CP
There’s something rotten here in dear old Blighty. And its name is Labour’s economic policy.
Rachel Reeves has decided the best way to grow the economy is by kneecapping the very entrepreneurs and family businesses that create jobs, build wealth and feed the nation.
How? By launching a kamikaze tax raid on business that would make even a Brussels bureaucrat blush.
Let’s be clear. This isn’t policy. It’s economic vandalism.
Businesses are already reeling from the double whammy of Labour’s rising employer National Insurance contributions and a steep hike in the National Living Wage, both of which are hammering their cost base and sowing chaos. But now comes more grim news for Labour.
According to CBI Economics, Rachel Reeves’s plan to rip up Business Property Relief (BPR) and Agricultural Property Relief (APR) won’t raise the £1.8bn Labour has promised the Treasury. In fact, it will do the exact opposite — costing nearly £2bn by 2030.
Yes, you read that right: a policy supposedly designed to boost the public purse will actually burn a hole in it. That’s not just flawed economics — it’s economically insane. But then again, so many of this Labour government’s policies seem to be cut from the same bonkers cloth.
But it gets worse. This isn’t just about red ink on a Treasury spreadsheet. This is about livelihoods. Real people. Real pain.
Over 200,000 jobs will be lost, says the report. That’s not just a statistic, that’s thousands of workers in Yorkshire, the East of England, Northern Ireland, and beyond. These aren’t lazy plutocrats sipping Chardonnay on the deck of the yacht. These are grafters. Generational farmers. Builders of businesses. People who take risk, create value, and, crucially… pay taxes.
And how does Labour reward them? With a 20 per cent tax grab on inherited family farms and business assets over £1 million. Forget death duties. This is death to business.
Family Business UK, who commissioned the CBI research, put it bluntly:
“Far from increasing tax receipts into the Treasury and stimulating the economic growth the Government is trying to deliver, the changes to BPR and APR in the October Budget achieve the opposite.”
And that’s not a partisan swipe — that’s cold, economic truth.
Farmers, charities and businesses or all shapes and sizes are seeing the human toll. In November, John Charlesworth, 78, took his own life after being “eaten away” by fear of the looming tax changes. The Post has seen reports that numerous farmers have also suffered the same fate. If that doesn’t make you pause, what will?
And it’s not just farming under the axe. Chris Walker, a former Treasury economist, found 10% of non-doms have already left the UK thanks to Labour’s crackdown. If that rises much further, the Treasury will really start to feel the bite. Analysts reckon we could soon be looking at over £10bn in lost economic growth. Madness, squared.
Entrepreneurship is not a crime. Taking a risk, investing your life, your savings, your sweat, to build something that employs people and pays into the national pot should be celebrated, not punished.
Speaking to the Telegraph, Tom Bradshaw of the National Farmers Union is right:
“This report must serve as a wake-up call to Treasury, or we face major cuts to investment and significant job losses.”
Mo Metcalf-Fisher of the Countryside Alliance warns:
“It would be an act of foolishness to ignore the very real and irreversible damage these changes pose to the stability of the agricultural sector.”
And if you thought the Conservatives had gone soft, Andrew Griffith, the Shadow Business Secretary, isn’t mincing his words:
“Labour plan to steal the futures of a generation of entrepreneurs on the back of some hooky treasury maths and a blatant breach of election promises… Our first Conservative budget will reverse this damaging measure.”
It’s almost as if Labour looked at every lever of economic success — enterprise, inheritance, innovation — and decided to pull the one marked “Do Not Touch: Economic Suicide.”
The result? A hostile environment for those who dare to build. A tax regime that drives talent and capital out of the country. A government that claims to be “pro-growth” while stomping on the very roots of growth itself.
We should be unleashing Britain’s entrepreneurs, not strangling them with inheritance tax red tape. We should be planting the seeds of enterprise, not salting the earth with tax raids.
Labour’s war on wealth creators must end, or Britain’s future won’t be built. It’ll be buried.
This article (Labour’s Tax Madness Is Killing Off Britain’s Entrepreneurs and Torching Our Economy) was created and published by Conservative Post and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author CP
See Related Article Below
Rachel Reeves pensions power grab is worthy of a banana republic
Labour’s diktat to retirement funds is the latest in a series of attacks on Britons’ wealth
Britain’s economy badly needs a jump start. But after eight long punishing months, there is no sign of one. The Chancellor’s latest idea is a decree on people’s private pensions that is more in keeping with economic policy in Venezuela. It is looming disaster.
As with other hardcore socialist regimes, this Labour Government believes you should not keep control of the money you earn. The message that has been coming out of No 10 Downing Street ever since Sir Keir Starmer moved in is that if you are a risk taker or wealth creator, Labour will come for your savings, your pensions, your job and your house.
You name it, Keir Starmer will tax it.
Many of the businesses who were duped into supporting Labour during Rachel Reeves’s prawn cocktail offensive before the election must now be looking on in horror.
As the ‘City’ minister in government, I was always clear that dictating how funds should be investing in people’s private retirement savings was a red line. But it appears one this Government is all too happy to cross.
And like other harebrained ideas, such as stripping millions of pensioners of the winter fuel payment, imposing death taxes on family farms or many other punitive measures, it has come out of the blue.
It is not that pension reform is not needed. There are always improvements to be made, working with the City – not against it. But that is not what Rachel Reeves has done. Taking powers for the state to direct how your pension is invested is the most significant direct intervention by the Government in the UK pension and wider investment market for decades.
And who is to say what a future iteration of Starmer’s Government would do? Will pension funds be told they must put a certain proportion into ‘Red Ed’s’ mad windmill schemes?
We already see disinvestment campaigns picket town halls across a whole panoply of Left-wing causes. Handing the Chancellor the power to direct the whole country’s pension funds at the stroke of a pen will make her an irresistible target for woke warriors of every kind.
As someone who has worked in finance myself, I know, like many others with business experience, that most poor outcomes for pensions come from an excess of financial regulation, not from its absence.
Pension funds will perform far worse when guided by Labour’s political agenda, rather than solely the interests of savers. The invisible hand of the market will not be helped one jot by Keir Starmer’s sticky fingers.
The big issue on private pensions has traditionally been a defensive, risk averse culture, which has elevated low costs over performance and theoretical liquidity over real investment growth for the long-term.
Our landmark Financial Services and Markets Act started to change this. Imposing growth duties on regulators, introducing new options such as long-term asset funds and freeing up over £100bn from UK insurers through a Brexit dividend supporting productive investments, such as infrastructure, were all steps in the right direction, which to be fair this Government has continued with.
But Rachel Reeves now threatens to undermine that progress in one fell swoop.
She is an embattled Chancellor, visibly out of her depth. As all of her chickens come home to roost, she is hemmed in by the growing distrust of the bond markets on one side and Cabinet and trade union advocates for more public sector largesse on the other.
It is no surprise the trillions of private pension capital are increasingly attractive.
In the process she is risking the futures of millions trying to save for their retirement and undermining Britain’s global jewel of a fund management centre.
Since taking office, Labour has gone out of its way to attack wealth creators and hard-working businesses. Their Employment Bill, which will do the opposite of what it says on the tin, puts a £5bn burden on businesses and drowns them in reams of red tape.
New business rates will punish high streets and see more shops boarded up. And the Jobs Tax will drive down the wages of workers whilst penalising growth and aspiration.
But that is people’s private money, put in there over years of scrimping and saving. Not her money to control after maxing out the Government’s credit card. The rapid exodus of millionaires under Labour is a sign that things are getting worse – these pension changes will only accelerate that flight.
The Telegraph: continue reading
Featured image: YouTube
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