Labour and business: Post-crustaceous politics IN THE early 1990s, as Labour battled to recast itself as a moderate, pro-business, and therefore electable party, senior shadow ministers staged a series of lunches with City of London bigwigs. The "prawn-cocktail offensive" (named after a by-then passé dish of prawns with a gloopy pink sauce) elicited hoots of derision from Michael Heseltine, the Conservative environment secretary. "Never have so many crustaceans died in vain," he whooped. Today the party's aims are similar - to persuade sceptical voters that it can be entrusted with the economy - but not identical. This time Labour is partly responsible for the debt and regulatory failures from which Britain is struggling to recover. A return to business as usual, argues Ed Miliband, the party's leader (pictured right), is not enough: for growth to be stable and productive, the economy needs to be "rebalanced" away from London and financial services. Chuka Umunna, the fast-rising shadow business secretary (pictured left), pooh-poohs the "old way" of talking to firms - suppers with blue-chip CEOs and success measured "by how many of those dinner companions you could get to sign a letter in support of your policies in a national broadsheet newspaper." So although he insists that - of course - he liaises with captains of industry "before and after big announcements," the party currently has small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in its sights, with British-Asian entrepreneurs, a doggedly Labour-supporting subset, providing a foothold. Mr Umunna has set out his fledgling business agenda at a telling series of events over the past two months: the launch of a Labour entrepreneurs" network at Google's "Campus" incubator, a gathering of traders and employers at Brixton Market in south London and, on March 22nd, the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) conference in Leicester. The FSB crowd took some pleasing: Mr Umunna had the drowsy after-lunch slot. One delegate tapped out a shopping list on an iPad, another perused the small ads in the Leicester Mercury. "You nodding off yet?" one duffer asked a colleague. The speech started with a paean to SMEs and their achievements; Jill Poet, an FSB member, rolled her eyes and muttered: "They all say that, don't they?" But things perked up. Mr Umunna's assessment of SMEs" problems - high energy prices, late payments from big customers, expensive employment tribunals, insufficient competition among banks for their business and limited access to credit - met with warm applause and even the odd "Hear, hear!" His prescriptions, concocted with Labour's "task-force" of SME bosses, included automatic sanctions for late payers, protections for small-business customers of energy firms and a new government agency modelled on America's Small Business Administration. They were similarly well received. Labour's analysis makes sense: different sorts of businesses have different priorities. Big firms want to hear the party's plans for taxing and spending before they pass judgment - and are wary of its commitment to higher levies on big incomes and expensive houses. Small companies, by contrast, are interested in ideas that get Labourite hearts thumping: battling vested interests, for example (SMEs grumble that they lose out to megacorps with the welly to stand up to suppliers, banks and politicians). Winning over these firms matters: they account for 60% of private-sector jobs. Such folk, it seems, are cautiously receptive to Mr Umunna's prawnless charm offensive. Good news for Labour - and even better news for prawns.