Pub drubbing
THE Chancellor’s shabby betrayal of the pub trade proved an astonishing own goal.
Having publicly promised to support struggling boozers, she cruelly ramped up their business rates in her Budget.
It left thousands of landlords — already facing impossible energy costs and wage rises — fearing closure.
But a Sun-backed campaign by pubs — including banning Labour MPs frombars, andthreatening an unprecedented day of industrial action — has now forced Sir Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves into yet another U-turn.
Public outrage means the Government is putting together an emergency support package.
But how did it ever come to this in the first place?
READ MORE FROM THE SUN SAYS
THE SUN SAYS
Labour seems to take pleasure in watching pubs call a final Last Orders
THE SUN SAYS
Labour are behaving like vandals by smashing away at retailers with high taxes
The Chancellor KNEW that pubs — the beating hearts of so many of our towns and villages — were on the brink.
Yet she went ahead with the sly tax raid anyway to help pay for her mammoth £16billion splurge on benefits.
Where the climbdown on pubs leaves other struggling High Street businesses such as hairdressers is anyone’s guess.
Fornowthe Government is only committing to a vague long-term review of business rates.
But if the penny has finally dropped thatit’sa bad idea for the Labour Party to attack fun, it needs to now beat a hasty retreat on the betting tax, which was also rammed through in the Benefits Street Budget.
Bookies — like pubs — are important communityhubs, andhelp keep the High Street going.
If they close, Reeves will not be forgiven by working-class punters.
Coming a month after the U-turn on the family farm tax, the pubs reversal is another self-inflicted debacle from a Labour Party which utterlyfails tograsp basic economics.
If Starmer and Reeves ran a business in the same chaotic way they run Britain’s economy,they’dbe fired.
That’sif itdidn’tgo bustfirst.
Make work pay
LABOUR’S glee on social media at scrapping the two-child benefit cap shows they will never get a proper grip of out-of-control welfare.
Work and Pensions Secretary Pat McFadden was yesterday so worried about upsetting his left-wing backbenchers that he refused even to say if he wanted the benefits bill to come down at all.
The Left claims that giving more handouts to bigger workless families is the best way to fix child poverty.
But it is deeply unfair on those who graft and pay their taxes.
And all it achieves is to make benefits more attractive than work — needlessly trapping claimants in the welfare system for generations.
Will Labour ever understand that whatactually liftspeople out of poverty is jobs?