Labour must be careful not to embark on a “flight to populism” when it comes to business policy, Lord Digby Jones, a former Labour trade minister, has said.

Jones, an ex-head of the CBI business group who last year spoke at Ukip’s annual conference, said Miliband was failing to win over business leaders.

He said: “I would like to see them actually standing up and saying: we get it. I’d like to hear Ed Miliband make a speech that says without a thriving business community in the UK there will be no tax receipt and therefore you will have no public sector and no jobs. We get that, we understand it, we would like business to meet us halfway with better behaviour … but we do understand that [business] is important. And therefore we will stimulate investment by lower taxation.”

He contrasted Miliband’s stance with that of New Labour, where there was “someone like Peter Mandelson saying ‘I’m intensely relaxed’ about people making money, when he’s been on a prawn cocktail offensive around the boardrooms of Britain and actually said ‘I’m not only going to leave you alone, I’m actually going to do some pro-business stuff’, which Gordon Brown did”.

He said people should remember the New Labour government “was not just business-friendly, but was successful because of it”.

“We’ve got the most successful economy in the developed world at the moment and it’s going really, really well and it will feed through in time. Please don’t spoil it by a flight to populism. And that’s really what worries me,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

Miliband has promised to create a more responsible capitalism and pledged to freeze energy bills for 18 months, alarming the gas and electricity companies.

However, he has offered an olive branch to companies by promising to cut rates for small businesses and keep corporation tax at the lowest rate in the G7.