Toxic brew
THE Chancellor’s sly tax raid on pubs and shops will blow a huge hole in our High Streets and local communities.
What this economically illiterate Government fails to understand is that massive extra costs on business mean higher prices.
Which in turn hit customers — who have to further tighten belts, and are less likely to be able to go for a night out at all.
Inevitably, closures will follow, leading to job losses — and more taxpayers’ cash being required to pay benefits for those plunged out of work.
How is any of this going to help Labour’s so-called drive for growth?
As we report today, pubs are especially badly affected by the Government’s toxic brew of removing business rate relief on the hospitality sector, at the same time as massively increasing rateable values of pub premises.
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Some landlords will face a 500 per cent increase in business rates, paying tens of thousands of pounds extra a year — all on top of years of Covid debt and Ukraine war-related energy bill spikes.
A huge number of pubs — more than one a day are closing already — will simply not survive.
In a show of just how worried and enraged landlords are, more than 200 have joined a campaign to bar Labour MPs from their premises.
And who can blame them?
There was a time when Labour understood the importance of pubs to working-class communities.
The party’s current leadership appears to hate the idea of people having fun — slapping new levies on everything from having a bet to drinking a milkshake.
The truth is the Chancellor has learned no lessons from her first anti-business Budget, and the impact of her second is likely to be even worse.
From next April, her punishing measures will unleash a vicious cycle of economic despair in our towns and villages.
With no pubs left for voters to even drown their sorrows, Labour should expect the verdict on their callous incompetence to be harsh.
Court in a trap
HOURS after Sir Keir Starmer hailed progress on talks to reform the European Court of Human Rights, the bureaucrats of Strasbourg delivered their typically pig-headed verdict.
The Council of Europe’s Secretary General Alain Berset warned the PM it was “not possible to change things just because one country or some countries want to do this”.
He said: “We must not destroy the ECHR.”
It’s clear that the only way Britain can protect its own borders properly is to forget about this useless talking shop — and get on with quitting as soon as possible.
