What is Sir Keir Starmer’s driving purpose? The prime minister’s latest attempt to clarify his vision to voters comprised of six “milestones” which he said his government will aim to achieve by the end of the decade.

At an event at Pinewood Studios, where the Mission: Impossible films were made, the prime minister said he would not accept the “tepid bath of managed decline”.

The latest targets are raising living standards, cutting waiting lists, decarbonising the electricity grid, building 1.5 million new homes, ensuring children are ready for school and recruiting 13,000 neighbourhood police.

Those who have followed Starmer’s leadership could be forgiven for being a little confused.

Over the past year, he has set out no fewer than 27 different objectives, of varying degrees of importance.

There are the three “foundations” of national security, secure borders and economic stability. Above them sit the five “missions” that were announced ahead of the election. Then there were the six “first steps”, followed by seven pillars for growth and now the six milestones.

Many of the priorities overlap, some appear to be duplicated and others stand on their own. All have been announced with great fanfare at successive press events, often with the entire Cabinet in attendance.

As MPs digested the latest milestones, there were concerns that one of Labour’s chief — and most striking — commitments appeared to have been downgraded.

In the run-up to the election, Starmer pledged to ensure that Britain had the highest level of growth in the G7 group of developed nations.

It was always a highly challenging pledge, but in the wake of the Budget it looks increasingly impossible. Official forecasts suggest that the UK’s growth is at best flatlining now and over the course of the next five years. Growth in the US and other parts of the world is significantly outstripping Britain’s.

The new target is to raise living standards. It is far from stretching given that living standards are poised to grow by 0.5 per cent a year — hardly going gangbusters, but enough for Labour to claim it has met the pledge. Starmer insists he remains committed to his original growth target but given that the milestones are being put up in lights, it is likely to be far less prominent.

One of the main reasons for the anaemic levels of growth is the tax rises in Reeves’s inaugural Budget, specifically a £25bn increase in the employers’ rate of national insurance.

The decision to hit employers has widespread implications, not just for growth and the state of the economy but for broader relations with business. Any sense of goodwill and trust that Labour built up ahead of the election has gone.

For business leaders who bought into Labour’s pitch ahead of the election, it has been a particularly bitter pill to swallow.

In opposition Reeves and Starmer positioned Labour as the party of business, billing themselves as “wealth creators” and promising to be more pro-business than Tony Blair.

Reeves went on a charm offensive, wooing the City and some of Britain’s biggest investors. Many business groups publicly welcomed the prospect of a Labour government after the turbulence of four prime ministers in four years under the Conservatives.

The reality has been very different. Businesses began raising concerns relatively early in Starmer’s premiership that all was not as expected. Labour’s business day at its party conference in September turned into a borderline farce when executives who paid £3,000 for the chance to hear from the prime minister and other cabinet ministers were greeted with a live stream of Rachel Reeves. Some said they were going to ask for their money back.

Others have raised concerns about the No10 operation, pointing to the difficulty of getting face time with ministers.

On any measure the Budget was damaging for businesses. Along with the increase in national insurance, other measures include a rise in capital gains tax and the imposition of inheritance tax on farmers. With many of the central measures not kicking in until April next year, business groups are in a state of near-permanent revolt.

In the Treasury, criticism about the Budget is rejected outright. The more loudly that businesses and farmers complain, the argument goes, the more it proves the point. This was a budget about protecting people’s pay packets. The books needed balancing, but ultimately it was the employers, not the employees, who have paid.

Reeves believes that businesses can ultimately absorb the cost of her decision to increase national insurance. It is only fair, she has argued, that they should pay their share. In an attempt to justify her decision, she even went as far as role-playing a business leader. “If you’re a business leader, you come into a business and you see the challenges in the finances you have three choices,” she said.

“You can brush them under the carpet and keep your fingers crossed that something will turn up; you can say, I’ll do some of the work now, and I’ll come back for it next year or the year after; or you say I’m going to wipe the slate clean, I’m going to take the tough decisions now and then we can move on with more certainty for the future.”

However, businesses do not agree with her. The British Retail Consortium is already warning of job cuts, lower wages, higher prices and store closures. A survey by the Bank of England found that half of UK businesses expect reduced profit margins, higher prices and lower employment as a result of the rise in national insurance.

The government believes it can win back the trust of business leaders over the course of this Parliament. That time — and a renewed focus on growth — will be enough ultimately to rebuild bridges. But if that growth does not materialise, the discord between Labour and business will only widen.

Steven Swinford is the political editor of The Times.