OUTRAGEOUS! OBSCENE! The initial reaction to Shell’s record-breaking £9.4 billion profits came in on cue. Up popped Martin O’Neill, the Labour chairman of the Commons Trade and Industry Select Committee, to demand that a windfall tax be slapped on the profiteers.

This predictable intervention will not have been well received by Gordon Brown. Yesterday the Chancellor was putting the finishing touches to the speech he delivers this morning at the QE2 conference centre in London, where he is hosting a love-in on enterprise simultaneously with the G7 meeting for finance ministers.

This personal manifesto will portray a Brown government as the friend of business, supportive of enterprise and employers, as his article in The Times Business pages today outlines. While he may not go so far as to say that new Brown is the party of the bosses and the boardroom, and extol the profit motive, the emphasis will be firmly in praise of wealth creation.

So the last thing Mr Brown wants to be associated with as he plays to an audience of business people is a call for a windfall tax on corporate profits. By yesterday evening, the Treasury had slapped down Mr O’Neill with a firm statement that it was not planning a swipe at oil company profits. After all, although the Treasury omitted to mention it, corporation tax already ensures that the Government takes its cut of any rises in corporate earnings.

Nevertheless, Mr O’Neill’s voice was not the only one to be heard denouncing the Shell figures. The idea of companies making billions of pounds of profits still brings shudders of disapproval from consumer groups as well as left-wing politicians. In the next few days we can expect an upsurge of righteous indignation over the profits that Britain’s banks will report, kicked off when Barclays admits to having made almost £5 billion last year.

Matt Barrett, the Barclays chairman, did not endear himself to members of the Treasury Select Committee last year when, being taken to task about charges on credit cards, he remarked that he had difficulty in understanding the concept of “excess profits”. Mr O’Neill might have difficulty in defining the term but, like so many irrational folk, he knows it when he sees it. Even the Daily Mail, in a leading article, indicated that it might be prepared to see a windfall tax levied on the banks.

Who do they think would be hurt by such a move? A windfall tax on the oil companies would not hit Jeroen van der Veer, the Dutchman trying to sort out Shell, which is not in nearly such good shape as those profits might indicate. A levy on the banks would not lower the living standards of Mr Barrett in the slightest. The losers on both counts would be the millions of people whose income and savings depend on the success of British com- panies. Whether it is through directly holding the shares or investment in the pension funds, insurers and savings vehicles that hold the bulk of the stock, British people need these companies to prosper.

Members of the Brown party should be made to repeat the mantra that profit is good, and big profits are better. When they top £1 million an hour, as they have done at Shell, they deserve applause. Shell employs nearly 120,000 staff. Last year it invested almost as much as it made, and this year it will be investing another $15 billion. It needs to because it has to find oil and gas and fast: at the moment it is pumping it out much, much faster than it is replenishing its reserves.

These are the shrinking reserves, which first came to light last year as it became apparent that the company had been adopting a highly imaginative approach to valuing its reserves. Since then, it has had to admit that it was overstating the amount by almost six billion barrels: another 1.4 billion vanished only yesterday.

The surge in profits that the com- pany reported was not the result of exploration success or profiteering at the petrol pump, but merely a reflection of the increase in the price of oil. Every increase of $1 in the oil price is worth around $400 million to Shell. But that equation works both ways and when the oil price falls, as it will, those who clamour for a windfall tax will not be suggesting a whipround to swell the coffers that support Shell shareholders.

Despite the best efforts of the Thatcher Government to encourage Britain to become a shareholding democracy, there is still a lurking suspicion that the owners of companies are plutocrats, profiting on the backs of the workers. It was frighteningly clear when Stephen Byers whipped Railtrack away from its rightful owners to return it to what is effective nationalisation that he had not considered that the shareholders were ordinary British savers and even railway workers.

But then the same notion did not appear to concern Mr Brown when he slapped his windfall tax on the privatised utilities in 1997. He needed the money, more than £5 billion, to kick off his scheme for encouraging more people out of unemployment and into jobs. Geoffrey Howe, the Tory Chancellor, had shown the way with a special levy on bank profits in 1981, although he only grabbed £315 million.

Mr Brown, however, has come round to the view that governments do best out of successful businesses. Threats of windfall taxes will only remind companies that perhaps they would feel more comfortable based elsewhere, maybe somewhere with a warmer climate in every sense. Those running businesses need to know that their efforts are appreciated. At the QE2 conference centre, the putative prime minister will be assuring them of undying support and admiration, and hoping that it will be returned.