Lager clouts
RACHEL Reeves promised before last year’s Budget to help struggling pubs — but ended up massively increasing their business rates.
After an outcry, the Chancellor said it hadn’t been intentional and promised an emergency bailout.
Yesterday — too late for those pubs and bars which have already been forced to call a final Last Orders — we got the details.
Her £300million package includes a 15 per cent discount on rates this year — saving the average pub just £31 a week — followed by a two-year freeze.
There is nothing to protect boozers from the crippling rises in National Insurance, minimum wage and energy costs inflicted by Labour.
And there was zero help for other hospitality businesses like restaurants and hotels. In other words it is — at best — half-measures.
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Since the Budget, thousands of pubs have barred Labour MPs.
If they try to pop back into their local this weekend, they might find they’re still very far from welcome.
Raw deal 1
BRITAIN should, of course, have a trade relationship with China.
But too often it appears that the Government is prepared to put up with almost anything in order to get the deals over the line.
Spying on an industrial scale. The hacking of No10’s phones.
Waving through plans for a super-embassy despite fears it will be a hub for even more espionage.
Having our car industry flooded with cheap electric imports.
The madness of buying tens of thousands of Chinese solar panels built using electricity from coal-fired power stations, while banning new drilling for North Sea oil here at home.
Swallowing a £2billion bill for decommissioning a British Steel plant.
No doubt, the Prime Minister will boast of having secured hundreds of millions of pounds of investment by the time he flies home from Beijing.
The question is: at what price?
Raw deal 2
LABOUR’S “one in, one out” return scheme for illegal migrants was supposed to deliver just that.
But with grim inevitability, so far 350 have arrived from France — yet just 281 have been sent the other way.
Meanwhile the other much-trumpeted element of Sir Keir Starmer’s plan to reduce illegal migration — smashing the people-smuggling gangs — shows no signs of succeeding.
The one in, one out fiasco is not the first time we’ve been done over by the French in a ruinously dear migrant deal.
And, with equally grim inevitability, you can bet it won’t be the last.
