Here’s a question Labour might want to answer: who runs a business — the bloke who started it, risked his house, borrowed the money and pays the wages, or the people he employs? Because sometimes you have to wonder.

The Government wants to beef up flexible-working rights, making it harder for bosses to refuse requests and forcing them to justify why saying no is “reasonable”. And next year this process will require a formal meeting between employer and employee where the reasons for a refusal must be fully explained. For starters can you imagine the time and cost, especially when you consider HR will need to be brought into the process.

Well, here’s something reasonable: businesses need people at work when the business needs them. Flexible working sounds lovely. So does working from your kitchen table in your slippers. But WFH is a hangover from Covid that Britain seems incapable of shaking off.

And what did that era leave us with? Among other things, an explosion in long-term sickness. ONS figures showed that by 2023 there were 386,000 more economically inactive people reporting depression, anxiety or “bad nerves” than in 2019. Meanwhile, Labour seems determined to dismantle the workplace itself, one brick and one act of parliament at a time.

A business isn’t just laptops and Zoom calls. It’s a team. It’s youngsters learning from experienced people, conversations across desks, friendships, competition, banter and a sense that everyone is pulling in the same direction.

And flexible working not only comradery but will quickly become a nightmare. Fred wants Mondays at home. Sally needs to start at ten. John wants Fridays off. Then Harry says: “Hang on, if they can do it, why can’t I?” Before long you’ve got 100 employees working 100 different weeks and need another manager just to work out who’s actually working.

Good bosses listen to their people. I always have. But employment is a two-way deal. This constant assumption that bosses are nasty exploiters and workers must be protected from them is poisonous.

Keep tightening the screws on employers and eventually people will ask the obvious question: Why risk everything starting a business if somebody else gets to decide how you run it?

Labour’s attack on the workplace isn’t flexible working. It’s based on discredited political dogma that leads to the tail wagging the dog. Until the dog dies that is!