The Chancellor has been told which way is up by a business that says her Budget was a total disaster.
Hapless Labour is sucking the life out of Britain. (Image: Getty)
One of the great whoppers unleashed by Rachel Reeves in her Budget was that the UK is a great place to start and scale up a business. For centuries, this country has been a fertile breeding ground for innovators and visionaries, with the proud Made in Great Britain stamp of approval a hallmark of unrivalled quality.
But under Labour’s socialist utopia, life is being sucked out of the go-getters and risk-takers who now see little hope or much point.
Britain gave birth to the Industrial Revolution. The UK is now subject to international ridicule.
We have always been a nation of shopkeepers whose thriving small businesses and spirit of entrepreneurship made things, provided jobs, and created a healthy bottom line.
That’s not the case now, and, like many listening to Chancellor Rachel Reeves‘ financial statement last week, Mitchell Barnes, one of the UK’s most impressive businessmen, has been left thinking: what’s the point?
Mr Barnes said the Budget has made life harder (Image: Humphrey Nemar)
The talented graduate started RYSE 3D from his garage in 2017 and, from its base in Warwickshire, provides 3D printing components for some of the most advanced hypercar projects in the world.
Some 40% of its work is exported, last year his company won a King’s Award for Innovation, and he was summoned to Downing Street as a shining example of the kind of proactive, highly motivated, self-starters that made the UK the best in the world.
He should be cockahoop, right? Wrong.
Mr Barnes, 30, should be a pin-up for any pro-business Government, but in a damning indictment of Labour, he said an overseas plant is a better financial option than growing his business in Britain because a Budget that lacked ambition and did little for manufacturing growth had left him “deflated”.
Like many others, Mr Mitchell, whose company has created dozens of jobs and invested heavily, has been battered from all sides by a government that has slammed the brakes on growth.
Advanced manufacturing firms like the one he started rely on highly-skilled engineers, designers and technicians, but Labour’s money-grabbing National Insurance hikes, increasing the tax rate on dividends, and the Employment Rights Bill do nothing to encourage or empower risk takers, wealth generators and entrepreneurs.
Mr Barnes said: “Reeves spoke about making Britain a great place to start and scale-up, but where is the proof? Everything she has done so far has been to the contrary.
“Our sector wants to invest, we want to hire, and we want to build. This Budget makes that harder, not easier.”
David Miles, from the Office for Budget Responsibility, would seem to agree.
In her £30billion tax raid Budget, Ms Reeves extended the freeze on tax thresholds, which, Professor Miles said, was “unambiguously a way of increasing tax in the UK”.
He said: “It brings in a lot of money. It’s very difficult to raise substantial amounts of taxes without having negative effects on the incentives of people either to work, to save, to stay in the country, or to set up businesses.
“We think on balance there’s a negative effect from the decision to extend the threshold freeze.”
Labour isn’t interested in helping pioneering companies create and shape the future; it wants to pick their pockets.
Under this shameless Government, there is an inversion of incentive where the state pays more for idleness than the market pays for labour.
Starmer and Reeves delight in punishing the doers to reward the bystanders.
