IN THE early 1990s, shadow chancellor Gordon Brown spearheaded a “prawn cocktail offensive” to convince big business that a new Labour government would be a friend not a foe. Going still further, leader Tony Blair declared in 1994 that Labour would be the “party of business.”

Recognising the likelihood of a Labour victory in the 1997 general election, the financial corporations agreed to cosy up. 

But they did so with a wish list: no tax increases on high incomes, corporate profits or dividends; no tough new regulation of the City of London; no reversal of energy or railway privatisation; no wholesale repeal of the Tory anti-union laws; independence for the Bank of England to set interest rates and a cut in corporation tax on company profits.

Their wishes were granted, with trade and industry secretary and ex-EU commissioner Peter Mandelson playing the part of chief fairy godfather.

The symbiotic relationship between the Labour leadership and the bosses produced two resignations by a disgraced Mandelson, police questioning of prime minister Blair about “cash for honours” and the fall of his successor Gordon Brown in the wake of the 2008 financial crash brought on in part by City greed and corruption.

By the 2010 general election, Labour had frittered away the biggest parliamentary majority in British history.  

So why anybody today should pay the slightest attention to advice from Baron Mandelson of Foy and Hartlepool and his ilk to be more “business friendly” is a mystery.

Yet that is what Labour leader Ed Miliband and shadow chancellor Ed Balls have done in their recent “sackcloth and ashes” offensive, apologising for past Labour spending plans, higher levels of corporate taxation and even for the existence of British Rail.

Yesterday, Miliband praised Britain’s bosses for their entrepreneurship, inventiveness and ability to change people’s lives.

This was not, apparently, a reference to the entrepreneurship which has left us desperately short of investment in Britain’s future energy, transport and housing needs, necessitating a huge infusion of public money. 

Nor was it a reference to the inventiveness of Britain’s boardroom executives when it comes to extorting bigger profits from food and energy consumers, grabbing bigger subsidies for mismanaging the railways, ripping off the NHS, mis-selling pension and insurance policies, rigging interest rates, laundering their profits, dodging their taxes and exporting their badly needed capital overseas.

Nor, apparently, did Miliband have in mind the ability of Britain’s bosses to change people’s lives for the worse by killing, sacking or impoverishing them in order to save money and boost profits.

If he and the Shadow Cabinet think their obsequiousness will ingratiate them with big business, they are sorely mistaken.

The fat cats fear only a Labour Party riding high in the opinion polls and buoyed by public enthusiasm for a manifesto which pledges to renationalise energy and public ownership, save the NHS, build a million affordable houses, tax the rich and big business, pursue the big tax dodgers and build a fairer society.

The alternative is a feeble, “business-friendly” manifesto which goes down to defeat or sets up yet another feeble, business-friendly Labour government for a heavier defeat later. 

Either way, the Labour leaders can expect no mercy from the Tory-supporting billionaires, tax-dodgers and pornographers who own most of Britain’s press. 

They will receive Labour’s supplicants today before kicking them remorselessly in the teeth at next May’s general election.