We can’t go to the pub because we’re too poor – and it will have shut anyway

Reeves has added £75.1bn to the burden on taxpayers and still borrowing is out of control Daily Telegraph 27/12/25 Simon Heffer We can’t go to the pub because we’re too poor – and it will have shut anyway Reeves has added £75.1bn to the burden on taxpayers and still borrowing is out of control Many of those pubs still open have banned Labour MPs over the party's anti-business policies Many of those pubs still open have banned Labour MPs over the party’s anti-business policiesCredit: Lorne Campbell Simon Heffer Simon Heffer 27 December 2025 9:44am GMT We all heard the squealing handbrake turn just before Christmas when Rachel Reeves decided to raise the threshold at which inheritance tax would be levied, to try to quell the justified outrage of farmers in particular who would suffer from it. Leaks also appeared saying she was considering revisiting non-dom status, precisely because so many rich people had left Britain, taking their considerable spending power with them. Labour thinks it gives a cheap thrill to its shrinking band of voters by piling taxes on to the so-called rich. However, even those voters, much as they might once have relished class war and wanted to punish the well-off, now realise the policy includes unpleasant hidden extras. It destroys jobs, undermines and sometimes kills businesses, and (given the Government’s ignorant and immoral refusal to spend less) propels a downward spiral of borrowing, tax cuts and destruction of wealth. Without wealth, Labour supporters and indeed the rest of us do not get vital public services, which become increasingly unaffordable. It is not just the U-turn on inheritance tax for businesses, and the hint of one on non-doms, that suggests the Chancellor has been confronted by some unavoidable realities. Every day another sector provides evidence that the Government’s economic policies are increasingly damaging. In a hapless Christmas message the Prime Minister expressed the hope that people would find time to visit the pub. However, largely thanks to an unaffordable rise in the minimum wage, on top of already swingeing employers’ National Insurance contributions, around 2,000 pubs close annually in this country, shedding jobs and livelihoods and often ripping the heart out of their communities as they do. It is no wonder stickers are pasted in windows of hundreds of pubs around Britain banning Labour MPs from entering them. Activists opposed to the policy of destroying businesses suggested last week that they might also be banned from farm shops, high street retailers and other hospitality businesses because of the destructive effect the economic policies they support continue to have on small businesses. Figures also published last week showed that in two budgets in her 18 months in Number 11, Ms Reeves has imposed an additional burden of £75.1bn on taxpayers, roughly 20 per cent more than Gorden Brown did in ten years in her job. This is economic vandalism on a breathtaking scale. And even the partial climbdown on inheritance tax is unlikely to be enough. Many farming businesses will still have to be broken up on the death of the current owner, continuing to raise questions about the country’s ability to feed itself. And Sir James Dyson, who has already moved much of his manufacturing base abroad, has said the remaining strictures on inheriting businesses may prevent the next generation of his family carrying on the excellent enterprise he has built up through a combination of his risk-taking, his inventiveness and his sheer hard work. Simon Heffer We can’t go to the pub because we’re too poor – and it will have shut anyway Reeves has added £75.1bn to the burden on taxpayers and still borrowing is out of control Many of those pubs still open have banned Labour MPs over the party's anti-business policies Many of those pubs still open have banned Labour MPs over the party’s anti-business policiesCredit: Lorne Campbell Simon Heffer Simon Heffer 27 December 2025 9:44am GMT We all heard the squealing handbrake turn just before Christmas when Rachel Reeves decided to raise the threshold at which inheritance tax would be levied, to try to quell the justified outrage of farmers in particular who would suffer from it. Leaks also appeared saying she was considering revisiting non-dom status, precisely because so many rich people had left Britain, taking their considerable spending power with them. Labour thinks it gives a cheap thrill to its shrinking band of voters by piling taxes on to the so-called rich. However, even those voters, much as they might once have relished class war and wanted to punish the well-off, now realise the policy includes unpleasant hidden extras. It destroys jobs, undermines and sometimes kills businesses, and (given the Government’s ignorant and immoral refusal to spend less) propels a downward spiral of borrowing, tax cuts and destruction of wealth. Without wealth, Labour supporters and indeed the rest of us do not get vital public services, which become increasingly unaffordable. It is not just the U-turn on inheritance tax for businesses, and the hint of one on non-doms, that suggests the Chancellor has been confronted by some unavoidable realities. Every day another sector provides evidence that the Government’s economic policies are increasingly damaging. In a hapless Christmas message the Prime Minister expressed the hope that people would find time to visit the pub. However, largely thanks to an unaffordable rise in the minimum wage, on top of already swingeing employers’ National Insurance contributions, around 2,000 pubs close annually in this country, shedding jobs and livelihoods and often ripping the heart out of their communities as they do. It is no wonder stickers are pasted in windows of hundreds of pubs around Britain banning Labour MPs from entering them. Activists opposed to the policy of destroying businesses suggested last week that they might also be banned from farm shops, high street retailers and other hospitality businesses because of the destructive effect the economic policies they support continue to have on small businesses. Figures also published last week showed that in two budgets in her 18 months in Number 11, Ms Reeves has imposed an additional burden of £75.1bn on taxpayers, roughly 20 per cent more than Gorden Brown did in ten years in her job. This is economic vandalism on a breathtaking scale. And even the partial climbdown on inheritance tax is unlikely to be enough. Many farming businesses will still have to be broken up on the death of the current owner, continuing to raise questions about the country’s ability to feed itself. And Sir James Dyson, who has already moved much of his manufacturing base abroad, has said the remaining strictures on inheriting businesses may prevent the next generation of his family carrying on the excellent enterprise he has built up through a combination of his risk-taking, his inventiveness and his sheer hard work. Sir James said last week that Britain could have manufacturing concerns if it chooses to have them. His implication was that because of the penalties imposed through the tax system on entrepreneurs, and particularly those who can shift production abroad to avoid high labour costs and over-regulation, Britain (in the person of Ms Reeves) is making the choice that it doesn’t much care whether it has a manufacturing sector or not. The consequences of such a decision should be obvious, even to someone as all-over-the-place as Ms Reeves.

Nor is she the only economy-wrecker in the Cabinet. Take, for example, Ed Miliband, whose wilful refusal to drill for oil and gas, and his deranged obsession with highly unpopular electric cars, means he has done more than his share to relegate Britain to the economic equivalent of a banana republic. Recently, a superbly-reported piece in the left-leaning London Review of Books looked closely at why there is so much support for Reform in the former Labour stronghold of Blyth, in the old coalfields near Newcastle-upon-Tyne. One reason was public concern about why, if coal might be mined economically locally, no-one was doing so. If even Labour’s own historic core vote has had enough of its contortions, it really is doomed. We all know why the Government persists with its grotesquely high spending, and it is not merely because it pursues policies such as in its obsession with renewable energy at a time when it badly retards the economy to do so. It is because a group of militant backbenchers whom Sir Keir is afraid to take on will not allow him, despite his massive Commons majority, to make the economies that might allow a Chancellor to stop driving wealth creators either to the wall or out of the country through extortionate taxes. After all, this was the same man who might have made a start on those spending cuts had he backed to the finish the welfare reforms proposed last spring by Liz Kendall, one of the rare serious people in his team. But he bottled out of dealing with a question he himself had described as being a “moral” issue. The immorality of lazy, feckless people exploiting a welfare state when they could easily work therefore continues. It would be helpful if, with each of its U-turns and climbdowns, the government reminded the public of one eternal truth: that you can’t have public services unless you can find people and businesses to pay for them, and you will have fewer of those taxpayers if you drive them out of business or out of work. Labour ought to leave leftist fantasy economics to the Green Party, whose crackpot leader (the man who once claimed that a woman could have a larger bust through the power of thought) has indicated that one of his economic policies might be to stop servicing our debt. Good luck with that and the bond markets. It is being said to exhaustion that sometime in 2026 we shall have a new prime minister. Who knows? But we certainly need a new Chancellor. She even found time in the usually quiet Christmas week to show how little clue she has. “We’ve listened”, Labour says as it climbs down. If it had a grasp of the realities facing business, and of the dependence upon entrepreneurs to achieve the prosperity it claims to seek, it wouldn’t have needed to.