The Chancellor trashes everything she touches. But this is truly heart-breaking.
By attacking pubs, Rachel Reeves has targeted the heart and soul of Britain (Image: Getty)
Rachel Reeves is a one-woman engine of mass destruction. Her relentless tax raids and policy blunders have damaged growth, jobs, ambition and economic confidence. Investment has stalled, businesses are closing and success now comes with a target on your back.
This isn’t just economic damage. It’s cultural too. By expanding benefits while hammering work and aspiration with higher taxes, she’s helped corrode the work ethic that once underpinned Britain’s success. And now comes the latest blow, one that will rip the heart out of Britain itself.
I flew back to England on Boxing Day after spending Christmas with my partner’s family in Norway. As soon as we dropped our bags, there was only one thing on our minds. Hit the pub. There’s no better place to be at Christmas than a proper British boozer.
We went to three pubs, all within walking distance in our corner of south-east London. They weren’t rammed at six in the evening, but they were decked out in lights and tinsel, and quietly humming with life.
To step inside was to enter a warm, welcoming world. A public house, where everyone is welcome as long as they broadly behave themselves. Most people do, with one or two exceptions, because pubs are in our blood.
I saw families clinking gin glasses, dog walkers enjoying a sit-down, a man watching a film on his iPad with earbuds in, and a whiskery old chap in a ten-gallon hat and cowboy boots who popped up at every bar, and nobody batted an eyelid. Everybody had somewhere to go, no matter who they were.
Then the grim realisation hit. Without those pubs, the entire area would have been dead. No reason to be out. No place to go.
It would have been darker, lonelier and drearier place, with no heart, no warmth and no point.
That’s how more and more places will look thanks to the callous and downright ignorant policies of Rachel Reeves.
The decline of the great British pub isn’t all her fault. Cheap supermarket booze, Covid and cost-of-living crisis all pre-date her time in office. But instead of riding to the rescue, she’s doubled down on the destruction.
A staggering 412 pubs shut in 2024, more than one a day. This is a national emergency.
So what does Reeves do? She hiked employers’ National Insurance from April,leaving many facing what one landlord called “impending doom”. That tax raid has been blamed for the loss of 69,000 hospitality jobs since it was announced.
Two inflation-busting minimum wage hikes have squeezed them even harder, while in a double blow, she’s hiking alcohol duty by 3.66% in February, and the real killer, slashing business rates relief for hospitality. Paying £7 a pint is normal. A tenner is coming. Combined these measures are a death sentence for pubs, and Reeves has delivered it.
Victims include some of the very best boozers, driven to the wall due to the “ridiculous tax burden”.
No wonder so many landlords are banning Labour MPs.
Pubs also offer young people an entry-level job and a chance to learn how to deal with others. Reeves has made them too expensive to hire. How long before the few pubs that survive greet customers with a touchscreen instead of a smile?
Reeves has destroyed many things. But this is the most harrowing of all. In destroying the Great British pub, she’s not just attacking the heart of the nation, but its very soul.
