A leading Labour moderniser has angered the unions by calling for more millionaires in Britain and suggesting that high salaries should be celebrated.

John Hutton, the Business Secretary, says that the Government’s aim of tackling poverty, and making sure that no one gets left behind, must not be understood in the “stultifying sense” that no one should be allowed to get ahead.

But even though the speech will not be delivered until tonight, news of it brought a barbed response from Brendan Barber, general secretary of the TUC, who suggested that Mr Hutton's department had been captured by the “greed is good” end of the business lobby.

In a speech in Westminster to the Progress discussion group, Mr Hutton will say: “Over the coming months and years, we must be enthusiastic - not pragmatic - about financial success.

“We are, for example, rightly renewing our historic pledge to eradicate child poverty in Britain. But tackling poverty is about bringing those at the bottom closer to those in the middle.

“It is statistically possible to have a society where no child lives in a family whose income is below the poverty line - 60 per cent of median average income - but where there are also people at the top who are very wealthy. In fact, not only is it statistically possible - it is positively a good thing.

“So rather than questioning whether high salaries are morally justified, we should celebrate the fact that people can be enormously successful in this country.

“Rather than placing a cap on that success, we should be questioning why it is not available to more people.”

Mr Hutton is also expected to confirm that new measures will be unveiled alongside tomorrow's Budget to help more people, particularly women, start and grow their own businesses. “The idea that women are any less enterprising than men is a nonsense, and yet the gap between male and female entrepreneurship in Britain is significant. Closing that gap will help not just our economy in the years ahead, but the cause of gender equality as well - something is fundamental to a modern progressive political party like ours.”

He will also claim that New Labour had made a fundamental shift - to recognise that aspiration and ambition are natural human emotions, not the perverted side effect of primitive capitalism.

He will say: ”We want more millionaires in Britain not less. Our overarching goal that no-one should get left behind must not become translated into a stultifying sense that no-one should be allowed to get ahead.”

“So I believe a key challenge for New Labour over the coming years is to recognise that, far from strengthening social justice, a version of equality that only gives you the opportunity to climb so far, actually subverts the values we should be representing. Instead, any progressive party worth its name must enthusiastically advocate empowering people to climb without limits, free from any barrier holding them back - be it class, gender or unnecessary government intervention.”

Mr Barber said: “This is a curiously out-of-touch and out-of-date speech. No-one objects to proper rewards for risk taking, innovation and major responsibility and some will always earn more than others. That debate has long gone.

“What is disappointing is that this speech does not engage with today's issues.

“Even international bankers organisations are asking hard questions about huge bonus payments that reward successful risk taking, but provide no downside when risks go wrong. This is now a main cause of instability in the world economy.

“We look to ministers to stimulate debate about the absence of any link between company success and boardroom pay, not to celebrate it.

“The growth of a free-floating group of the super-rich harms social cohesion and threatens inflation.

“And as the Chancellor knows, there is a choice between whether the Government makes the super-rich pay a fair share of tax or whether the Government meets its child poverty target.

“Thoughtful business people are engaging with these issues, yet this speech suggests that the Department for Business is in danger of becoming a wholly-owned subsidiary of the “greed is good” end of the business lobby.”

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