“Don’t confuse cancellation with failure.” That, famously, was the line David Letterman, the bloke who actually built The Late Show, passed to Jon Stewart years ago. And it was the line Stewart hurled back across the Ed Sullivan Theater this week, voice catching, finger jabbing, as Stephen Colbert prepared the wake for America’s number-one late-night programme.

Read that again. Number. One. As in top of the bloody pile, comfortably ahead of Fallon and Kimmel, the most watched chat show in the United States. And tonight, somewhere around 11:35pm in New York, CBS will pull down the shutters, sweep the studio and try to convince us, with all the conviction of a teenager denying he’s been at the cooking sherry, that this was, and I quote, “purely a financial decision.”

Of course it was. And I am Beyoncé.

Let us be grown-ups about this. CBS euthanised its highest-rated chat show three days after its host called the network’s parent company, Paramount, out for paying Donald Trump a sixteen-million-dollar settlement over a 60 Minutes interview. Colbert called it, with the kind of plainness America used to specialise in, a “big fat bribe”. Seventy-two hours later, the man was told he was for the chop. The merger Paramount needed waved through by Trump’s pet FCC sailed merrily on soon after. If you don’t smell something on the breeze, you’ve no nose.

Letterman, never knowingly understated, called CBS executives “lying weasels” and signed off with a parting shot, borrowed from Ed Murrow and inflected with a vowel Lord Reith would not have approved, that I cannot quote in these pages without an asterisk. Quite right too. The man invented the franchise. He owns the moral high ground and he’s busy strewing it with broken set furniture flung from the roof of the Ed Sullivan Theater.

For those of us who have written before about Colbert and the slow strangulation of political satire in the age of Trump, tonight is not so much a final episode as a final warning. The message coming out of West 53rd Street is now horribly simple: take the mickey out of the man in the Oval Office, embarrass the parent company in front of the regulators he appoints, and your career, Emmy-bedecked, network-leading, fifty-two weeks a year, is over before the band finishes the play-out.

That is not a financial decision. That is a precedent. And a vile one.

I happen to run businesses for a living. I have spent thirty years arguing that British plc should be tougher, braver, more willing to stick its hand up at the back of the room. So I am the last person to wring my hands when an American media giant decides it can no longer afford a hundred-million-dollar talk show. Late-night is unwell. Audiences are migrating to TikTok and YouTube faster than commissioners can flick the studio lights on. Even my dog has a podcast.

But that is not what happened here. What happened here is that a man told a joke about a man who cannot take a joke, and the bean counters folded the chair he was sitting on. As I argued when Trump’s tariffs began squeezing British exports, this White House treats business as an extension of grievance. CBS didn’t get cancelled by the market. It got cancelled by a sulk.

That is the bit that ought to terrify British boardrooms, not just American ones. Because the chilling effect does not stop at the Hudson. Every UK media business doing deals in the United States, every studio, streamer, format house, news brand, is now reading the body language. Don’t annoy the President. Don’t let your talent annoy the President. Settle, smile, soften the gag. It is, to borrow from another television creation I have written about, Jed Bartlet’s worst nightmare arriving on a Wednesday afternoon: the executive branch quietly dictating the punchlines.

We are British. We invented taking the mickey out of the powerful. From Spitting Image to Mock the Week, Have I Got News For You to whatever Charlie Brooker fancies doing next Wednesday, satire is, for us, a load-bearing wall of national life. A democracy that cannot laugh at its leaders is not a democracy in good health; it is a banana republic with better dental cover.

Colbert, for what it is worth, will be seen off in his final week by Jon Stewart, Tom Hanks and Barack Obama, hardly the send-off you stage for a man whose ratings have gone south. Letterman is right. Cancellation is not failure. The failure belongs to CBS, to Paramount, and to every executive who decided that the easiest way to grow up was to crouch down.

The joke, on this last night, is not on Stephen Colbert. The joke is on the rest of us, if we sit politely and watch.

Read more:
Colbert’s final bow: How CBS cancelled the king of late night to keep Trump sweet

Somewhere in a damp Parisian hotel in October 1977, a young Geordie schoolteacher called Gordon Sumner picked up his bass, glanced at a faded poster of Cyrano de Bergerac in the foyer, leaned out of the window at the working girls below, and rattled off a small reggae-flavoured number about a prostitute he had never met.

He called her Roxanne. He spent, by most accounts, an afternoon on the thing. Possibly a long lunch. Certainly less time than I will have spent writing this column.

That song, in February 2022, helped Sting hand his entire songwriting catalogue, some six hundred tunes, to Universal Music Publishing for a reported $300 million. Roughly £240 million in real money. For lyrics scribbled on hotel notepads, in the back of tour buses, occasionally in the bath. Even allowing for inflation, alimony and the eye-watering price of his tantric retreats, it remains, in cold commercial terms, the single greatest example of “sweating the asset” I have ever encountered in business.

Consider the original economics. A pop song in 1977 was a perishable: three minutes of grooves pressed into a slab of polyvinyl chloride, designed to be bought for 75p, played to death, scratched by a teenager and replaced by next week’s offering. The label took the lion’s share. The writer, if he was lucky and his manager was honest, he usually wasn’t, got a few pence per copy. And yet here we are, half a century on, and Roxanne is still earning. Every car advert. Every karaoke licence. Every Spotify spin in a Bangkok cocktail bar at two in the morning. Every nostalgic Boomer thumbing repeat in his Range Rover on the M40 to Bicester Village.

Sting is not alone. Bob Dylan flogged his songwriting catalogue to Universal in late 2020 for around $300 million, then sold his recorded works to Sony the following summer for another $200 million. Bruce Springsteen, the working-class hero from Asbury Park, lifted somewhere between $500 and $600 million off Sony for his life’s work. Bowie’s estate, Genesis, Neil Young, Pink Floyd. The numbers are positively obscene, and rising.

Why? Because, according to the IFPI’s Global Music Report 2025, recorded music brought in $29.6 billion globally last year. Streaming alone topped $20 billion, fully 69 per cent of the pie. There are now 752 million paying subscribers worldwide and ten consecutive years of growth. The very technology that everyone solemnly said would kill the music industry, Napster, file-sharing, the iPod, the internet itself, has instead resurrected it as the perfect annuity. Music doesn’t sell once any more. It sells forever, in fractions of a penny, every second of every day, while the writer sleeps.

Compare that to the rest of us. The plumber who fitted my boiler in 2018 invoiced me, paid his VAT and moved on. The barrister who drafted our new sponsorship contracts billed by the hour and that was that. The architect, the dentist, the accountant, the management consultant, all selling time, all watching the clock, all running flat out until the day they retire and the cheques stop. Even the great industrial fortunes of the twentieth century, your Wedgwoods, your Hansons, your Goldsmiths, required factories, foundries, lorries, lawyers, picket lines and the occasional hostile takeover. Whereas Paul McCartney dreamt the melody of Yesterday in his girlfriend’s spare room in 1965, scribbled “scrambled eggs, oh my baby how I love your legs” as placeholder lyrics, and has since banked north of £19.5 million on a single song — the most-covered tune in human history, with more than three thousand versions. The Beatles’ catalogue is now valued comfortably north of £1.2 billion and reportedly throws off £70 to £90 million a year for owners who, gloriously, include almost none of the people who actually wrote it.

This is the lesson British business has been embarrassingly slow to learn. It is not what you make. It is what you make that keeps making. The whole intellectual property economy, software, brands, patents, content, is built on this principle. Microsoft writes Office once and bills you forever. Disney drew Mickey before the Wall Street Crash and is still suing people about him. Coca-Cola scribbled a formula on a piece of paper in 1886 and has paid for four generations of dividend cheques. But none of them, not one, possesses the casual, narcotic genius of the songwriter who spent an afternoon humming and is still cashing seven-figure royalty statements in his seventies.

We business owners should be furious. And inspired. In November 2023, The Beatles even released Now and Then, a John Lennon demo from the late seventies, patched up with artificial intelligence and a bit of Peter Jackson studio wizardry, and it strolled to number one in the UK, fifty-six years after their previous chart-topper. The asset, sweated and sweated and sweated again, and now sweating for a fourth generation of listeners who weren’t born when their grandparents bought the original LP.

So the next time some private equity grandee bangs the boardroom table demanding “operational efficiency” and “recurring revenue streams”, remind him gently that the most efficient business model in the modern economy is a paunchy Geordie with a guitar humming nonsense about a Parisian prostitute in 1977 and banking nine-figure cheques in his seventies. The rest of us should be so lucky. Or, more usefully, so clever.

Read more:
Sweating the asset: How Sting wrote Roxanne in an afternoon and sold it for £240 Million

I am not, in the ordinary run of things, a man given to civic exhortation. Lecture another adult on what to do with their Thursday and you tend to end up wearing their coffee, quite rightly.

But indulge me, just this once, because tomorrow is local election day across great swathes of England, and somebody has to say something about the great British shrug that has come to define our relationship with the ballot box at the parish-and-pothole level.

In the last round of council elections, turnout in some wards crept south of thirty per cent. Thirty per cent. Sit with that for a moment. Seven in ten adults, in possession of a franchise their grandparents fought a war to defend, opted instead to put the kettle on, watch a man on YouTube fitting a gearbox, or sit there in a state of low-grade irritation about Westminster as though the council had nothing whatever to do with their lives.

As though the council did not run their bins, set their parking charges, decide whether the vape shop next door could open at seven in the morning, and quietly determine, through the dark art of the local plan, whether a four-storey block of flats will rise next year on the patch of brownfield where their children currently kick a football.

I run businesses for a living, and I can tell you, as readers of this magazine will already know in their bones, that the people who shape your operating costs are not, in the main, the slick young SpAds and ambitious junior ministers preening on the Today programme.

They are councillors. People with names like Peter, Paul and Jane, even I used to be one for over a decade. People with dreadful lanyards and, mostly, excellent intentions. They set business rates relief schemes. They grant, or refuse, your A-board, your awning, your application for a pavement licence so the punters can drink rosé in the rain.

They decide whether your high street will boast a half-decent bus service or a bewildered taxi rank flanked by three Costas and a Greggs. They sign off road closures that can cost a small retailer a fortnight’s takings in a single botched resurfacing job. They run procurement budgets through which billions are quietly dispensed every year, and from which, incidentally, your own firm could perfectly well be eating, were you ever to bother with the tendering portal.

In short, if you run a business, the council is your landlord, your regulator, your customer and your traffic warden, all rolled into one slightly damp Edwardian building with a malfunctioning lift. Ignore it at your peril.

Now. I am not going to tell you who to vote for. I have my views, strong ones, in fact, ones I will not bore you with here because, frankly, they are not the point, and you have yours. That is the splendid, frustrating, occasionally infuriating glory of the thing. You may be a lifelong Conservative who has finally had enough. You may be Labour through and through, a Lib Dem with a clipboard, a Green who cycles, a Reform man who shouts, or one of those magnificent independents who slipped in last time on a single-issue ticket about the duck pond.

I do not care. I genuinely, profoundly, do not care. What I care about is that you put on a coat tomorrow, walk to the church hall, the primary school or the slightly dispiriting community centre, take the stubby pencil they have thoughtfully provided, and put a cross in a box.

Because here is the awkward truth: democracy is a muscle. Use it badly, use it crossly, use it with a heavy sigh and a glass of red waiting at home, but use it. Leave it in the drawer for too long and it withers, and once it has withered the people who do turn up, and they always turn up, get to decide everything for the rest of us. That is not a left-wing observation or a right-wing one. It is simply how arithmetic works in a polling station.

I am told there is a fashionable line these days, much retweeted by sixth-formers and weary executives alike, that “voting changes nothing”. To which the only sensible reply is: marvellous, then you will not object to my vote counting double. Of course it changes things. Ask any small business owner who has watched a sympathetic council slash parking charges, or an unsympathetic one slap on a workplace levy. Ask the publican facing a three a.m. licence refusal. Ask the parent whose new primary school exists because three hundred neighbours bothered to turn out one wet Thursday in May.

So. Tomorrow. Coat on, pencil up, cross in. I am not telling you who to vote for. I am telling you to vote. There is, I promise, a meaningful difference.

Read more:
Local Elections 2026: Why you must go out and vote tomorrow

There is a particular kind of silence that descends on a once-busy restaurant when last orders have come and gone, the candles have guttered, and the chef is out the back having a cigarette and contemplating bankruptcy. It is the sound of a small dream dying. And right now, across Britain, that silence is becoming deafening.

I have just returned from dinner at a perfectly nice neighbourhood bistro in west London, where the owner, a man who quit a comfortable banking job to chase the romance of feeding people, confessed somewhere between the burrata and the lamb that he is closing in September. Not because nobody comes. They come. They eat. They tip. They order the second bottle. But the maths, he sighed, no longer mathses.

The story is the same in every postcode. UKHospitality reckons we lost roughly one pub or restaurant every single day last year. The Hospitality Rising figures are grimmer still: chefs walking away, dining rooms going dark, sites being flogged off to coffee chains and vape shops. And yet our Chancellor has decided that what this fragile, brilliant, world-beating sector really needs is a thumping great kicking.

Let us count the bruises. From April 2025, employer National Insurance jumped to 15 per cent. The threshold at which businesses begin paying it was slashed from £9,100 to £5,000, which is a fancy Treasury way of saying that every waiter, every glass-polisher, every Saturday-morning kitchen porter is now considerably more expensive to employ. Throw in the National Living Wage rising to £12.21 an hour, business rates relief shrivelling from 75 per cent to a measly 40 per cent, and a stubborn refusal to cut hospitality VAT to anything resembling our European competitors, and you have what UKHospitality calculated as an additional £3.4 billion annual hit on the sector. Three-point-four. Billion. With a B.

To which Rachel Reeves and Sir Keir Starmer have essentially shrugged and said: tough. Get on with it. Be more productive. Use AI. Yes, really, the Prime Minister actually suggested artificial intelligence was the answer to the front-of-house labour crisis. Has the man ever tried to get a chatbot to recommend the Picpoul de Pinet over the Sancerre, or to deal with a four-top of accountants splitting the bill seventeen ways?

I am not, as a rule, a conspiracist. But I am beginning to wonder whether this is plain incompetence or something darker. Because if you sat down with a clean sheet of paper and deliberately tried to design a policy package guaranteed to incinerate independent restaurants, you would land more or less exactly where this Government has landed. Hammer the labour costs. Hammer the property costs. Refuse the one tax cut, VAT, that would actually move the needle. Drive away the high-spending non-doms who used to keep Mayfair humming, propose extending the smoking ban to pub gardens and pavement tables, then make it harder still to recruit from abroad. Magnifique.

The rationale, presumably, is that restaurants are a luxury, frequented by people who can afford it, staffed by people who do not vote Labour. Easy political target. Wrong, of course. Our sector employs 3.5 million people, more than half of them under 30, many in their first proper job, learning skills no classroom ever taught, graft, courtesy, and how to charm a furious German tourist out of a complaint about the size of the prawns. Killing restaurants does not punish the rich. It punishes the kid from Croydon who wanted to be a sommelier, the Polish chef who built a life here, and the landlady whose pub still kept her village alive.

And here is the bit Reeves seems incapable of grasping: hospitality does not just feed us. It powers tourism, it props up high streets, it fills supply chains from Cornish dairies to Yorkshire breweries to the Kentish vineyards her colleagues love being photographed at. When a restaurant closes, the butcher feels it, the laundry firm feels it, the cab driver feels it, the florist feels it. You do not just lose a place to eat. You lose an entire ecosystem.

I had hoped, fool that I am, that this Labour Government might understand that. Many of its members, after all, claim to enjoy the occasional supper out, although one suspects most of theirs arrives by Deliveroo on the public purse. But policy after policy has revealed either profound ignorance of how a small business actually functions, or active hostility towards anyone who took a punt on themselves rather than waited patiently for a public sector pay rise.

The lights are going out across our high streets. The chairs are being stacked. The wine is being sold off at cost. And our Chancellor, when asked, musters only the platitude that growth takes time.

So does dying, Rachel. So does dying.

Read more:
Last orders for British hospitality: Are Reeves and Starmer trying to kill the UK restaurant sector?

There is a particular kind of dinner I have, every couple of months, in a particular kind of place, a Soho members’ club that lets you bring more than three people without an interrogation, in this case, with a particular kind of British technology founder.

He is, by his late thirties, on his third successful company. He has, between them, raised something north of £180 million in venture capital. He has, currently, about 220 employees in London, with another fifty due to be hired in the coming twelve months. He has, last week, sold a further $40 million tranche of his Series C to two American funds.

And he has, somewhere between his second and third glass of red, told me that he is moving the company’s headquarters to New York. Not on principle. Not on tax. Not on regulation. Not even, despite the obvious temptation in this column, on the Chancellor. He is moving because the next $200 million he needs, in 18 months, is in New York, and the practical day-to-day life of a CEO in a series of monthly trips to a city eight time zones from his children is, frankly, too painful. So he is moving the family. The London office will remain. It will, over time, get smaller. A version of this conversation has happened, by my count, with at least twelve British founders I know personally in the last two years.

Britain does not, in 2026, have a start-up problem. We start-up exquisitely. We have, by any international comparison, more new technology businesses per capita than nearly any other developed economy. Cambridge is, on its own, one of the great clusters of the world. London’s software and fintech ecosystems are deeper than Berlin’s, deeper than Paris’s, comparable to New York’s on most measures, with a couple of exceptions. We have brilliant universities, a working tax-incentive regime in EIS, a meaningful angel community, and a steady flow of seed and Series A capital.

What we have is a stay-at-home problem.

The numbers are visible if anyone bothers to look. UK technology IPOs, by listed value, are running at less than 12 per cent of US listings adjusted for relative GDP. UK Series C and onwards rounds are dominated, by deal count, by American lead investors. The proportion of UK technology companies founded in 2018 that have, by 2025, relocated their corporate domicile overseas, to the US, to Delaware, to Ireland, to Singapore, is now over 22 per cent. The proportion of all UK-founded unicorns that listed on the New York Stock Exchange or Nasdaq, rather than the London Stock Exchange, is over 80 per cent for the last decade. Eighty.

Why? It is not, despite the City lobbying, primarily a tax problem. American capital gains rates are not, in any meaningful sense, more friendly to founders than British rates. It is not, despite a great deal of Treasury-led discussion, a corporate-tax problem. The US corporate tax rate, when you blend federal and state, is comparable. It is not, despite the political mood music, a regulatory problem in the technology sectors that matter, the FCA, where it counts for fintech, is a notably more friendly regulator than its American equivalent.

It is, primarily, a depth-of-capital-pool problem. The UK pension system, despite the most articulate efforts of the Edinburgh Reforms and the Mansion House Compact and a half-dozen subsequent initiatives, allocates an embarrassingly small proportion of its £3 trillion of assets to growth-stage British equities. Canadian pension funds are, statistically, more invested in British scale-ups than British pension funds. This is the absurdity of the present situation: the world’s ninth-largest pension industry, hosted in Britain, is not investing in British growth, and is being out-deployed, in British growth equity, by Canadians, Australians, and Americans.

Fix the depth, and the rest of the problem largely goes with it. There are about three things to do. First, get UK Defined Contribution pension money, which is, by the way, growing at over £100 billion a year, into a properly structured British scale-up vehicle, at a meaningful target allocation, with a proper governance overlay. Second, restore the pre-2008 status of the London Stock Exchange as a competitive listing venue for technology businesses, by reforming the dual-class share structures and the listing-rules architecture that has kept it stranded in the era of utilities and miners. Third, make the EIS reliefs permanent, generous, and unfussy at the seed stage, so that the early-stage capital remains the easiest tier to raise.

None of this is impossible. None of this is even, in the international context, particularly bold. The Australians did most of it in 2008. The Canadians did most of it in 2014. The Singaporeans built theirs in around six years. We are, in 2026, still pondering it.

And in the meantime, my Soho friend will, in the autumn, leave. He will take the family. He will keep the London office. The American round will close. The next British unicorn, and there will be a next British unicorn, will, on present trajectory, list, again, in New York. The Mayoral candidates will, on the day after, all denounce the loss to “Brand London”. And the bottle of red, in our particular Soho members’ club, will be uncorked, again, by someone else.

We start-up brilliantly, in this country. We just need, finally, to learn how to keep them. The May locals, it turns out, are not the only thing on the ballot.

Read more:
Britain doesn’t have a start-up problem, it has a stay-at-home problem

Tomorrow is May Day, and somewhere in the middle of the country, a married couple in their early forties is opening up a small bakery for the third Friday in succession on which they have not, between them, drawn a salary.

They started the business in 2022. They re-mortgaged the house. They missed two of their daughter’s school plays last term, including the one where she had a line. They have not, for nineteen months, taken a day off. They are, on the official ONS labour-market classification, “self-employed”, which is to say they are not, technically, considered workers at all.

I would like, on this particular May Day, to suggest that they are.

There is a particular sleight-of-hand in British political language that has, over the last fifty years or so, produced an increasingly narrow definition of the word “worker”. A worker, in current usage, is someone who is paid by an employer in return for doing a job, ideally with a contract, a payslip, and a pension contribution. The “workers’ movement”, in modern parlance, is the political and industrial movement representing exactly that figure. Anyone outside the definition is, by implication, something else, an entrepreneur, an investor, a self-employed person, a small-business owner, a family-firm founder. They get other ministries, other sympathies, other adjectives. They do not, on the whole, get celebrated on May Day.

This is, frankly, ridiculous. The bakery couple work, on the broad numbers, more hours than any of their employees. They take home, on average, less per hour than their employees. They have less holiday, less protection, less pension, less sick pay, less of everything. Their economic risk is total. Their political clout is somewhere between negligible and non-existent. Their public image, in much of British political discourse, is closer to that of the tax-avoiding non-dom than that of the sympathetic NHS porter, which is, when you actually meet either, a perfect inversion of reality.

There are, by the latest ONS estimate, just over 4.3 million self-employed workers in the UK. Of those, around 600,000 run businesses with employees of their own. They collectively contribute approximately £303 billion to UK GDP, which is more than the entire UK financial-services sector. They pay corporation tax, dividend tax, capital gains tax, employer NICs, business rates, VAT, and insurance premium tax. They keep more than three million Britons in PAYE jobs. They are, in any meaningful definition, the productive backbone of the country.

And, for at least the last decade, they have been treated by every successive UK administration with a mixture of mild benign neglect and occasional, almost incidental, cruelty. IR35 was a cruelty. Making Tax Digital is a cruelty. The narrowing of business property relief on inheritance tax has been a cruelty. The withdrawal of various small expenses and reliefs has been a cruelty. None of these things has been done because anyone in Whitehall actively dislikes the small-business owner; it is rather that, in the present political configuration, the small-business owner is too small to matter, too dispersed to organise, and too busy to march. The civil servants drafting the SI get the headline figures right, and the headline figures, individually, are small.

May Day, in its original conception, was a workers’ holiday, but, as anyone with any knowledge of the period will tell you, the “workers” it commemorated were not, exclusively, the wage-labour pay-packet figure of present-day usage. They were the broader productive class: artisans, shopkeepers, mechanics, makers, the journeymen in the literal sense who worked with their own tools to produce something useful. A baker in Walsall, in 2026, getting up at 4am to mix the dough, fits that older definition perfectly. The fact that she has, technically, incorporated herself as a private limited company should not, surely, exclude her from the holiday.

I do not, please understand, wish to undermine the more familiar version of May Day. The march, the bunting, the speeches, the flag, they are part of a recognisable British political tradition that I rather enjoy. I just would like, this year, to make a small modest plea for the inclusion in it of the people whose labour is no less skilled, no less hard-won, no less honest, and considerably less protected, than the labour the day was originally meant to celebrate.

So if you are in the bakery this morning, or the small workshop, or the family-run pub, or the consultancy that lives at the kitchen table, or the farm that has been in your name for thirty years, happy May Day. The country is, despite the available evidence, better off because of you. Take five minutes off, if you can. Drink a coffee. Watch the bunting. And, before you go back to it, remember that whatever the textbook says, and whatever the marching song goes, the work you do is, exactly, work.

Read more:
On May Day, spare a thought for the workers who took the risk and built the bloody company

I wrote, last year, about how worried I was for the British rural economy, and a few of you wrote back to ask, kindly, what I thought we should do.

The honest answer, I have realised over the intervening twelve months, is that the most important and most fragile thing we could do is keep the village pub open. I have been thinking about this, since the spring, almost every day. So allow me, this week, the personal column. I think it is the right week for it.

The pub I am writing about, and yes, of course it is a particular pub, is in a small village in Suffolk, on a road that the satnav lies about. It has been there in some form since the 17th century. The current building is largely Georgian, with a Victorian extension and a 1990s kitchen that I would generously describe as character-building. The current tenant has been in place for eleven years. The previous tenant for twenty-three.

It is, by the present trade body’s definition, a “community wet-led” pub. About 60 per cent of its trade is drinks; 30 per cent is food; the remainder is the upstairs rooms, which were converted in the 1990s for the kind of weekending Londoners we used to call “townies” and which we now call, less affectionately, “zoom refugees”. It employs four full-time and seven part-time staff. The full-time staff include the chef, who came up from Hackney during the pandemic and never left, and a young lad of 22 who started as a glass-collector five years ago and has just qualified as cellar-master. The part-time staff are mostly women from the village, two of whom would, in a different country, be working in a primary school that closed in 2019.

It is the wettest, most stubbornly British piece of social infrastructure I know, and it is, on the present rates revaluation, in a kitchen-equipment-replacement cycle that nobody saw coming, and in a year of unusually aggressive energy contracts, about £42,000 a year away from solvency. This is not a private detail. The publican, when I rang him on Monday, told me himself.

There are, in our village, no shops. There has been no post office for fourteen years. The bus runs twice a week. The primary school, in 2019, lost its Year 6 cohort permanently. The doctor’s surgery closed for new patient registrations in 2018 and is, now, more of a dispensing arrangement than a clinic. The church holds services once a fortnight. The mobile library, which had one stop here on a Tuesday afternoon, was wound up in the funding round of 2022. The pub is, in any meaningful sense, what the rest of the village now is.

Were it to close, the geography of village life would not be replaced by something else. There is no shop ready to take over the “community” function. There is no village hall with a working kitchen, it lost its Aga in 2017 and the trustees never raised the £6,200 to replace it. The Cubs, who use the pub’s back room on Wednesdays, would, on past form, drift to a town six miles away and, on past form, shrink. The Sunday lunches, which give an unmarried woman of 78 her main weekly social contact, would not happen. The wakes, and we have had four, this year, in a village of 273, would have to be held in someone’s living room.

I am aware, as I write this, of the metropolitan eyebrow being raised. The countryside has been moaning, the eyebrow says, for as long as anyone can remember, and the countryside is not what it once was. Both of those things, technically, are true. They are also evasions. The countryside is materially different from any other part of England in one specific respect: when its institutions go, there is, almost without exception, no replacement. London has, in any one square mile, three public houses, four cafés, a couple of pubs that aren’t very good, several restaurants and a handful of community spaces that do roughly the same social work between them. Suffolk does not. The English village, almost uniquely in the British Isles, has put all of its community infrastructure into a single building, and that building, increasingly, is the pub.

What would I, accordingly, do? Almost everything I have already proposed in this magazine: VAT at 12.5 per cent for hospitality; a community-pub-specific multiplier on rates; the “asset of community value” reform with the burden of proof reversed onto developers seeking to flat-pack a Grade II listed pub. Plus one more, which I have been quieter about until now: a small, ring-fenced national fund, perhaps £150 million a year, to provide low-interest loans to community pub buyouts in areas where the only alternative is closure. We have such a fund for cinemas. We have a far larger one for football. We do not, anywhere in our policy stack, have one for the rural pub.

We will know, in two or three years, whether we kept these places open. I’ll be in the Suffolk one as long as it’s open. So will, on present form, the village. The country, very quietly, would be better for the same.

Read more:
I worry for the rural pub, and yes, this one is personal too

I am, on the whole, in favour of strong workers’ rights. I have been a small-business employer for the better part of three decades; I have, in that time, seen the casual British employment market behave both better and worse than it ought. So no, this is not the column where I argue that the British worker is too much protected.

But the Workers’ Rights Bill, six months in, is now meaningfully damaging the British labour market, and I think someone has to say so before the present trajectory gets worse.

Let me give you the picture as it is on the ground. Day-one rights to claim unfair dismissal. Day-one rights to flexible working applications. New, more generous, statutory sick pay. Tightened restrictions on zero-hours contracts. New protections against fire-and-rehire. New duties on harassment. A fresh framework for trade-union recognition, with a lower threshold. A new “probationary” concept, the legal architecture of which has not, despite repeated industry pleading, yet been settled.

Each of these reforms, taken on its own, has a defensible policy case behind it. Each of them, taken in isolation, would probably do more good than harm. The trouble is what happens when you put them all together, in a single piece of legislation, with implementation rules that arrive in tranches over eighteen months, in front of a labour market in which around 96 per cent of all employment relationships are run by SMEs that do not have an HR department.

What happens is this. The SME owner sits down with her perfectly nice high-street solicitor in early March, walks through the new exposures, and concludes, quite rationally, that hiring an additional UK employee is now an exposure of approximately £80,000 to £150,000 over the first 18 months, on a tribunal-risk-adjusted basis. She doesn’t hire. She uses an agency contractor. She uses a part-time freelancer. She uses, increasingly, a Lisbon-based subcontractor on a B2B services agreement, because the legal architecture of that arrangement is, by happy coincidence, simpler in 2026 than the legal architecture of an employer-employee relationship in Britain.

Multiply this by the country’s 1.5 million SMEs, and you get the data the Office for National Statistics published last month. Net hiring in firms below 50 employees has fallen for the third consecutive quarter, the longest contraction in any non-recessionary period since records began. Use of contractors and consultants has risen 22 per cent year on year. Graduate hiring at SMEs, which was already declining for AI-related reasons, is down a further 14 per cent.

I want to be careful here. I do not blame the people who designed the Bill. The intentions are recognisably good. The impact on the worst-behaved British employers, the call-centre operators, the gig economy edge cases, the Sports Direct end of the warehouse industry, has, on the available data, been broadly positive, and I am pleased about that. The damage is being done in the middle: in the small office, the small studio, the small manufacturer, the small specialist consultancy, where the additional legal exposure is meaningful relative to revenue and the absence of an HR function makes compliance disproportionately expensive.

What would I do? Reverse, immediately, the day-one unfair dismissal right, and replace it with a six-month probationary period during which fair-process protection applies but no tribunal route exists. Couple this with a statutory cap on tribunal awards in firms below 50 employees, indexed to turnover. Give an unequivocal carve-out for under-25 employment to address the hidden graduate-hiring effect we are about to see in earnest. And, finally, set out, in plain English, the “probationary” framework that has been left, deliberately or otherwise, ambiguous.

There is nothing in any of this that compromises the worker who has been with a firm for years and has been treated badly, which is the case the legislators were thinking about when they drafted the original. There is, however, a great deal in it that lowers the legal exposure of taking on the next graduate, the next mother returning to work, the next 19-year-old leaving school in Stoke. We have, in the present design, made it materially harder for those exact people to find a foot on the ladder.

Labour came into office promising to be the party of work. The Workers’ Rights Bill, on its present implementation track, has begun to be the party of unemployment, by quiet accident. Six months from now, the data will be unambiguous. There is still time to fix it. There is, increasingly, not much time after that.

Read more:
Day-one rights, six-figure tribunals: how the Workers’ Rights Bill is killing hiring before it starts

I have been having, all week, more or less the same telephone conversation with hospitality clients. It begins with a polite catch-up about the Easter trade.

It moves, after about ninety seconds, to the 2026 rates revaluation, which has, by some grim miracle, managed to fall on the same set of operators who have already been hit hardest by every other policy of the last five years. It ends, almost without exception, with the client saying some version of: “We may have to think about closing the Whitechapel site.” Or the Bristol site. Or the Edinburgh site. Or the High Wycombe site. The town moves; the sentence does not.

Business rates, in this country, are the levy nobody talks about until they are paying them, after which they are the levy nobody can stop talking about. They are the property tax on commercial premises that has, against all logic, become a sort of operational tax on the use of bricks and mortar in the productive economy, while the warehouse-and-fulfilment side of the same economy, Amazon, Ocado, the third-party logistics estate that fulfils the Boxing Day shopping, pays a fraction. We have, in essence, set up a tax system that subsidises the click and penalises the visit.

The 2026 revaluation, in its full and ugly bloom, has now landed. Pubs and restaurants, on the new ratings, will pay an average of 14 per cent more than they did. Hairdressers, dry cleaners and the residual high-street independents are paying between 9 and 19 per cent more. Hotels in central locations have been hit by between 18 and 26 per cent. The promised multiplier reform, which Labour campaigned on in 2024 and which has been the subject of three consecutive rounds of consultation, has not been delivered; the small-business multiplier remains slightly lower than the large, but the gap is too narrow to do meaningful work, and both have been ratcheted up by inflation.

Meanwhile, the same revaluation has handed substantial cuts to two categories: out-of-town warehouses, where land values, on the very technical basis used by the Valuation Office, have come off slightly; and the central London prime office estate, which, despite hybrid working, retains a bizarrely generous treatment in the new schedule. The very part of the economy that sucks employment out of high streets and fulfilment out of independent retailers has had its tax bill cut. The very part of the economy that we keep claiming to want to nurture, the visit, the room, the table, the till, has had its tax bill loaded.

This is not, I should say, a partisan complaint. The architecture of the British rates system is bipartisan in its absurdity, and every Chancellor since Geoffrey Howe has, with an air of regret, added another wrinkle. It is the perfectly imperfect example of a tax system that has been reformed for so long that nobody can now remember what it was originally for. The historic rationale, that local rates funded local public goods such as roads and lighting, has, for forty years, been replaced by a national pool, redistributed by the Treasury, with predictably poor results.

What, then, is to be done? Several things. First, the simple and overdue: a 12.5 per cent VAT band for hospitality, paid for in the medium term by the broadening of business rates to the warehouse and fulfilment estate. Second, the radical: a serious proposal to abolish business rates altogether and replace them with a simple commercial-property land value tax, which the Henry George Society is, at this point, almost too tired to keep proposing. Third, the boringly fundamental: a return to a meaningful local share of the rates collected, so that town councils have a direct interest in the prosperity of the businesses on their patch, and not merely a planning interest in their square footage.

Each of those proposals has been on the table for, at minimum, two decades. Each of them has been studied to death by a sequence of cross-Whitehall reviews, with the result that we have a vast, multi-volume archive of policy work and, on the ground, the same broken tax. The reason it does not change is the same reason any tax does not change: the people doing well out of the present arrangement are organised, articulate and represented; the people doing badly out of it are exhausted, dispersed and busy.

But the price of the present settlement is, finally, becoming visible. Closures of independents are at a record. Hotel occupancy in regional cities is below pre-pandemic levels. The high-street vacancy rate, as I wrote last week, is at 14.2 per cent. None of these numbers are sustainable in the medium term, and none of them will be reversed by another speech about “high-street renewal”. They will be reversed only by structural reform of the rates system. We are, after twelve years of rotating Treasury reviews, running out of time and out of the small businesses who could afford to wait.

The next move belongs to the Chancellor. So does the Whitechapel restaurant, on the present trajectory, by midsummer.

Read more:
Business rates: Britain’s most punishing levy on the very firms it claims to champion

Easter, in this country, has become a kind of trading-figures ECG: a thin grey line for most of the quarter, a sharp peak around the bank holidays, and then, on the day after, the slow flat-line that resumes for another six weeks.

We had the peak. The trade press, with its usual cheery instinct, called it “a strong four-day uplift in footfall”. Bunting was deployed on the front page of more than one daily newspaper. By Tuesday morning, the actual takings, which is what we should have been looking at all along, had returned, on the latest UK Hospitality and BRC numbers, to the trend rate they were on in February.

This is the rhythm of the British high street and hospitality sector in 2026, and the rhythm is not healthy.

I went, over the Easter weekend, to Bath. I have been going to Bath, on and off, for thirty years. The old ratio I used to associate with the city, independents to chains, around 60–40 — has flipped. The Pulteney Bridge end has gone the way of every English provincial centre: a Caffè Nero, a Greggs, a Boots, a Starbucks, a Tesco Express, a Joe & The Juice and an empty Carluccio’s with a ‘to let’ sign for the third year running. The independents are still there, just; but they are increasingly clustered in two streets, and the rest is corporate plain-text with bunny ears. We had a perfectly good lunch at one of the holdouts, who told me, at the till, that her landlord had increased the rent another 11 per cent at lease renewal in February. She was, she said, “seeing how the year goes”. Translation: she was eight months from closing.

This is not a story about Bath. It is a story about every English town and city outside the M25. The high-street vacancy rate, on the present LDC numbers, is sitting at 14.2 per cent, the highest non-pandemic figure on record. In the smaller towns, that figure rises closer to 19. The hospitality side is no better. The number of full-service restaurants registered for VAT has fallen for the third successive quarter. The number of independent cafés, which had been one of the few resilient categories through the last decade, fell for the first time on record.

What has happened? The same things that have been happening for a decade. Business rates have not been reformed. Energy is more expensive than in any comparable Western European market. The minimum wage has gone up, for sound reasons, but at a pace that has not been matched by labour productivity in the kitchen, the bar or the tills. Employer NICs, having gone up in 2025, did not go down. A flurry of well-meaning new costs around environmental compliance, single-use packaging, and the new tipping legislation have added another 1.5 to 3 per cent to operating costs in the typical mid-tier restaurant.

And, perhaps most damaging of all, the consumer has lost confidence. The Easter footfall numbers I mentioned earlier have a quiet B-side: average spend per visit was down 4 per cent year-on-year. People are coming, in slightly higher numbers than they did, and then spending less. The bottle of supermarket prosecco at home with the family on Sunday has, very quietly, replaced the kind of celebratory midweek dinner that used to keep a town centre alive between bank holidays. The middle-class disposable income is not what it was, and the middle-class hospitality habit is the first thing to go.

The strategic response, on the part of government, has been to commission another high-street commission. There have been, by my count, seven of these since 2010, all of them well-intentioned, all of them written by people whose professional time is mostly spent in places not on the high street, and most of them shelved within twelve months of publication. We do not have a high-street policy in this country. We have a high-street regret.

What would I do, again? VAT at 12.5 per cent for hospitality. A statutory presumption against above-inflation rent increases for shops below £75,000 a year in rateable value. A meaningful business-rates multiplier reform that taxes the warehouse, not the corner café. An end to the special pleading from the largest grocery chains for the planning treatment that has gutted the very high streets they now wring their hands about.

And — though this is the hardest of all — a quiet, urgent national conversation about whether the British public actually want to keep their town centres. Because the present consumer behaviour, which is to say, click-and-delivery from a warehouse fifty miles away with the occasional bank-holiday cameo at the local independent, will not, on its own, sustain a town centre. The market alone, when it has been left to it, has not solved this problem in any developed economy. We will need to choose, deliberately, to keep the rooms.

Or we will have to get used to the bunny ears, the empty Carluccio’s, the sympathetic ‘to let’ signs and the rest of the architecture of decline. Easter has, in the meantime, been and gone. The flat line, on the cardiac monitor, has resumed.

Read more:
Easter on the high street: bunny ears, empty tills and a hospitality sector running on fumes

It is now eighteen months into the second Trump administration, and the British exporter, that politely undervalued figure who keeps the country’s current account in any sort of order at all, has just been handed another tariff bill.

American duty on UK speciality chemicals went up another 5 per cent on 1 April. UK whisky, that grand old Scottish workhorse, is now being charged the better part of 25 per cent in some American import categories. UK premium engineering, particularly aerospace components, has been hit by a delightful new “national security review surcharge” of 12 per cent, the existence of which one of my friends in Washington explained to me, last weekend, with the air of a man explaining a particularly inventive parking ticket.

And the British government’s response to all this has been, to a first approximation, the silence of an administration which, having spent eighteen months treating Donald Trump as a kind of category error, has now run out of category. There is no transatlantic trade strategy. There is no minister for it. There is, instead, a series of polite communiqués from the Department of Business, the Foreign Office and the trade envoys, who, having spent the spring being warmly received in mid-Atlantic states, return to find that none of the people they met in those mid-Atlantic states are particularly relevant to the actual decision making in Washington.

I should say, before this becomes a column the present American administration will read with pleasure, that I am no fan of the Trumpist trade philosophy. The tariffs are, on every honest economic measure, bad for American consumers as well as British producers. The protectionism is largely incoherent. The administration is using national-security justifications for sectors that have, on closer inspection, no national-security implications at all. The whole programme is a mid-term industrial policy dressed up as a security policy and pursued, in the manner of all such things, with rather more energy than care.

But it is happening, and it is not going to stop happening, because the political coalition in the United States that supports it has not weakened. The British exporter must, in 2026, plan as if the tariff regime is permanent, because, on most plausible scenarios, it is. And the British government must, accordingly, decide what its actual transatlantic strategy is.

The instinct in Whitehall has been to play this game cool, hoping for a “mini-deal” on professional services or intellectual property that takes a few items off the tariff list while preserving the broader UK position. This is not, I am sorry to say, going to work. The Trump White House does not do mini-deals; it does deals. And the deals it does are bilateral, transactional, and visible. To get one, the British government would need to put something on the table large enough and visible enough to be worth a presidential signature. The list of things in that category is short: the digital services tax; pharmaceutical pricing on the NHS; agricultural standards; Chagos.

Each of those is politically expensive at home. Each of them has, somewhere in Whitehall, a reasoned defence. None of them have been seriously discussed in the present cabinet as bargaining chips, because the present cabinet has, broadly, decided that talking about Trump in those terms is undignified. The price of dignity, as ever, is paid by exporters.

What I would like to see is, frankly, an end to the dignity. Get serious. Identify, openly, two or three concessions that the United Kingdom is willing to make in exchange for the removal of tariffs on the four or five sectors where the British competitive advantage is greatest: speciality chemicals, premium engineering, premium spirits, biopharma. Do the deal. Survive the politics at home. Move on. The country could do with the £6 to £8 billion in re-opened export receipts that a serious deal would generate over a Parliament.

Then, more importantly, build out the missing market diversification. British exporters have been, for at least a decade, dangerously concentrated on the United States and the European Union. The world has, in the meantime, had a Mexico, an India, an Indonesia, a Vietnam, all of which are now larger and more dynamic markets than they were when the present trade strategy was last reviewed. UK Export Finance has the budget, on paper, to back this kind of diversification. It does not, on present operations, do so meaningfully. That is fixable in an afternoon, by changing its mandate.

The country that exports its way through a Trump tariff regime is the country that, at the same time, opens three other markets. We are, on present form, doing neither. The exporters I speak to are, in increasing numbers, talking quietly to their continental subsidiaries about whether to relocate production. They will, if we don’t move fast, take that conversation to its logical conclusion.

Westminster, please. Wake up. The plane to Washington takes off twice a day; somebody serious needs to be on it.

Read more:
Trump’s tariffs are squeezing British exporters – and Westminster is asleep at the wheel

It has been just over twelve months since Britain abolished the non-domiciled tax regime, and the political class which engineered the change has, in the manner of a man who has lost a bet, gone deathly quiet on the subject.

There has been no triumphant statement of revenue raised. There has been no celebratory press release on “fairness restored”. There has, instead, been a series of releases from rival Mediterranean and Gulf jurisdictions, each one trailing the arrival of another set of British residents who used, until recently, to be ours. Italy is now the largest single beneficiary. Dubai is second. Switzerland, despite the snow, is having a banner year.

I am not, before any reflexive ideological reaction sets in, an unqualified defender of the old regime. The non-dom system was, in places, indefensible. It allowed, for instance, multi-generational use of the resident-non-domiciled status by people whose families had not seriously been domiciled abroad for decades. The 2017 deemed-domicile reforms, the ones the previous government did, against considerable lobbying, get right, closed most of the worst abuses, and at the time I supported them.

What we have done in the last twelve months is something quite different. We have, in effect, told a large group of internationally mobile high-earners, many of them not Britons at all, but global figures who chose, in the way that talented people sometimes choose, to put their family lives, charitable foundations, art collections and businesses in this country, that we no longer particularly value their being here. They have, for the most part, taken us at our word.

The figures, where they exist, are sobering. HMRC quietly published, last month, a 9 per cent year-on-year decline in stamp duty receipts on properties above £5 million, predominantly in central London. Mayfair and Belgravia office rents, which had been holding up against general London weakness, have softened in the last two quarters in a way that estate agents are too professional to attribute publicly to anything in particular. London philanthropic giving, the donors’ list of every major arts institution and many of our hospitals, has shifted; one major teaching hospital trust I know of has lost 14 per cent of its annual donor income. The Treasury, of course, does not collect a separate line item for charitable receipt loss as a result of policy change, so this number does not appear in the Office for Budget Responsibility tables. It will, however, appear in the closure notice of any number of smaller charities by 2028.

Then there is the City salary effect. A surprising number of Goldman, JP Morgan, and Citadel London-based partners have shifted their booked location to Milan, Geneva, or, increasingly, Dubai. Their families, in many cases, follow. The schools they used to fill in central London have noticed; admissions to the major preparatory schools fell, last September, by between 4 and 7 per cent, the largest single-year drop in living memory. The London restaurant scene, which depends on the £200-a-head business diner more than it likes to admit, is feeling the absence in real time.

I write this not in defence of any particular individual, but because the cumulative effect, and this is the part the Treasury repeatedly underestimates, is large, slow, and politically unmeasurable. There is no rally for the loss of a non-dom. There is no by-election that turns on it. There is, however, a slow grinding-down of London’s appeal as a global wealth hub, and that appeal, like the appeal of a great restaurant, is built up over decades and lost in a matter of years.

What does the Treasury say to all this? Privately, and I have asked, it says, broadly, two things. First, that the absolute number of non-doms is small. Second, that the headline revenue raised by the abolition was “in line with forecast”. Both of these things may be true. They are also irrelevant. The non-dom system was never, primarily, a source of direct revenue. It was a magnet. The charitable giving, the property purchases, the cultural patronage, the wealth-management industry that grew up around it, the hedge funds that anchored in London because of it — these were the second-order effects. They are the things you cannot put back together once you have decided, in a fit of theoretical even-handedness, to dismantle them.

There is, finally, a political point. Nigel Lawson once observed that the difficulty with tax policy is that revenue has consequences and consequences have lag. The current Chancellor will not be the one paying the bill for the loss of the non-dom regime. That bill will land, in 2028 or 2029, on the desk of someone else, who will inherit a London that has lost, quietly, a meaningful slice of its global gravity. There will be no headlines. There will only, slowly, be fewer people in the room.

Italy, by the way, will publish its end-of-year statistics on incoming high-net-worth residents in a few months. I would put a small wager, and I am a sober man, that it will set a record. We have, between us, given Rome the most expensive Brexit dividend it never asked for.

Read more:
The non-doms have packed their suitcases and the tax base is going with them

It is the morning of 6 April, the first day of the new British tax year, and I have spent the last hour staring at a payroll spreadsheet that has, by some entirely legal arithmetic, just deducted another £1,360 a month from the operating margin of our smallest subsidiary.

We have not hired anyone new. We have not given anyone a pay rise. We have not bought a new piece of kit. The state has, simply, in the manner of a particularly assiduous Italian waiter, returned to the table to refill our glass with a wine we did not order.

Welcome to the British New Tax Year. It is a bit like a New Year’s Eve party, if New Year’s Eve had been organised, in a hurry, by your accountant.

Let us tot up what has actually changed today, on a payroll for a fifteen-person company with an average salary of £42,000. Employer National Insurance, having gone up to 15 per cent in April 2025, has not gone down. The threshold remains depressed. That continues to cost the company, on present figures, around £19,500 a year more than it cost two years ago. The minimum wage has gone up another 4.6 per cent. The apprenticeship-levy contribution, despite the “Growth and Skills” rebrand, still bites at the same point. The dividend allowance, having been £5,000 a few years ago, sits this morning at £200, with the Chancellor briefing, quietly, that she would like, eventually, to abolish it. The capital gains rate on shares has crept up by another point.

The business-rates revaluation, in its glorious 2026 manifestation, has now landed properly. For our hospitality client in central Bristol, the bill has gone up by 19 per cent. For our small manufacturer in Wiltshire, by 7. The promised reform of the rates multiplier, which Labour campaigned on in 2024 and which has been kicked, gently and apologetically, down a series of consultations, has not, in fact, materialised.

Inheritance tax on agricultural and business property, which used to be a relatively quiet corner of the British tax code, has been narrowed in three successive moves under different headings. The cumulative effect is that a perfectly ordinary family business, turnover under £10 million, two locations, twelve people, is now, on its founder’s death, a tax event that consumes between 20 and 28 per cent of the going-concern value. There is no reasonable way to plan for this without setting up structures whose primary function is to mock the spirit of the legislation, which is what every reasonable person now does, and which is, again, why the country has the productivity figures it has.

I am, before this column slides into pure complaint, not unsympathetic to the bind every Chancellor faces. Demographic pressure is real. Defence procurement is large. Adult social care is unsolved. NHS productivity is, by international comparison, an embarrassment. There are, eventually, only so many places to find money. I get all that, and I have written it before in this magazine.

What I object to is the silent, year-on-year, ratchet-and-pawl character of the way British SMEs and middle-tier earners now experience tax. There is no rally. There is no raised voice. There is no front-page coverage. There is just, every April 6, another spreadsheet, another silent £19,500 here, another £4,200 there, and the polite Treasury press operation insisting that no “tax rate” has been raised. Technically true. Practically a fiction.

I would also note, for any future Chancellor reading: there are limits. Limits to what fifteen years of stealth tightening can be done to an SME sector before that sector reorganises itself in ways the Treasury does not enjoy. Limits to the number of family businesses that will pay another generation’s worth of inheritance tax before they sell to a Dutch trade buyer. Limits to the number of British software founders who will spin up their next venture in Wilmslow rather than Wilmington. Each year, the limit moves a bit closer.

What this morning has reminded me, on its first cup of coffee, is that we are now in the part of the British tax cycle where stealth is the policy and the policy is denial. We will pretend, in newspapers, that nothing has changed today. We will pretend, on the Treasury website, that the changes are minor. We will, in the supplementary OBR fiscal note, find a footnote on page 87 that says the cumulative incidence on the SME sector in this Parliament has been the largest in any Parliament since 1976. Nobody will read it. Nobody, apparently, in Whitehall has.

Happy New Tax Year. The boot, if you were wondering, has been lifted only to come down again. The Italian waiter is back. The bottle, you’ll notice, is no longer free.

Read more:
Happy New Tax Year: same kicking, slightly higher boot

I have a friend who runs a glassworks in Yorkshire, third-generation, family-owned, the kind of business that produces, for not much money, the small clear bottles that sit on the shelves of the most exclusive perfume houses in Paris.

I rang him last week to ask how trading was. He answered the phone with a single word, which I cannot repeat in this magazine, and then explained, in a tone I have heard once or twice before in my life, that he had spent the morning working out at what point in the calendar he was going to have to extinguish his furnaces.

Extinguishing a furnace, in case you have not had cause to think about this before, is approximately the worst thing that can happen to a glassworks. Once a furnace is cold, the lining cracks; once the lining cracks, you are looking at six months of rebuild before you can produce a single bottle. It is, in industrial terms, the equivalent of a cardiac arrest. And yet several British manufacturing furnaces, in glass, in ceramics, in chemicals, in steel, have either gone cold this winter or are, on the present trajectory, going to.

The reason, in a single number, is energy. British industrial users in 2026 pay, on average, £196 per megawatt-hour for electricity. American industrial users pay around £52. French industrial users, who, for reasons the Treasury has never quite articulated, get to dip into a heavily subsidised national nuclear baseload, pay £64. Our German competitors have been forced down to about £80 by a series of emergency measures that are now, awkwardly, being extended through 2028. The British manufacturer is, as ever, the outlier.

We dress the situation up as climate leadership. We are, the Treasury insists, “front-running” the decarbonisation curve. Our prices reflect a “mature market” for renewables. The carbon-pricing mechanism “sends the right signals”. Each of these phrases has a kind of grim Civil Service music to it, and each of them is wrong. Our industrial energy prices are not high because we are decarbonising. They are high because we are decarbonising badly: with no domestic gas backbone, no serious nuclear build-out, no functioning interconnector strategy, and a wholesale market design that prices everything at the marginal gas plant even when the marginal plant isn’t running.

Each of those flaws is fixable. None of them is being fixed. The Energy Department is consumed, instead, with consumer-facing slogans about heat pumps. Heat pumps are fine. They will not, on their own or together, save my Yorkshire friend’s glassworks.

The macro picture is the part that ought to alarm Whitehall. Britain has lost about 18 per cent of its manufacturing capacity in the last six years. We have lost the third of our cement we used to make. We have lost most of our flat glass. We have lost two of our remaining four virgin steel sites. We are about to lose, by my reckoning, the bulk of our specialty chemicals. Each of these closures is announced individually, with a flurry of regret from the local MP and a politely worded statement from the trade body, and each is folded back into a national narrative about the “transition”. There is no transition. There is a substitution. We are substituting the British factory for the foreign factory.

We are also substituting the British job. The 50,000 to 60,000 manufacturing jobs lost in this Parliament are not, despite the warm words about “green retraining”, being replaced. The retraining schemes I have looked at, in detail, produce, mostly, lower-paid work in lower-skilled service sectors. The wage premium of British manufacturing, the reason a Yorkshire glassworker, on his late shift, takes home meaningfully more than the supermarket logistics worker on his, is, slowly, being smoothed away. The country is about to discover, in another decade, what every economy that has lost its industrial base discovers: that the social fabric of the place where the factory used to be does not survive the smoothing.

What would actually save the situation? A formal industrial energy price cap, indexed to French levels, paid for in the short run by an explicit ring-fenced borrowing facility, on the basis that this is what every other major Western economy has done. A long-overdue sit-down with the Office for Nuclear Regulation about the absurd timescales for British small modular reactors, where we are, somehow, behind the Romanians. A serious carbon-border adjustment that doesn’t allow Chinese steel to continue arriving, untaxed, into a country whose own steelmakers are paying every conceivable carbon premium.

And, while we are at it, a public statement from this government, and any other that may follow it, that British manufacturing is not, contra the present mood music, a regrettable hangover from the Industrial Revolution. It is, in any country with a serious view of itself, a strategic asset. Switzerland thinks so. Germany thinks so. Japan thinks so. South Korea thinks so. The fact that Britain has somehow let itself be persuaded otherwise is the policy mistake of the decade.

My Yorkshire friend, by the way, has another six weeks. After that the furnaces, in the nicest possible way, go out. He will not, when they do, blame the planet. He will blame the country.

Read more:
British manufacturing is being electrocuted to death, and we are calling it net zero

There is a particular conversation I have been having, more often than I would like, with senior partners at the big professional-services firms.

It tends to take place at someone else’s book launch, over a reluctant glass of warm white, and it always begins with the partner saying something like: “Oh, well, you know, we’re thinking very seriously about graduate intake this year.” The verb is usually “rationalising”. The number is usually “down 30 per cent”. The reason is, increasingly, the same. They have, between us, decided that the work that used to be done by a 22-year-old can now be done, mostly, by a model.

Each of them, on their own, has a defensible case. The AI tools available in 2026 are, frankly, very good at the bottom end of professional work. They will do you a first draft of a memo, a first cut of a financial model, a first read of a contract, a first marketing plan, and they will do it in a fraction of the time. The marginal economics, for any partnership, are unanswerable. So the partners answer them: graduate hiring goes down, AI licence cost goes up, this year’s P&L looks fine.

Multiply that conversation by, say, the eighty largest firms in the country, and you arrive at a number that ought to send the Treasury into a cold sweat. We are looking, on present trajectory, at a 30 to 40 per cent reduction in graduate hiring across the British professional-services sector by 2027. That is not a soft trend; it is already in published intake numbers. And we are doing it, collectively, without a single board having sat down and asked the obvious question, which is: where, exactly, does the next generation of senior partners come from?

Because here is the problem nobody at that book-launch wanted to discuss. The work that AI is now doing for £14 a month, per seat, was the same work that, for fifty years, served as the apprenticeship for everyone now sitting in a corner office. You learned how to write a memo by writing memos. You learned how to model a deal by modelling deals. You learned how to read a contract by reading them, badly, and being shouted at by a senior associate who had once read them badly, themselves. The output of that labour was secondary; the labour was the training. Removing the labour, in other words, is not just a cost decision. It is a strategic decision about whether you wish, in fifteen years’ time, to have any senior people at all.

I am, generally, a fan of AI. I run businesses that have used it well. I think the people howling about a robot apocalypse are, mostly, the same people who in 1995 were howling about the death of the bookshop, and the bookshop is, surprisingly, still here. But I think we are about to make a serious, system-level mistake, and I think we are about to make it because every individual board has the wrong incentive set.

Consider the unintended consequences. The first wave of casualties will be the regional university, the working-class graduate, the first-in-family-to-go-to-uni who took on £60,000 of debt on the understanding that there was a job at the end of it. They are about to discover that the job has, quietly, been replaced. The second wave will be the firms themselves, who, in eight to ten years, will look around their partnership rooms and notice a hole, a missing year-cohort of mid-level associates, the people who would have been promoted, who weren’t hired in the first place. The third wave will be the British professional-services brand itself, which has spent fifty years exporting expertise globally and which depends, fundamentally, on a domestic conveyor belt of talent.

What would I do? Make AI use a tax-allowable expense if and only if a firm holds graduate hiring constant, in real terms, for the same year. The HMRC mechanism for this exists; it is the same one used for R&D credits. Tie the carrot of AI deductibility to the stick of graduate retention. Watch the numbers stabilise inside one fiscal year. It is not as elegant as letting the market decide; it is, however, what governments are supposed to do when an entire profession is in the middle of a coordination failure.

There is a wider point about Britain’s labour market here. We have spent fifteen years gently informing our young people that they should be “entrepreneurial”, by which we mostly mean we have no jobs for them. The next chapter of that story, in which AI eats the bottom rung of the few employed graduate ladders we still have, will be very ugly indeed. We are running out of ladders. And, contra the AI evangelists, the country still requires people with the experience of having climbed one.

I would put the Lincolnshire electrician of last week in a long-running argument with the Magic Circle partner of this week. Both, in their different ways, are watching the same thing. The British training system, for plumber and tax barrister alike, has, very quietly, started to break. The right time to fix it is now.

Read more:
AI is quietly making graduates redundant: we will regret this inside a decade

I had a frankly demoralising conversation last week with a man who runs a perfectly successful family-owned electrical contractor in Lincolnshire.

Forty-eight people, mostly men over forty, a fleet of vans, a yard that smells of warm copper. He wanted, he said, to take on three apprentices this year. Wanted, please note: he had the work, the mentors, the kit, the customer demand. He had abandoned the attempt by Christmas. The reason, in his own words, was that the system designed to deliver him three apprentices in 2026 has been built, at every level, by and for people who have never tried to use it.

And we wonder, in this country, why we have a skills shortage.

It is a year since Labour’s much-trailed “Growth and Skills” rebadging of the Apprenticeship Levy, in which the original Levy, itself only nine years old, was tweaked to allow, in principle, more flexibility in spend, more shorter courses, more so-called modular qualifications. The substance, on the ground, has been less than impressive. Some 53 per cent of all Levy spend in 2025-26 still went on “senior leader” and “level 7” qualifications, the apprenticeships-in-name-only that have for years allowed the big four accounting firms and the giant consultancies to dress up their normal MBA training as a cost to the public purse.

Meanwhile, the share of Levy spend going to under-19s, which is to say to actual school-leavers learning an actual trade, sits at less than 22 per cent. It was 50 per cent when the scheme launched in 2017. The trend is, mathematically and morally, in the wrong direction.

Why? Because the Levy, as designed, is a tax on the largest employers, who are also the most administratively sophisticated employers, who are therefore the most likely to capture the spend back through their own internal training departments by relabelling existing programmes as “apprenticeships”. It is a near-textbook example of what regulators call “capture”: the institution being regulated has more lawyers than the regulator, so the regulation eventually serves the institution. KPMG’s graduates have not, on close inspection, become better trained than they were before the Levy. They have merely become, on paper, “apprentices”, which is now a word with as much real-world purchase as “synergy”.

Down at the bottom of the pyramid, where my Lincolnshire electrician sits, the picture is the inverse. Small firms get nothing meaningful out of the Levy because they don’t pay it. The “co-investment” route, in which a small firm pays 5 per cent of training costs and the government 95 per cent, is, on paper, generous, but the funding bands are too narrow for the trades that need them most. An electrical apprentice costs about £21,000 to train properly over three years. The funding band sits at £15,000. The shortfall lands on the SME, in addition to all the time spent supervising, teaching, marking, signing off and chasing assessment paperwork.

Then there is the assessment apparatus. We have, between us, built a national vocational training infrastructure of such breath-taking complexity that even the people running it cannot tell you, with confidence, the difference between a Level 3, a Level 4, a Level 4 with end-point assessment and a Level 4 with “gateway”. There are seven separate categories of approved provider; there are sixteen categories of assessment organisation; there are over 600 standards in current use. My Lincolnshire friend abandoned the attempt to take on his three apprentices in mid-November, when he was forwarded an email from his local college informing him that his preferred end-point assessor had had its registration paused “pending revalidation”. Which assessor was paused, and why? You guessed.

Reform is not, in fact, complicated. The Tony Blair Institute, of all bodies, set most of it out in a report last summer. Cap the share of Levy spend that can go on Level 6 or above at 20 per cent, with the balance ring-fenced for under-25s. Widen the funding bands for trades. Strip out the tiered-assessor pantomime and revert to a single, simple, employer-led qualification gate per trade. Restore a meaningful share of decision-making to local economic partnerships, which know who is hiring what.

None of this is foreign. We had something approximating this, broadly, between 1964 and 1981, under the Industrial Training Boards. We threw it away in the early Thatcher years on perfectly defensible ideological grounds, replaced it with nothing for two decades, then panicked back into the present hash. The most painful thing about the apprenticeship debate in Britain is the realisation that, every twenty years or so, we re-invent the same wheel and put it on a wonkier axle.

If Labour is serious, and the rebrand suggests, at the very least, that it would like to be, it has six months to land a real reform. The Lincolnshire electrician who would otherwise be doing useful national work training three teenagers is, frankly, watching. So am I.

Read more:
The Apprenticeship Levy is broken, and the ‘Growth and Skills’ rebrand won’t mend it

There is a particular look on a Chancellor’s face, in the closing minutes of a Spring Statement, that you only really see if you have watched a few.

It is the look of a person who has just got away with something. The eyes drift up; the shoulders drop; the back of the dispatch box gets a little lean-back; the well-rehearsed peroration about working people and stability and growth is delivered with the slightly distracted air of a person already rewinding for the live interviews on the College Green. We saw that look yesterday. It told you everything you needed to know.

Because here is what Rachel Reeves did not announce.

She did not announce a real cut to business rates for hospitality. She did not announce an end to the gradual erosion of inheritance tax relief on family business and farms, which has now been quietly tightened in three successive fiscal events under different titles. She did not announce a freeze on employer National Insurance, despite a year of pleading from every employers’ body in the country. She did not produce the long-promised reform of the apprenticeship levy. She did not, despite frantic pre-briefing about a “Cities of Growth” initiative, deliver anything to the medium-sized industrial heartland between Hull and Stoke that the country has been begging her to address.

She did do the following. She nudged the dividend allowance down, again, by a hundred pounds. She produced an additional bond issuance for the British Business Bank with a tag of £400 million, much of which will, on past form, end up subsidising tier-one consultancies operating as “delivery partners”. She extended Making Tax Digital to landlords below the £30,000 threshold, which will, by the OBR’s own number, raise £85 million while costing the affected SMEs about £350 million in compliance fees. She announced a new tax-incentivised vehicle for private-credit funds to invest in “regional infrastructure”, which, deciphered, means London and the South-East with a press release.

This was not a Spring Statement. It was an interest payment, in the currency of British political theatre, on a debt the Chancellor knows she will have to roll over again in the autumn. The “markets”, that great anonymous chorus before whom we all curtsey now, will give her a brief golf clap, gilts will hold steady, the Office for Budget Responsibility will publish a polite forecast, and the country will be back in this same chair in November.

What infuriates me, frankly, is the missed opportunity. The Chancellor had, in front of her, three measures any of which would have cost less than the Whitehall press operation already spends on her itinerary, and which would have changed the temperature of British business meaningfully. A single per-cent cut to employer NIC for firms below £10m turnover. A statutory commitment that no further changes to entrepreneurs’ relief or BPR would happen this Parliament. A 12.5 per cent VAT band for hospitality, paid for by removing the capital allowance on warehouse build-out. None of these things were taken. None of them were even seriously considered, on the evidence of the Treasury Red Book.

Why? Because Rachel Reeves, like every Chancellor who came before her, has discovered that the path of least resistance through any fiscal event is to find a fresh set of pockets in the upper-middle of the British economy and pat them down for change. Small landlords. Mid-sized employers. Family farms. Family pubs. The classic profile is unmistakeable: high enough to have something worth taking, fragmented enough not to organise, busy enough not to march. There are no rallies in Parliament Square for a £4,200 NIC bill. There ought to be.

I do not, before this column slips into pure complaint, suggest that the Chancellor’s constraints are imaginary. They are real. Borrowing costs are real. The bond markets are real. Demographics are real. Adult social care is real. Defence procurement is real, and large. I am not asking her to perform a magic trick. I am asking her to stop performing a different magic trick, the one where she pulls another £1.5 billion of revenue out of the SME hat each March without anyone noticing, and to begin actually framing fiscal policy around the question of how Britain produces the growth it requires.

Because if she carries on like this, the answer to that question becomes painfully simple. Britain doesn’t. It is produced for us, somewhere else, by economies which are, by accident of policy, more friendly to those who try to make things work.

We are not, I promise the Chancellor, an inexhaustible resource. There is a limit, even to British forbearance. Yesterday, in the gap between her sit-down and the Speaker’s standing-up, we got a glimpse of it.

Read more:
After the Spring Statement, Britain’s businesses know exactly what to expect: nothing

I write this on the eve of another Spring Statement and the great British SME, which is the part of the economy I happen to know, has the look of a man who has already been through Customs twice and is being asked to step into the side room.

There has been, somewhere along the way, a quiet consensus that this is not going to be the “fiscal event” the Treasury keeps insisting it is not. There has, equally quietly, been a consensus that, regardless of what they call it, we are going to be paying for it.

Let us take a moment, therefore, to lay out the road we already know we are on. Employer National Insurance contributions went up to 15 per cent in April last year. The threshold at which it kicked in fell to £5,000. The annual cost to the median ten-person SME, by our own modelling at Trends Research, runs to about £19,500. Business rates have been re-valued for 2026; the multiplier reform Labour promised in opposition has not, despite warm words, materialised. Capital gains tax has crept up. Inheritance tax on agricultural and business property has been narrowed. Pension contributions for higher earners have been clawed at. Energy subsidies for industrial users, which were the only thing keeping a third of British manufacturing on its feet in 2024, have been quietly withdrawn.

Against that backdrop, Rachel Reeves walks into the Commons next week with a set of fiscal headroom figures that have, in every Office for Budget Responsibility exercise this year, shrunk and not grown. She has, on present numbers, somewhere between £8 billion and £12 billion of room before her own self-imposed rule kicks in, and the gilt market, which, if we are being honest, is the only Whip in this Parliament with actual votes — is watching her pencil with intense suspicion.

The temptation, as ever, will be to find another revenue line. The Treasury, like all Treasuries, has a list of these as long as your arm. A small tweak to dividend taxation. Another fiddle on entrepreneur relief. A “temporary” levy on stamp duty for commercial property. A fresh sparkle of HMRC investigatory zeal aimed at the family-owned business and the self-employed. None of these moves will make headlines. All of them will, taken together, do meaningful damage.

What I would ask, if I had ninety seconds with the Chancellor and a strong cup of coffee, is this. First, no new taxes, at all, on the firms turning over below £10 million. We are the part of the economy that hires when others freeze. Tax is the wrong instrument for the wrong patient. Second, a serious rebalancing of business rates, with a full-fat hospitality and high-street multiplier cut paid for, in the medium term, by extending rates to the warehouse and logistics estate that has so far skated free. Third, a five-year freeze on tinkering with the EIS, the SEIS, and entrepreneurs’ relief, because what UK risk capital needs more than anything is the boring, unsexy gift of stability.

Fourth, and most importantly, Chancellor, if you really want to move a needle on growth, give me a serious skills package built around real apprenticeships and not the consultancy-flavoured “leadership levy” we currently endure. The British SME does not need another tax break. It needs a 19-year-old who can wire a junction box and turn up on time. The training infrastructure to deliver that died, slowly, between 1998 and 2018, and the country has been quietly paying for its absence ever since.

The grim Westminster smart money expects, instead, a “narrative event”. Another fiddle with the fuel duty escalator. Another £500m for some shop-window programme, ideally with a name that ends in -hub. Another speech about the “foundations of growth” which will be exhumed, like the foundations of an abandoned new town, by the next administration in due course.

I would love, on this particular Wednesday, to be wrong. I would love the Chancellor to walk out of Number 11 with a serious, unflashy, business-friendly Statement that puts a stable hand on the tiller and makes the first long-overdue gesture of trust in the firms that actually employ people in this country. There is a version of Rachel Reeves who could do that, and I would, in this column, be the first to say so.

But the begging bowl, on present trajectory, is already on the move. The British SME has heard the front door open. We are bracing. And, increasingly, we are looking at the back of the timetable for the late train to Lisbon.

Read more:
Reeves’s Spring Statement: brace yourselves, the begging bowl is on its way round again

It is International Women’s Day, and my LinkedIn feed has the look of a small market town in Provence: lavender, pastel, and a great deal of self-congratulation.

There are sponsored breakfasts. There are sponsored panels. There are sponsored lanyards. And tomorrow, when the bunting comes down, we will go back to a country in which female-founded UK companies receive, depending on whose research you trust, somewhere between 1 and 3 per cent of all venture capital deployed.

I have, in the kindest possible way, had enough.

I do not, before any of the obvious counter-thrusts, doubt that the panels are well-meant. I know many of the women on them, and most of the men. I have spoken on a few of them myself, including one breakfast in 2019 which was so corporately catered that the smoked salmon was on a kind of pastel-pink mousse, and which produced, as far as I can establish, no detectable change in any UK funding statistic.

The problem is not that we are talking about female entrepreneurship. The problem is that we have managed to construct a thriving industry, events, books, breakfast sessions, Instagram accounts, chief diversity officers, podcasts, which exists primarily to discuss the fact that women do not get capital, while doing nothing in particular to change the fact that women do not get capital. The discussion has become the policy. And the policy, by every measure available to me, is failing.

Consider the figures. Of UK venture capital deployed in 2025, around 1.8 per cent went to all-female-founded teams. About 8 per cent went to mixed teams. The rest went to all-male teams. This is consistent with 2024, with 2023, with 2022, and indeed with most of the years going back to the founding of the British Venture Capital Association. None of the stickered Pride-of-Britain campaigns and IWD campaigns and 30%-Club campaigns have moved this number meaningfully in a decade.

Why? Because the cheque book is not on a panel. The cheque book sits in 22 firms, mostly within an Underground stop of Old Street, almost exclusively staffed by men in their thirties and forties, who, like all human beings, write cheques most easily for people who remind them of themselves. This is not, before anyone reaches for their lawyer, an accusation of malice. It is an observation about pattern recognition, which is what venture capital is. And until the people doing the pattern recognition look different, the patterns recognised will look the same.

What would actually move the dial, then, beyond the lanyards? First: get the British Business Bank, which is the largest single investor in UK venture capital, to write into its limited partner agreements a hard requirement on capital deployed to female-led teams, with a real reporting and clawback mechanism. The Bank already screens for ESG. It can screen for this. Second: widen the EIS scheme to give a higher relief rate, say 35 per cent rather than 30, for investments into female-led companies. Money moves; pre-seed capital follows tax incentives like a Labrador follows ham.

Third, and this is the one nobody in this debate ever wants to talk about, recognise that a meaningful share of the gender capital gap is in fact a maternity capital gap. Female founders raise less because, on the evidence, they are penalised for the years 30 to 40 in a way their male counterparts are not. A statutory founder maternity allowance, paid out of a small levy on EIS, would do more for female enterprise than ten years of pancake breakfasts. It would also, by the way, be cheap. We could fund it from the Treasury’s underspend on the dormant assets scheme alone.

I write all this not as a heroic ally, heroes are exhausting, but as a serial investor who has watched too many gifted women take their cap table abroad because the British funding stack made them feel like a marketing exercise rather than a portfolio company. We will not fix this with another lavender panel. We will fix it with cheques.

Happy International Women’s Day. Now: who in this room is signing one?

Read more:
International Women’s Day: spare us the lanyards and look at who’s actually got the cheque book

I was in a pub in Marylebone last Wednesday, a perfectly civilised, low-ceilinged, slightly damp London pub of the kind that ought to be impossible to ruin, and I watched a couple in their late thirties order, in entirely sober earnestness, two mocktails and a small bowl of edamame.

The man asked, with a straight face, whether the lime cordial was “refined sugar free”. The barman, a Pole called Marek who is approximately my age and certainly more dignified, did the thing with his eyes that hospitality professionals do when they are deciding whether to keep the lease or burn the place down. Marek, if you’re reading: I voted burn.

We have arrived, as a culture, at the apparent consensus that drinking less is uncomplicatedly good. I am not, despite the byline, going to argue otherwise. I have lived, all my life, in a country with a complicated relationship to alcohol, and the evidence on liver disease, on domestic harm, on the working week, is what it is. Drink less, by all means. Drink better, even better. But would somebody, please, sit down with the Treasury, the Department of Health and Social Care and the Centre for Social Justice, and explain to them that the British pub, the actual building, the actual job, the actual community, has been the quiet collateral damage of this turn, and that this matters?

The numbers tell the story. Trade in our hospitality clients drops by close to 18 per cent during Dry January. It drops again by another 7 to 9 per cent in Lent, in Lent, in 2026, in a country where most people couldn’t name three of the Apostles. Sober October, in slightly tongue-in-cheek alliance with Stoptober, dings the year by another four. Add in the steady ambient drift towards low-and-no, and the modern publican is running a business in which one in every four months is structurally worse than the same month a decade ago.

I am, again, not blaming the trend. I am asking what we propose to do about the building.

Because here is the thing about the British pub: it is not a vehicle for selling drinks. It is, despite our refusal to acknowledge it, the principal piece of social infrastructure in much of the country. There are 8,000 villages in England and Wales without a shop. There are 4,000 villages without a primary school. There are still, for now, 22,000 with a pub. The pub is where Cubs AGMs happen, where wakes are organised, where young men whose mothers are worrying about them sit on a Sunday afternoon in chair facing the door. It is a building Britain has, almost by accident, decided also to use as a bar.

Treat it as infrastructure and the policy debate changes. We don’t ask Network Rail to fund itself entirely from ticket sales. We don’t ask GP surgeries to break even on prescriptions. We accept, in the case of railways and clinics, that there is a public-good element to the institution beyond what its private business model can capture. The pub has the same character. It deserves the same imagination.

Concretely: a hospitality VAT cut to 12.5 per cent, which would funnel almost directly to the food side of the wet-led pub. A community-pub multiplier on business rates that recognises a difference between a rural free house and a Premier Inn carvery. A statutory presumption against “asset of community value” pub conversions to flats, with the burden of proof reversed, on the developer. And, while we are at it, a serious conversation about the alcohol duty escalator, which, in its present form, is taxing the pint at a rate that nudges yet another drinker towards the supermarket.

The wellness lobby, who I have learned not to take on lightly, will tell me that lower drinking is straightforwardly good and that the death of the pub is a price worth paying. The doctors’ groups will be in the same camp. I would gently observe that the same argument was used for the closure of the cinemas in the 1960s, the bingo halls in the 1980s and the high streets in the 2010s. We are slow learners, in this country, about what we lose when we lose the rooms.

Sober October is a fine campaign. Dry January is healthy and worthy. Lent is, I gather, theologically defensible. None of these things should sit at the foot of a long-term public policy that hollows out the actual building. The mocktail is not the future of British community life. The mocktail is, on the present trajectory, what comes between us and it.

And yes, I bought Marek a drink. He wouldn’t have one. He’s on day eleven.

Read more:
Lent, Dry January, Sober October: when did the British pub become collateral damage in the wellness wars?

I had a coffee last week with a woman who runs a small specialist engineering firm in the Black Country. She has 14 staff, an order book that runs into the autumn, and a fridge full of unpaid invoices from a household-name aerospace contractor.

The total, when she totted it up on the back of a Pret napkin, came to £197,000. None of it overdue by a few days. All of it overdue by between 60 and 110 days, against contracted 30. She had already, that morning, told two suppliers she would have to pay them later than agreed. The cascade has a name: it is called late payment, and it is the slow-motion mugging of British small business.

We have been talking about this for as long as I can remember writing about business in this country. Every government in turn produces a Prompt Payment Code, a Small Business Commissioner, an Annual Report on Payment Practices, and an op-ed by a minister congratulating themselves on having done something. And every year I sit down with another version of the same engineer, with the same fridge, and the same napkin. Nothing changes.

It does not change because the incentives, as ever, do not change. A FTSE buyer has every reason in the world to push its payable days out, and almost no reason at all to bring them in. Their finance director gets a bonus for working capital. Their procurement team gets a sticker for “supplier consolidation”. The small firm at the other end of the contract, meanwhile, gets a dunning email from HMRC about its VAT liability, regardless of whether the cash has actually arrived.

I have been an evangelist for the Prompt Payment Code, since it was discussed when I had the ear, of the then, Prime Minister David Cameron, but let’s be honest: it has the legal force of a strongly worded letter from your tennis club. Suspension is an embarrassment, not a sanction. A FTSE 250 board does not lose sleep over its prompt-payment ranking the way it does about, say, an SEC filing. Until late payment becomes a board-level personal exposure for company directors, the practice will continue, because the practice is profitable.

So make it personal. The single reform I would put in front of the Chancellor, and I will, should I ever meet Rachel Reeves, is statutory interest at the Bank Rate plus four, accruing automatically, with directors of large companies personally liable for any payable overdue by more than 60 days twice in any 12 months. Not the company. The directors. Watch your payable days improve in a week.

I would also, while we are at it, force every company over £100m of turnover to publish a real-time live dashboard of average days to pay, with the contracted rate, the actual rate, and the names of the buyers responsible. Not an annual PDF buried at the bottom of an investor relations page. A living, breathing public number, refreshed nightly, like a football score. There is nothing a procurement director hates more than visibility.

There will be the usual howling from the British Chambers of Commerce-via-CFO lobby, saying that all this will simply push pricing onto small suppliers, raising costs for buyers and consumers. To which the answer is: yes, marginally, and that is correct. Britain has under-priced its small suppliers for two decades by allowing big buyers to use them as an unsecured credit line. Re-pricing late payment is the correction, not the problem.

And the macro effect, if anyone is still listening over the noise of another City lunch, is enormous. Federation of Small Business estimates suggest late payment kills around 50,000 UK firms a year. Fifty thousand. That is more than were killed during the worst of the pandemic. Every single one of those firms had jobs, taxes paid, customers served, premises rented and apprenticeships started. We talk endlessly about a missing tier of mid-market British companies; here, in late payment, is one of the biggest single reasons we don’t have one.

Back in my Black Country engineer’s fridge, the £197,000 will, eventually, arrive. It will arrive on day 117, because a supplier-finance scheme has been waved at her by a polite man from a London bank, charging her three per cent of the face value to settle early on her own invoice. So the contractor pays late, the bank takes a clip, and she takes the haircut. That is, in a sentence, the British small-business economy in 2026.

Late payment is a quiet pandemic. The next Chancellor’s budget could end it in an afternoon. I am no longer holding my breath; but I am, very loudly, holding the napkin.

Read more:
Late payment is Britain’s quiet pandemic, and SMEs are still being told to take it on the chin

There is a particular kind of Friday-afternoon dread reserved for British company directors in 2026, and it goes like this. You sit down to do something blameless, file a confirmation statement, add your new finance director, change the registered address, and Companies House, in its infinite wisdom, asks you to “verify your identity”.

Forty-five minutes later you have uploaded a passport, a driving licence, a recent utility bill and a selfie that looks suspiciously like a hostage proof-of-life, only to be told, at the end of it, that the system “could not match” your face to your photograph and to “try again later”.

Try again later! This is not the DVLA renewing a moped licence. This is the central registry of the world’s fifth-largest economy.

I have lost count of the SMEs I know that are now several months behind on perfectly innocuous filings simply because some founder, usually one with two passports, a name with a hyphen or an unfortunate haircut in 2014, cannot get past the verification gate. The Treasury and the Department for Business will tell you that this is the price we pay for a cleaner register, and that the previous regime allowed shell companies to be set up by anyone with a laptop and a sense of humour. They are right about that. They are wrong about almost everything they have done in response.

Identity verification at Companies House should have been the opposite of what we have got. It should have been near-frictionless for the 99 per cent of directors whose passport, address and bank account already exist as a matched set somewhere in HMRC’s files, and forensic for the 1 per cent who present anomalies. Instead we got the photocopier-shop equivalent of a Soviet checkpoint, designed by a committee that has clearly never tried to use it on a phone in poor light with a teething toddler on its lap.

I am not, I should say, soft on company fraud. The phoenixing brigade, limited company, limited liability, limited shame, have done genuine damage to British creditors for decades, and the appearance of registered addresses at the back of a fried-chicken shop in Croydon was overdue for a tidy. But the fraudsters know what they are doing. They have hired the agents. They have the documents. They are not the ones quietly going non-compliant in Cheltenham because Mum’s passport doesn’t scan in evening light.

The wider issue is that Companies House has become symptomatic. Every time the UK state encounters a problem of trust, its instinct is now to push the cost of solving it down to the smallest economic units in the country. HMRC does this with Making Tax Digital. The Home Office does it with right-to-work checks. The pension regulator does it with auto-enrolment. The collective effect, on a small business, is that you spend an ever larger slice of your week being a junior compliance officer for somebody else’s policy ambitions.

And the cost is not trivial. Our own back-of-the-envelope estimate at Trends Research is that the average UK SME now spends 14 hours a week, fourteen, on regulatory administration that produces no output, no customer satisfaction, no employee training. A team of ten loses a person and a half. That is, mathematically, why productivity in this country has flat-lined.

What would I do? First, build a proper digital identity rail in this country, so that the same verification works for HMRC, Companies House, the DVLA and your bank. The Estonians did this in 2002. Second, presume innocence: most directors are who they say they are, and the system should treat them that way until something looks off. Third, give Companies House actual investigatory powers, and the staff to use them, to chase the genuine fraudsters, rather than penalising the easy targets who are already on the register.

I would also, while I am at it, suggest that the people who design these processes be required to use them. Spend a Saturday morning trying to verify your own identity on a six-year-old Android while supervising a teenager’s GCSE coursework. You will, I promise, redesign the form by Sunday lunchtime.

Until then, my own confirmation statement sits unsigned, my finance director is locked out of his own filings, and the country goes on talking about a productivity puzzle that is not, in fact, very puzzling at all.

Read more:
Companies House has turned every UK director into a passport-juggling pen-pusher

Let’s get something straight right at the outset: The idea of banning working from home is not merely daft, not a bit ill-advised, but a spectacular, full-on intellectual car crash wearing a stupid hat.

And the fact that this notion is being flirted with seriously in political circles tells you everything you need to know about how out of touch this country’s Westminster bubble has become.

If you’ve been reading my scribblings on this subject for the last decade, such as Why forcing a return to the office is a step backwards for business and Bodies, bums, cost money, can you go virtual, then you’ll know I’ve not exactly been shy about waving the flag for flexibility. I’ve argued that work isn’t a location; it’s a thing you do. Deadlines don’t care about Tube strikes. Creativity doesn’t flourish because you’ve got a corner desk with a view of Canary Wharf. Pencils don’t write better in the City.

And yet here we are, in 2026, watching the same fossils who championed touchdown desks as if they were a breakthrough in human civilisation roll out the same old chestnuts about presenteeism, ‘office culture’, and “We have to see people at their desks!” — as if productivity is directly proportional to proximity to a swivel chair.

What makes this iteration of absurdity particularly galling is the political context. The current political mood music suggests that Nigel Farage could well be the next Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Now, I am not here to start a partisan fracas, but I am here to call out nonsense wherever it crops up, regardless of which side of the aisle it’s draped in. And when someone positioned to lead the country describes working from home as something to ban, you have to wonder whether they’ve ever, you know, worked.

If your understanding of remote working is limited to the fleeting glimpse you get when the BBC cuts to a home office with a bobble-head on a shelf, then yes, you might think working from home is an indulgence. A luxury. A mild form of leisure. But as anyone who has actually managed teams through screens, as I wrote in Managing your team through a small screen, will tell you, there’s nothing remotely relaxed about aligning global calendars, coaching through glitches, wiring up video calls while your dog thinks he’s invited, and delivering outcomes that matter.

One of the clearest articulations I’ve read on this came from Mark Dixon, founder of Regus, yes, the flexible workspace titan with a vested interest in desks existing everywhere, and yet unambiguously clear that banning remote working is idiotic. His comments, in an interview with The Times, pierced the usual fog of clichés: flexibility is not the enemy of collaboration; it is its enabler. People don’t want to be forced back into a dungeon of desks five days a week; they want meaningful connection on their terms. If that means meeting in person for ideation and spending the rest of the week where they can function best, then great. If it means satellite offices closer to where people live, brilliant. But banning WFH altogether? Only someone with a pathological affection for sepia-tinted office fantasies could back that.

Let’s unpack why this matters beyond the tedium of managerial turf wars, and to put my bona fides out there on this topic Capital Business Media – owners of Business Matters – has doubled turnover  in three years with not a single staff member being in the same ‘office’ as their colleagues.

First: productivity. The best evidence we have, from countless businesses large and small, is that output does not collapse when people work from home. The idea that remote work is synonymous with loafing is a myth lazy commentators cling to because it’s a convenient continuation of their own nostalgia for commutes on Tube trains smelling faintly of regret.

Second: talent. The modern workforce is not static; it does not orbit offices like electrons around a corporate nucleus. People prioritise flexibility, and talent migrates to where they find it. Companies that cling to “You must be here 9–5, no exceptions” do not become magnets for the best people; they become boarding houses for the most compliant. If banning WFH becomes legislation, businesses will reward political interference with a choice: move work abroad, automate it, or collapse under its own inertia.

Third: the economy. There’s a pernicious assumption among some policymakers that an office full of bodies equals economic vitality. But let’s be honest, the office economy is a facade propped up by overpriced coffee, sandwich chains with dubious pension plans, and pastry carts wheeled out of a desire to feel busier than we are. Real economic value is created by effective, sustainable work, whether it’s done in a studio in Sussex, a flat in Glasgow, or an airport lounge in Zurich during a layover.

Far from being a quaint perk, remote working is an economic force multiplier. It reduces carbon emissions from commuting, diminishes pressure on housing markets in overheated urban centres, and spreads spending power geographically. It’s not a threat to society; it’s an evolution of it.

So let’s be clear: banning WFH isn’t just about where people sit. It’s about control. It’s about a cultural insistence on seeing busyness as virtue rather than effectiveness. It’s about politicians pining for a world they half-remember through the filmy lens of “office culture” brochures from the early 2000s.

My suggestion? If anyone seriously proposes a ban on working from home, we should ask them this: “Have you ever delivered an entire quarterly business review over Zoom? Have you ever coordinated a multinational project without once stepping foot in an office? Have you ever actually assessed work by outcomes rather than appearances?”

Until they can answer yes, I’d be wary of taking their advice on the future of work seriously.

Because whatever happens next in Westminster, let’s not consign the world of work to a bunker called an office. That’s not progress. That’s nostalgia dressed up as policy. And in an era when adaptability is a competitive advantage, banning working from home isn’t just backward-looking, it’s lunacy.

Read more:
Banning WFH is lunacy, and the politicians out of touch enough to mandate it are too

I’ve been fortunate enough to walk the cavernous halls of a fair few of the world’s biggest trade shows in Las Vegas, they promised, and delivered, staggering innovation and energy.

Days of relentless discovery: robots pouring cappuccinos, AI so intuitive it seemed clairvoyant, and founders who spoke about change not as a cliché but as a lived reality. These were not just exhibitions; they were global marketplaces for ideas, capital and partnerships.

Yet back home, while Britain idles in Westminster’s fog of distracted policymaking, our competitors across Europe are not just showing up, they’re outshining us.

This year, Gary Shapiro, chief executive of the Consumer Technology Association, the people behind CES, the annual technology conference held this week annually in Vegas, publicly criticised the UK government for lacking meaningful support for British businesses at the world’s most influential tech stage. His indictment is stark: the UK’s presence at the event is “spotty” and underwhelming compared with countries such as France and the Netherlands. Meanwhile, those nations send senior ministers, in some cases even royalty, and generously fund coordinated national pavilions for their firms.

Before we mince words about patriotism and global ambition, let’s be clear: this isn’t some petty squabble over flags and PR stunts. Trade shows like CES are strategic platforms where deals are forged, investment flows are unlocked, and international credibility is forged. It is precisely where the future gets bought, sold and broadcast.

And yet, Britain, despite having one of the world’s most dynamic tech sectors, is looking increasingly like an afterthought.

Consider the facts: French exhibitors now outnumber British ones; Germany and the Netherlands field strong contingents; even some smaller European states pack more visible, government-backed stands. The UK’s Tradeshow Access Programme, once a modest but valuable grant scheme for SMEs, was scrapped in 2021 and, despite repeated pleas from industry, has not been restored.

I have witnessed first-hand the pride and purpose with which other nations approach these events. The French pavilion, sleek, well funded and staffed with government representatives, felt like a declaration of strategic intent. British exhibitors, by contrast, often seemed to be fending for themselves, clutching their pitch decks and hoping for serendipity rather than being buoyed by a coordinated national effort.

There’s something faintly absurd about this situation. Post-Brexit, our leaders have consistently proclaimed a desire to “go global”, to boost exports, attract investment, and elevate the UK’s role on the world stage. Yet when the most visible arena for that ambition rolls into Las Vegas, one where 100,000 visitors convene and thousands of international companies exhibit emerging technologies, we treat it as an optional extra rather than a priority.

True, the government points to its Industrial Strategy and Small Business Plan as evidence of support for scaling firms globally. But warm words on paper are cold comfort on the exhibition floor. In contrast, targeted financial support and senior government engagement send a clear signal that Britain not only values innovation, but backs it when the stakes are highest.

You need only speak to the founders who travelled thousands of miles from the UK, many self-funding their trips, to hear a consistent refrain: without coordinated help, British firms are underexposed and under-networked. One CEO told me he felt “overshadowed” by a neighbouring European country’s pavilion that looked and felt like a national investment. Another confessed that, had it not been for private backing, they might not have made the trip at all.

This should trouble us. The future of British business growth is not solely in domestic policy tinkering, it is in international trade, collaboration and visibility. Trade shows are not merely exhibitions; they are signposts for global relevance. When your government isn’t present in a meaningful way, the world notices — and so do investors, partners and international customers.

Let’s not construe this as an attack on civil servants or ministers. The truth is simpler: the UK is juggling competing priorities, cost of living, health services, geopolitics, and a multi-billion trade show in Nevada can seem indulgent by comparison. But that is precisely the point. Innovation and global business growth cannot be an afterthought if we are to compete with economies that deliberately align industrial strategy with outward-facing support.

Last year I was talking to a French startup founder, and I asked what her government’s presence meant to her, she smiled and said: “It means someone believes in our success before we prove it.” That sort of confidence matters. It turns heads, opens doors and scales businesses in ways that a sterling-denominated press release never will.

Britain has all the ingredients to be a leader: world-class universities with their numerous spin-offs, inventive entrepreneurs, and a time zone that bridges East and West. But without visible, tactical governmental support at flagship global events, we risk these assets being underestimated or, worse, overlooked.

If the UK truly aspires to be a global tech and trade powerhouse, then it must treat trade shows like CES as what they are: frontline diplomatic and economic missions.
Because if we aren’t prepared to support our businesses on the world’s biggest stages, we shouldn’t be surprised when others step into the spotlight, and we’re left in the auditorium seats, polite but absent.

Read more:
Why Britain’s world stage presence deserves more than lip service

There’s a particular sound that stays with you once you’ve lived in the English countryside. Not birdsong, that’s too obvious, but the deeper rhythm of things: the tractor coughing into life at dawn, Chameau boots crunching on gravel, the hooves of the horses going out for a hack, the soft murmur of a village pub where everyone knows exactly why you’re there even if they’ve never seen you before.

I had a house in rural Northamptonshire once. Not a fantasy “weekend retreat”, but a place where life actually happened. One evening, over a pint of ‘landlord’ and slightly judgemental, the village gamekeeper offered to teach me how to shoot. “You get good enough,” he said, “and maybe you can join us on a day at the estate.”

A few sessions at the clays with a beautiful Purdey side-by-side and I was hooked, not just on hitting the target – which I am told my hit rate was very impressive – but on the world around it. The quiet discipline. The sense of responsibility. The unspoken understanding that this was not about bloodlust or bravado, but stewardship. About knowing the land, respecting it, and earning your place within it.

Which is why, as 2025 limps to a close, I find myself deeply uneasy about the future of Britain’s rural economy, and the way of life bound up in it.

We’ve been told, repeatedly, that concerns about farming, shooting, gamekeeping and rural business are either nostalgic indulgences or political dog whistles. Watch a few episodes of Clarkson’s Farm and tell me that again with a straight face. Strip away the jokes and celebrity sheen and what you’re left with is a documentary about a sector living permanently on the brink,  one failed harvest, one policy tweak, one cost spike away from collapse.

That brinkmanship became painfully clear this year when the government set its sights on agricultural inheritance tax relief. What began as a plan to end long-standing protections for family farms triggered outrage across rural Britain. As reported by the Financial Times, the subsequent retreat, raising thresholds and softening the blow, was presented as a compromise. But uncertainty, once introduced, doesn’t politely leave again. It lingers. It freezes investment. It accelerates exits.

Family farms are not tax shelters. They are capital-intensive, low-margin, generational businesses whose value is tied up in land rather than liquidity. Treating them like dormant wealth piles rather than working enterprises is how you dismantle a sector quietly, without ever admitting you meant to.

And it’s not just farmers feeling the squeeze. Gamekeeping, shooting and countryside management support tens of thousands of jobs and underpin rural tourism, hospitality and supply chains. A stark warning was sounded recently in The Telegraph’s analysis of the decline of gamekeeping, which laid bare how rising costs, regulation and political hostility are pushing skilled rural workers out altogether.

This isn’t culture war fluff. It’s economics.

Add to that the sense, increasingly hard to shake, that rural Britain is culturally misunderstood by those writing policy. Labour’s proposals around animal welfare and trail hunting have reignited fears that legislation is being shaped through an urban moral lens, with The Guardian reporting warnings from countryside groups that rural voices are being marginalised rather than engaged.

Meanwhile, the data tells its own grim story. Farm closures continue to outpace new starts, with thousands of holdings disappearing under the weight of rising costs, labour shortages and unpredictable returns, as highlighted by FarmingUK. When a farm goes, it rarely goes alone. The contractor loses work. The feed supplier closes. The pub shortens its hours. The village hollows out.

What worries me most is that this erosion is happening quietly, politely, without the drama that usually forces political reckoning. There’s no single villain. No obvious cliff edge. Just a steady draining away of viability until one day we look around and wonder where everyone went.

The countryside isn’t a theme park or a television backdrop. It’s an economic ecosystem that feeds us, employs us and anchors communities. Once it’s gone, you don’t rebuild it with grants and slogans.

I learnt to shoot because a gamekeeper trusted me with his craft. That trust, between land and people, tradition and modernity, economy and culture, is what’s really under threat. If policymakers keep treating rural Britain as a sentimental inconvenience rather than a strategic asset, they may wake up one day to find the countryside still looks beautiful… but no longer works. And that, unlike a missed clay, is a mistake you don’t get to take another shot at.

Read more:
I worry for our rural economy – and yes, it’s personal

Let’s be absolutely candid: the siren song of easing off climate commitments is tempting the corporate class and it stinks.

If 2025 was indeed the year business quietly began retreating from net zero, watering down pledges or scrapping them outright, then 2026 must be the year UK firms rediscover backbone and purpose. After all, the alternative isn’t merely inconvenient; it is recklessly self-defeating.

The Guardian’s recent investigation suggests that, from retailers to banks, carmakers to councils, pledges once trumpeted from press release rooftops are being softened or shelved. The rhetoric of carbon-neutral economies now reads, all too often, like a relic of corporate virtue signalling rather than a serious business strategy.

Yet here’s the part no executive memo seems to state with enough clarity: net zero isn’t a fad. It is the defining economic transformation of our era, as seismic as electrification or the internet. Treat it as a mere box-ticking exercise and you will wake up in a world where markets and reputations have passed you by.

Let’s dismantle the fearmongering for a moment. There’s a narrative circulating among the financially cautious that climate action is a cost rather than an investment. That delivering net-zero targets detracts from near-term profits. That shareholders want dividends, not decarbonisation. And then there’s the grumbling about regulation: “not now, not yet, don’t you see we have bills to pay?”

Balderdash. Yes, there are genuine short-term costs to decarbonisation. But those are far outweighed by long-term economic opportunity. Research by credible bodies such as the British Chambers of Commerce and McKinsey shows the net-zero transition could be worth over £1 trillion to UK business by 2030, through innovation, exports and first-mover advantage. That’s not greenwash: that’s maths.

Indeed, if British business becomes the laggard rather than the leader, it won’t just cede moral high ground, it will cede market share. Markets today are global, and buyers increasingly demand sustainability from their suppliers. Investors are doing the same. Lenders, insurers and big pension funds are incorporating climate risk into pricing and capital allocation in ways that will only intensify. To flinch now is to risk being uninvestable in the very near future.

Some might counter that regulatory uncertainty, especially post-Brexit policy shifts or political swings, makes sustained net-zero commitments precarious. And yes, the political landscape has been fractious. But that’s exactly why business leadership matters. When politicians waver, when policy is debated, corporate resolve can act as the stable anchor for long-term strategy. Step back and someone else will fill the vacuum — and it won’t be challengers with sustainability at their core.

Let’s touch on those sectors where back-tracking has been most glaring in 2025. Finance, for instance, saw cracks in its climate alliance frameworks with departures from net-zero banking coalitions. Banks such as HSBC delayed parts of their climate goals, drawing sharp criticism.

The logical leap here, that commitments can be postponed when the going gets tough, is exactly where the sceptics win. But imagine the message it sends if UK banks, the very institutions underwriting corporate growth, say they will only play ball when profits are guaranteed. It instantly undermines trust in the entire system of environmental, social and governance (ESG) integration in corporate strategy.

Retailers, too, have delayed ambitions. Supply-chain complexities and cost pressures are cited as reasons. But shoving targets back a decade or more does not solve those issues; it merely kicks the problem into the future.

And let’s not pretend automotive and aviation are immune, areas where clear net-zero pathways have, in places, ground to a halt. Travelling for Business recently highlighted how even policy support has become ambivalent.

So, where do we go from here? First: reaffirmation, not revision, of net-zero commitments. Ambition must translate into actionable, transparent transition plans rooted in science — not adjustable targets that bend in the breeze of short-term pressures.

Second: collaboration over retreat. Businesses big and small should lean into frameworks like the Science Based Targets initiative, which offers rigorous, scientifically grounded pathways to emission reductions. These are not gimmicks; they are industry-agnostic roadmaps to resilience.

Third: innovate, don’t abdicate. Let’s double down on electrification, circular economy models, and zero emissions supply chains. And let’s bring SMEs along for the ride. Data from the latest UK Net Zero Business Census shows that a majority of larger firms still regard net zero as strategic — a sign of encouragement if acted upon.

Finally, let’s call out the folly of short-termism. I am no romantic, nor a climate activist by trade. But business is nothing without its reputational capital. The choice is simple: be remembered as the generation that met the challenge of our age with grit and ingenuity, or the one that blinked.

UK business must not water down its net-zero pledges in 2026. Not because it’s easy, but because it is the only credible path to sustainable growth, investor confidence and competitive advantage in a rapidly reshaping global economy.

Read more:
Net zero isn’t a luxury: why UK business must keep its nerve in 2026

There was a time – not so long ago, though it already feels sepia-tinted – when London was the sort of place that tourists arrived in with stars in their eyes and left with shopping bags cutting off circulation at the fingers.

Harrods bags, Selfridges bags, Mulberry bags, the bright yellow of Fortnum’s peeking out of a suitcase being sat on in a hotel lobby. Europe’s favourite grown-up playground; Manhattan’s chic transatlantic sibling; Tokyo’s idea of European swagger with better tailoring and more chaotic restaurants.

And somehow, somewhere between the end of the pandemic and the beginning of whatever this new national habit of self-sabotage is, we decided that this was all terribly inconvenient.

Because now, instead of rolling out the red carpet to high-spending visitors who fund vast swathes of our hospitality and retail industries, we appear determined to trip them up with a series of policy banana skins. A kind of bureaucratic Mario Kart, except instead of cartoon plumbers skidding off Rainbow Road, it’s Andrea Baldo at Mulberry watching millions evaporate from his London tills.

First came the abolition of tax-free shopping, what the press politely calls the “tourist tax”, but business leaders now refer to in much the same tone one reserves for a wasp nest in the loft. It was, in the gentle phrasing of one retail boss, a “massive global disadvantage”. He’s not wrong. France woos Chinese visitors with instant VAT refunds at Charles de Gaulle, Italy practically hands tourists a Prosecco as they process theirs. Meanwhile, we greet them with the fiscal equivalent of a traffic warden in a foul mood.

Retail chiefs have been patient – or at least, as patient as you can be when pointing out, month after month, that the maths simply does not work. Tourists want the thrill of a VAT-free splurge. If we don’t offer it, they simply go elsewhere. Hence the growing chorus from the likes of Mulberry’s Baldo, who has watched London sales tank while Paris boutiques hum along nicely. It doesn’t take a PwC report to see what’s happening: shoppers follow value, and value has emigrated.

You might think the lesson here is obvious. If you want tourists, the big-spending sort who treat a long weekend as an Olympic sport, then don’t whack them with a levy the moment they land. You’d imagine, perhaps naively, that the next step would be to reverse the damage, or at least stop adding new obstacles.

But no. This is London. And in London, when there’s an opportunity to make a bad idea worse, we seize it with both hands and a press release.

Step forward Sadiq Khan, announcing with great flourish the potential introduction of a second tourist tax – a nightly levy on hotel stays that would, we are told, “supercharge London’s economy”. Which is an interesting definition of “supercharge”, unless we’ve started using the word to mean “ask people for more money so they spend less of it elsewhere”.

This proposed hotel levy, trumpeted as bringing the capital in line with other global cities, is the second punch in a one-two assault that the hospitality sector absolutely did not ask for. Because let’s be clear: London is not Barcelona, drowning in stag dos stripping in fountains. Nor is it Amsterdam, declaring war on the Hen Party Industrial Complex. London’s issue is not too many tourists — it’s that we are making ourselves unattractive to the ones we need.

Which is why the hospitality sector is looking a bit like a boxer in the 11th round, wobbling slightly, blood in the eye, muttering “Really? Another one?”

Hotels have only just crawled out of the Covid crater. Staffing costs up. Energy bills up. Supply chain madness. Then a visitor economy still recovering from the years when the only people checking into hotels were essential workers and couples pretending they were “working from home”. Revenues are fragile. Margins are thin. And now a city-hall-branded surcharge?

The timing is astonishing. Just as business travellers, the holy grail of midweek occupancy, begin to return… just as American tourists rediscover the joys of London theatre and pubs with carpets… just as Asia resumes sending coachloads of shoppers armed with Amex and enthusiasm… we decide to hand them a bill for having turned up at all.

What message does this send? The same as the VAT-refund fiasco: London is becoming the most expensive city in Europe to visit, and the least rewarding.

It is fundamentally a failure of imagination. Instead of asking “How do we compete?”, policymakers seem content to ask, “How much can we get away with before someone books Berlin instead?”

The answer, increasingly, is: not much.

Because tourists talk. They compare. They calculate. And when your long-haul holiday already costs thousands, and the pound is weak, and hotels are pricier than ever, that extra nightly charge isn’t symbolic – it’s irritating. Add in the lack of VAT refunds and suddenly a weekend that once felt like a treat becomes an exercise in fiscal masochism.

All this might be palatable if the revenue raised were earmarked for something dazzling — a transport revolution, a cultural renaissance, a hospitality uplift so extraordinary that visitors would queue to pay. But the rhetoric is vague, the benefits theoretical, and the impact on the ground immediate.

The truth is brutally simple: London thrives when it is welcoming, frictionless, rewarding and – crucially – competitive. What we have instead is a creeping perception that our leaders view tourists not as valued guests, but as walking wallets from which to extract just a bit more because, well, they can.

The hospitality and retail sectors don’t need another tax. They need policymakers who understand that the visitor economy is not a tap that can be turned on and off at whim. It is delicate, reactive, easily diverted.

Right now, we are steering it away.

London doesn’t need a second tourist tax. It needs a second thought.

Read more:
Is the government intent on killing London’s hospitality sector with a double-whammy tourist tax?

When Britain’s adopted steel king Lakshmi Mittal, gala-favourite philanthropist and one of the country’s most visible billionaire residents, quietly announced he was shifting his tax residency to Switzerland, it barely caused a ripple in Westminster.

Another wealthy non-dom heading for more forgiving fiscal pastures, shrugged the commentariat.

But for anyone paying attention to Britain’s charitable sector, Mittal’s departure is more than a footnote in a tax-policy debate. It is a red flag. A warning. A canary collapsing in the philanthropic coal mine.

Mittal is not leaving because of boredom with Belgravia. As Business Matters reported, his exit follows the dismantling of the non-dom system and, critically, the looming threat of UK inheritance tax on his global estate. He is not alone. Norwegian shipping billionaire John Fredriksen, German investor Christian Angermayer, and tech founders Herman Narula (Improbable) and Nik Storonsky (Revolut) have already slipped out of Heathrow with one recurring reason circled in red: UK tax policy.

And this, however we try to frame it, poses an awkward question.  One the Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, hasn’t quite acknowledged in her rush to tighten the fiscal screws: if Britain is pushing out the very people who fund its museums, universities, research institutes, and children’s hospitals, could UK charities be the biggest losers of her brave new tax world?

Let’s be honest. Charities don’t live on wishful thinking. They live on cheques. And while the British public is generous in spirit, it is the handful of ultra-wealthy donors, people like Mittal, who quietly bank-roll the big stuff: endowments, buildings, specialist medical equipment, entire research departments. Mittal himself has given millions over decades to Great Ormond Street Hospital, to public libraries, to the arts, to humanitarian causes, to Oxford University. When such people stay, Britain wins. When they leave, Britain loses.

This isn’t a defence of tax privileges for the wealthy. Reeves is right to say the system needed reform. But there is a difference between fixing a loophole and creating a deterrent. Between modernising policy and frightening away those who play an outsized role in keeping Britain’s charitable landscape afloat.

The truth, and it feels almost unfashionable to say it aloud, is that major philanthropy is highly sensitive to tax signals. Wealthy donors don’t just give out of generosity; they give within systems that make generosity rational. Alter the incentives, tighten the inheritance-tax net, abolish the regime that made London competitive, and suddenly Dubai or Zug begins to look less like a holiday bolthole and more like a sensible postcode.

And when donors exit, charities suffer twice. First, through the immediate loss of multimillion-pound gifts. Second, through the long-term shift in their funding model: fewer large, flexible philanthropic donations and greater reliance on small public gifts that, while admirable, rarely pay for the expensive or unglamorous parts of a charity’s work, the electricity bill, the IT system, the nurses’ salaries, the safeguarding training. The things no one wants their name on.

It is too simple and too glib for ministers to argue that “fairness” trumps all. Fairness to whom? A tax system that chases out philanthropists may technically be fairer, but it may also leave the nation’s most vulnerable without the funding safety-net that government has neither the budget nor political appetite to replace.

What’s more, philanthropy carries a reputational weight. Billionaires giving large sums in Britain sends a signal that the UK is still a place where causes flourish, research advances and culture thrives. When they relocate, the narrative shifts: from “Britain, philanthropic powerhouse” to “Britain, too expensive to care”.

Charities know this. They’ve known it for years. But they also know something uncomfortable: you can’t replace a Mittal with 10,000 £20 donations. Not when you’re funding MRI machines, scientific breakthroughs or entire children’s hospices.

So where does this leave us? Ideally, with a little honesty. The government must recognise that smart tax policy is not only about fairness but about outcomes. If Reeves wants to avoid turning charity CEOs into professional beggars, she may need to pair her reforms with targeted incentives for high-impact giving or risk watching the voluntary sector shrink in real time.

Charities, meanwhile, must prepare for a new era: flatter donor lists, heavier dependence on domestic donors, and more resource-intensive fundraising just to stand still. The days of relying on a handful of loyal billionaire patrons might be ending, and not because the donors changed their hearts, but because the government changed the rules.

If the exodus continues  if more Mittals, more Fredriksens, more Narulas pack their bags the question will not be whether Reeves’s tax shake-up was principled. It will be whether the price was too high, too blunt and too blind to its collateral damage.

And the greatest losers may not be the wealthy at all but the charities who depend on them, and the people those charities exist to help.

Read more:
The rich are fleeing and our charities may be left holding the bill

When I first started taking clients out for dinner, you could sit under the copper dome of Le Gavroche, order a bottle of claret you’d never dare drink at home, and—after a couple of courses, a soufflé, and a few discreet nods from the maître d’—leave only mildly lighter in wallet and spirit.

Today, on the same site, you can do much the same thing at Matt Abé’s new venture Bonheur. Only now, the bill for two will come in at £250 before you’ve even blinked at the digestif list.

I’m not one for false nostalgia—restaurants must evolve, chefs must be paid, and if anyone’s earned the right to resurrect a Mayfair temple of gastronomy it’s Abé. But there’s a creeping sense that fine dining has priced itself into absurdity. And for once, it’s not just about greedy restaurateurs; it’s about the country we’ve built around them.

Energy bills have soared. Not just yours or mine, but those of restaurants that rely on gas ranges, endless refrigeration, and enough light to flatter every banker’s jowls. Add to that the cost of labour in an industry already haemorrhaging staff post-Brexit, and suddenly that tasting menu looks less like an indulgence and more like a desperate act of financial survival.

The Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, would like us to believe that things are finally “stabilising”. I’ve seen more stability in a soufflé during a Tube strike. Her Treasury may be trying to keep business afloat, but when small restaurants are seeing energy costs double, the effect is akin to throwing a life jacket to a man who’s already under the water.

Fine dining, long the glitzy tip of the hospitality iceberg, is the first to feel the cracks. It was never about volume or turnover; it was about art. A kitchen like Abé’s depends on precision, patience, and prodigiously expensive ingredients that can’t be bought in bulk. When your butter alone costs more than most people’s rent, “value for money” ceases to be a meaningful phrase.

Once upon a time, £160-£180 for two was a generous way to mark a birthday or sign a contract. Now it’s merely the entry fee for breathing the same air as a Michelin inspector. And before the chorus begins: yes, I know what goes into it. I’ve sat in enough stainless-steel kitchens to appreciate the choreography of twenty cooks plating thirty dishes in silence. I know the rent in Mayfair. I know what happens to a menu when olive oil triples in price.

But—and forgive the sentimentality—I also know what a restaurant used to mean. At Le Coq d’Argent or Claridge’s or Marcus Wareing’s at the Berkeley, you could justify the expense as part theatre, part negotiation. It was business done in a place that made everyone feel like someone. You weren’t buying food; you were buying atmosphere, attention, and a tiny square of London’s self-confidence.

Today, that same dinner feels faintly transactional. The food is exquisite, the wine list terrifyingly precise, and yet something human has been lost. When you know a single starter costs as much as the average family’s weekly shop, the pleasure sours slightly. The magic evaporates with the steam from the consommé.

Reeves’ problem—indeed, the country’s problem—is that we’ve stopped treating restaurants as part of the cultural ecosystem. When energy prices bite, when VAT hovers at the same rate as fast food, and when landlords charge what they like, the effect isn’t just fewer Michelin stars; it’s fewer apprentices, fewer suppliers, fewer reasons for tourists to bother crossing the Channel for dinner.

You can’t build an “innovation economy” on empty stomachs. Yet that’s what we seem to be trying. The government talks endlessly about growth while allowing one of Britain’s finest export industries—its hospitality scene—to suffocate under the weight of its own bills. Paris subsidises its bistros. Copenhagen practically canonises its chefs. In London, we just raise the price of the tasting menu and pretend everything’s fine.

Of course, there will always be those for whom £250 is a rounding error. The same crowd who will book Bonheur weeks ahead and post filtered shots of their langoustine tartlets. They’re not the problem. The problem is the steady disappearance of the middle ground—the diners who once treated a grand restaurant as a reachable luxury. Those people are now in bistros, if they’re out at all, calculating the cost of bread service.

When I took clients to the Savoy or Claridge’s, it wasn’t just about indulgence; it was diplomacy. Deals were signed over lamb cutlets and laughter. You can’t do that if your guest is nervously Googling “how much to tip on £500”. Fine dining relied on aspiration, not intimidation.

Perhaps we should stop pretending fine dining is for everyone. Let it be what it now is: haute couture, admired from afar. But if we do, we must also accept that Britain loses something. Our restaurants have long been the quiet stages of our national life—places where ambition met artistry, where even a tax accountant could feel momentarily glamorous.

Reeves can’t control every gas bill, but she can recognise that hospitality is not a luxury to be tolerated; it’s a craft to be preserved. Energy relief for small restaurants, tax breaks for training, a re-think of VAT for the sector—none of it would cost much compared to the cultural value at stake.

Because once the £250 dinner becomes the norm, it stops being dinner. It becomes a ceremony for the few, performed behind heavy curtains while the rest of us eat at home and wonder when exactly Britain forgot how to go out.

Read more:
Fine dining’s death by a thousand cuts, and at least a £250 bill

There is something exquisitely British about watching a government try to sweet-talk the very people it is about to fleece. Like putting out the good biscuits before the bailiffs arrive.

And so we have Sir Keir Starmer — a man whose natural habitat is somewhere between a Select Committee hearing and an apologetic queue at Pret — inviting the grandees of British business to No 10 for what Downing Street insists on calling an “informal reception”.

NatWest, Sage, Marks & Spencer, Taylor Wimpey, Octopus Energy… all the familiar names trooped dutifully through the famous black door, like polite wedding guests who know full well that the groom is a wrong ’un but have still bought a gift from the list because, well, it’s tradition. And what did they get for their trouble? A drink, a handshake, and the creeping realisation that Rachel Reeves is sharpening her fiscal guillotine for 26 November.

Because let’s be honest: corporate Britain is not stupid. It can smell a tax raid long before it hits. Businesses up and down the country have been braced for this budget ever since Reeves’s first go at the Treasury last year, when she hiked employer national insurance and the minimum wage so aggressively you could practically hear the collective groan from every payroll director in the land. That budget, you’ll remember, destroyed in about nine minutes the painstaking courtship Labour had undertaken in the years after Corbyn — a sort of political couples therapy designed to assure business leaders that yes, the party had changed; no, nobody was coming for their yachts; yes, they could come out from behind the sofa.

Starmer’s reception this week was meant to be a soothing gesture — a warm hug before the cold reality of a £30 billion black hole in the public finances is unveiled. But the whole thing had the atmosphere of a GP offering you a lollipop moments before telling you they’re going to remove your leg “just to be safe”.

What Reeves is reportedly considering next would make even Gordon Brown blush. A manifesto-scrambling rise in income tax (because who needs promises, really?). A full-blown assault on limited liability partnerships (sorry, lawyers; sorry, accountants; most people won’t be sorry at all). And, my personal favourite, a raid on salary-sacrifice pension schemes — those clever little mechanisms businesses use to keep costs down without asking employees to start living on tinned tomatoes.

So yes, the mood in the room was not exactly “Christmas at Liberty”. It was more “annual meeting of people who know the bill is coming but haven’t yet decided who’s paying”.

The tragedy here — and it is a tragedy, in the classic British sense of being entirely foreseeable and yet still somehow depressing — is that Labour really had the business community on side. For a hot minute, Starmer and Reeves were the sensible grown-ups. The ones who wouldn’t crash the economy in a fit of ideological pique. The ones who wouldn’t treat FTSE companies like enemies of the state. The ones who, we were told, “understand how wealth is created”. (And then, three months later, taxed the people who create it.)

But credibility, like a good steak, is hard won and easily ruined. And Starmer’s government appears determined to prod it to death with the sharp end of a policy fork.

The prime minister’s great hope is that business leaders are, at heart, desperate for stability — so desperate that they will swallow any number of tax increases as long as they are announced in complete sentences rather than the fever-dream scribbles of their predecessors in government. There is a degree of truth in this. Business likes predictability. It likes grown-ups. It likes the lights to stay on when it flicks the switch.

But there is a limit to how much “doing your bit” people can be told to do before they start seriously contemplating the joys of Dublin. And Reeves’s recent speech, in which she solemnly informed us all that “each of us must do our bit for the security of our country and the brightness of its future”, felt a bit like being told to wash up someone else’s dishes because “we’re all a family here”.

Downing Street declined to comment on the guest list, naturally, which is Whitehall code for “everyone involved is furious but nobody wants to go first”. But I suspect that behind the forced smiles and the warm white wine, Britain’s top executives were quietly tallying up just how much this government is about to cost them — and whether any of it will actually be worth it.

Because while Starmer may believe that a few canapé-laden evenings can repair the damage, business leaders know better. Trust in politics is not rebuilt with receptions; it is rebuilt with policy that doesn’t change direction every time the wind blows across Horse Guards Parade.

And unless Reeves pulls an economic rabbit out of her red box later this month, the only thing hopping out of No 10 will be Britain’s most mobile — and most taxed — businesses.

Read more:
A canapé and a tax raid: Labour’s new love letter to business

Let’s get one thing straight: I’m not usually in the business of tutting at shoes. I’m not the keeper of the brogue, nor the patron saint of patent leather.

But when a man hosts a dinner at his own three-Michelin-starred restaurant to celebrate the newly knighted Sir David Beckham, and turns up in a tuxedo paired with gleaming white trainers — well, I start to wonder if the world hasn’t finally gone mad.

Now, of course, Gordon Ramsay owns the place. If anyone can decide the dress code at a table of his own, it’s the chef-proprietor himself. He can serve pigeon in a paddling pool and wear pyjamas if he likes. But ownership doesn’t equal immunity from taste. There’s a line between “relaxed contemporary cool” and “I’ve given up”. And I’m afraid, Gordon, that night you were teetering perilously close to the latter — in trainers, no less.

What made the spectacle even starker was the company. This wasn’t a boozy mates-only dinner down the King’s Road. It was a black-tie celebration for Beckham’s knighthood — the culmination of a decades-long campaign of service, brand management and quiet self-reinvention. And Sir David, to his eternal credit, turned up looking like a walking Bond franchise: the tux razor-sharp, the shoes mirror-bright, posture immaculate. Even, the now Lady Victoria, never knowingly underdressed, embodied old-school grace. Around the table, guests glimmered in black and silk, the dining room itself a temple of fine formality. Then there was Gordon,  beaming proudly, I’m sure for pone of his closest friends, but looking as if he’d dashed straight from the pass to the party without time to lace up.

Let’s not kid ourselves: trainers with a tux aren’t a bold fashion statement anymore. They’re the lazy man’s rebellion, the sartorial equivalent of mumbling at a job interview. Once upon a time, it was rock stars and artists who broke the rules; now it’s millionaires pretending to be effortless. And in the hallowed dining room of Restaurant Gordon Ramsay, where the sauces are reduced to the millisecond and the tablecloths are ironed flatter than the M25, that nonchalance rings hollow.

There’s an old idea that what you wear to dinner says something about how seriously you take the company you’re in. Dress up for the people you respect. Make an effort for the moment. And when that moment is the knighthood of one of Britain’s most famous men, perhaps a pair of Oxfords wouldn’t kill you. Beckham understood that instinctively. Ramsay, alas, looked like he’d mistaken “three-star” for “street-food pop-up”.

I’m not saying we should all resurrect the tailcoat. God knows no one needs more starch in their life. But some occasions, and this was one, still deserve their sense of ceremony. A knighthood isn’t just a social media milestone. It’s the country tipping its hat to a lifetime of excellence, captaining of England, his involvement in the 2012 London Olympics and numerous charities including His Majesty’s Kings Trust (formerly the Princes Trust). The dinner that follows should match that spirit of reverence. If the chef-host can’t be bothered to put on proper shoes, why should anyone else bother to polish their manners?

Of course, Ramsay might argue that he’s a man of modern tastes, that the Michelin world needs loosening up, that formality is for dinosaurs. Maybe. But there’s a world of difference between evolution and erosion. When everything becomes casual, nothing feels special. And part of the allure of fine dining — and indeed of honours, titles, rituals — is that they are special. That they demand something extra of us. A little theatre. A little respect. A little polish.

The irony is that Ramsay, of all people, understands precision. His entire empire is built on it — on the poise of a sauce, the placement of a garnish, the glint of a knife. He’ll bark at a chef for an overcooked scallop, but when it comes to footwear, apparently anything goes. Perhaps he thought the trainers were a cheeky modern touch, a wink to contemporary cool. But against the tableau of gleaming glassware, bow-tied guests and Beckham’s effortless suavity, it just looked … off. Like ketchup on foie gras.

Then again, maybe that’s the point. Maybe Ramsay wanted to telegraph that fine dining is evolving — that even at its summit, the rules are ready to bend. But there’s a danger in bending them too far. Because when even the guardians of refinement decide that effort is optional, the very idea of “special” starts to crumble. And if there’s anywhere that should still demand a bit of theatre,  a bit of occasion,  it’s the dining room of a three-star restaurant celebrating a newly minted knight of the realm.

In the end, this isn’t really about shoes. It’s about symbolism. The Michelin stars, the knighthood, the restaurant, the clothes, all of it speaks a shared language of aspiration. And in that language, trainers say something else entirely. They say: I don’t care that much. And perhaps that’s fine if you’re catching a flight or popping to Waitrose. But when you’re toasting Sir David Beckham under chandeliers, it feels just a bit … cheap.

So, Gordon — you own the restaurant, the name, and the night. But sometimes ownership carries responsibility. And on this occasion, when everyone else rose to meet the grandeur of the moment, your shoes let the side down. The food was I am sure was flawless, the wine divine, the conversation sparkling. But those trainers? They were the only thing in the room that didn’t quite fit.

Read more:
Sorry Gordon, whilst you own the restaurant, but trainers with a tux? really?

It’s a curious thing, this sense of waiting for a Budget. For most, it’s an exercise in mild anxiety – a check to see whether wine duty is up again or whether you can still afford to fill the tank. But for business owners in London right now, the wait for Rachel Reeves’ first full Budget on 26 November feels less like a nervous twitch and more like a death row countdown.

Charlie Gilkes, who co-founded Inception Group and runs some of London’s most imaginative bars – Mr Fogg’s, Bunga Bunga, the kind of places where post-pandemic optimism briefly came alive again – summed it up with alarming accuracy: “It feels like waiting on death row, waiting until the very last moment to let us know whether she will grant a stay of execution.”

And you can see his point. Reeves’ Budget, which has been rescheduled, delayed, and wrapped in more mystery than a Bond villain’s plot, is arriving under the kind of cloud that usually means someone’s about to pay – and it’ll probably be London.

For weeks now, the rumours have been circulating through Westminster corridors like wasps around a picnic: a wealth tax here, a mansion tax there, a shake-up of partnerships, a business rates “super multiplier”. Each idea lands like another nail being gently tapped into the coffin of the capital’s competitiveness.

The problem is not that the government wants to raise money – everyone knows the country’s finances look like a student overdraft in week one of term. The problem is who they’re going to shake down to do it. Because when politicians say “we all need to contribute,” what they often mean is “London can pay.”

Let’s put this in perspective. London generates £618 billion a year in GDP – roughly 22 per cent of the UK total. Add the South East, and you’re close to half. The capital and its surrounds contribute nearly 30 per cent of all income tax and more than 30 per cent of business rates. It’s the engine room of the UK economy, the bit that keeps the lights on while politicians from every party take turns kicking it in the shins.

And yet, Reeves’ team seem ready to push through reforms that will disproportionately batter the capital’s businesses. The “super multiplier” for properties with rateable values over £500,000 – a neat way of saying “we’ll tax your London office more because it looks expensive” – could mean rates as high as 58p in the pound.

To call that punitive would be an understatement. It’s an electric shock to every business with a W1 postcode. It doesn’t matter that these companies are already shelling out eye-watering sums for rent, staffing and utilities – the Treasury still wants its slice, preferably before the till opens.

David Jones of Avison Young pointed out the obvious but crucial truth: business rates are a direct overhead. They don’t come out of profit; they come out of existence. You pay them whether you’re making money or not. It’s the fiscal equivalent of being asked to chip in for your own executioner’s new axe.

And then there’s the wealth tax carousel. Reeves’ team is said to be looking at removing the capital gains exemption on homes worth more than £1.5 million. That might sound like it targets the super-rich, but in London that’s not a mansion – it’s a family home with a kitchen extension and a decent postcode. Roughly 11 per cent of London properties sit above that threshold, compared to 2 per cent elsewhere.

James Evans of Douglas & Gordon hit the nail on the head: “In many neighbourhoods, £1.5 million is far from a mansion.” Quite. It’s a three-bed terrace in Clapham with peeling paintwork and a leaking skylight. If that’s “wealth,” then Britain’s definition of luxury needs a serious reality check.

Add to that the possible 1 per cent annual levy on homes over £2 million, and you’ve got a policy cocktail that would make even Mr Fogg wince. These aren’t just taxes; they’re deterrents – neon signs flashing “London: Closed for Business” to anyone thinking of investing, relocating, or even staying put.

And let’s not forget the white-collar crowd. Reeves is reportedly eyeing changes to how partnership income is taxed, which could hit the capital’s law firms and consultancies squarely in the solar plexus. Partners who earn seven figures might not be your first sympathy vote, but when they leave – and they will leave, because Dubai, New York and Singapore all smile more kindly on their tax codes – the ripple effect will hit everything from sandwich shops to spin studios.

Charlie Gilkes isn’t just speaking for himself. He’s speaking for a city that’s been through hell these past few years – from lockdowns that gutted hospitality to staffing crises, inflation, rent hikes and endless policy tinkering. What London needs is stability, predictability, a sense that the rules won’t be rewritten every six months. What it’s getting instead is a Treasury that seems to view its success as a problem to be solved.

It’s a funny kind of masochism that defines our politics: punish the productive, milk the metropolitan, and then act surprised when the rest of the country runs dry.

London doesn’t want special treatment. It just wants recognition that when you squeeze the capital, the whole of Britain feels the pressure. The trains built in Derby, the fabrics woven in Huddersfield, the wine poured in Soho – they’re all part of the same chain. Cut off the top, and the bottom collapses.

So yes, as Reeves sharpens her red pen and business owners sit counting the days until the 26th, it does feel like waiting on death row. But perhaps, just perhaps, the Chancellor will look up at the gallows, take a deep breath, and decide that execution isn’t quite the growth strategy Britain needs right now.

Until then, we wait – strapped in, chin up, praying for a last-minute reprieve.

Read more:
Waiting on Reeves: London entrepreneurs face the gallows

It’s not often you see a supermarket make national news for not letting someone work for free. Usually the outrage runs in the other direction—“greedy corporations exploiting unpaid labour” and so on.

But today’s piece in The Telegraph about Waitrose and Tom Boyd, a 27-year-old man with severe autism, has managed to flip that script entirely. And in doing so, it has revealed something rather telling about the way big companies like to wrap themselves in the language of “inclusion” while quietly stripping the humanity out of it.

Tom, by all accounts, was a model volunteer. For four years, nine hours a week, he stacked shelves at the Cheadle Hulme branch. He turned up on time, was loved by staff, and—most importantly—he belonged. His mum, Frances, says he’d given more than six hundred hours of his life to that store. That’s not a “trial shift” or a “placement”. That’s a commitment longer than most marriages. And then, the moment she dared ask if he could be paid, Waitrose said no, and shut the whole thing down.

Now, if you’ve ever dealt with a big corporate HR department, you can almost hear the cogs whirring. Alarm bells, legal risk, safeguarding, health and safety. Someone in Bracknell probably got a “risk alert” email saying “URGENT: volunteer exceeding hours threshold, potential classification as employee.” So they did what corporates always do when confronted with something messy, human and potentially emotional: they pulled the plug.

This, I think, is what people mean when they talk about “the system”. It’s not some faceless cabal—it’s a spreadsheet somewhere, with a column that says “non-employees doing employee work = bad optics.” It’s the reflexive desire to tidy away anything that doesn’t fit the model. And in doing so, they managed to break the heart of a man who, according to his mother, only ever wanted to contribute—to belong.

Waitrose insists it’s investigating. They issue the usual boilerplate: “We work hard to be an inclusive employer… we partner with charities… we make reasonable adjustments…” All very fine. But if you need a PR statement to convince people you’re kind, you’ve already lost.

A Question of Value

The uncomfortable truth is that Tom Boyd was doing exactly what the supermarket assistant job description says: keeping the shelves full, products in the right place, the aisles tidy. The difference is that he wasn’t getting £12.40 an hour for it. He wasn’t even asking for that—his family said they’d accept two hours a week of paid work. Just something. Recognition. A sense that his contribution mattered.

But Waitrose couldn’t find room for that in the model. Apparently, you can sell “Essential Waitrose” beans at £1.20 but can’t accommodate an autistic man who’s been giving you free labour for years.

The irony is painful. In an age where every corporate press release bangs on about diversity, equity and inclusion, here’s a man who lived the spirit of inclusion far more genuinely than any policy ever could. He didn’t need a “neurodiversity awareness” training session; he needed a job. And the company, instead of seeing an opportunity to make good on its lofty slogans, treated him like a potential liability.

Waitrose isn’t uniquely wicked here. This is modern corporate Britain all over: risk-averse, image-obsessed, allergic to emotion. Somewhere along the way, kindness got corporatised. It’s been turned into a metric, a compliance box. “Inclusion” is a PowerPoint slide. “Compassion” is a campaign hashtag. And when an actual human being like Tom comes along—real, awkward, imperfect—they don’t know what to do with him.

So they hide behind “process”. They quote “policy”. And they convince themselves that they’re doing the right thing because the equality legislation file says so. The result? A man who once found purpose in stacking tins of tomatoes now sits at home, bewildered, while the store he loved continues to peddle organic quinoa and ethical olive oil under the banner of good living.

It didn’t have to be like this. Imagine the alternative headline: “Waitrose creates first supported employment role for man with autism.” Imagine the PR gold. The viral posts. The outpouring of goodwill. A small, practical act of inclusion, instead of the cold bureaucratic one we got.

I used to be associated with the UK’s first new-build dedicated school for children and young adults on the Autism spectrum, so I speak with experience when I say that there was a dozen different ways that Waitrose could have handled this and the way that they have just does not hold a candle to their so-called John Lewis Partnership, ‘partner’ benefits, which does include such things as paid parental leave and support for working families.

They could have given Tom a badge. A payslip. A Christmas card signed by the team. They could have said: “Tom, you’re one of us.” Instead, they told his mum the store was being “cleaned” so he wouldn’t be upset when they sent him away. The cruelty of that euphemism—“cleaned”—is almost Dickensian. It’s the kind of lie you tell a child about a dead pet.

This story touches something deeper than corporate policy. It’s about the meaning of work itself. For many of us, a job isn’t just about money. It’s about structure, community, identity. For someone like Tom, that’s magnified a hundredfold. The act of showing up, being useful, being part of something—that’s dignity. And we’ve built a world where that sort of quiet dignity has no line on the balance sheet.

Frances Boyd’s heartbreak is palpable not because her son was denied pay, but because he was denied belonging. She knows that his “limited language” doesn’t mean limited feeling. She knows how much it mattered to him to have colleagues, a uniform, a role. And she knows that behind the green aprons and organic lemons, there’s a company that forgot what kindness looks like when it isn’t printed on a marketing brochure.

I don’t think Waitrose meant harm. That’s the saddest part. They thought they were doing the “proper thing.” The compliant thing. But doing the proper thing isn’t always doing the right thing. Sometimes decency requires bending a rule, writing a small cheque, taking a risk.

They told The Telegraph: “We are sorry to hear of Tom’s story, and whilst we cannot comment on individual cases, we are investigating as a priority.”

Tom Boyd’s story is a reminder that business isn’t about policies—it’s about people. It’s about the small acts that don’t make the quarterly report but define a company’s soul. Waitrose, for all its premium polish and “inclusive employer” copywriting, has shown us what happens when compassion meets compliance—and compliance wins.

If this is what “doing the right thing” looks like in 2025, maybe we all need to ask whether the moral till’s coming up short.

Read more:
Waitrose’s kindness gap: how a supermarket lost its humanity

It was one of those small domestic moments that tells you everything you need to know about the modern British service industry. I was visiting my parents, both octogenarians, both long past the stage of bothering to shop around for anything,  when an envelope from the AA thudded onto the doormat. My mother opened it with the slight suspicion that all letters now require, only to find the annual renewal notice for their breakdown cover.

“Two hundred and sixty pounds thirty-eight,” she said, frowning at the figure as if it were a medical diagnosis. “Though that’s apparently cheaper than last year – it was £280.25 – and they’ve given us a discount of £107.25.” She seemed reassured, which is precisely how the AA likes it.

Then my eye caught a line in bold type: ‘Thank you for your 64 years of loyalty’.

Sixty-four years! That’s longer than most marriages, and certainly longer than any of the call centre staff at AA Insurance have been alive. My stepfather has been a paying customer since the Beatles were still playing in Hamburg. If loyalty were a virtue the AA truly valued, he’d have a gold card, a free tow truck, and a man in a yellow jacket stationed permanently outside the house.

But no. The letter was a masterpiece of corporate doublespeak – a thank you note wrapped around a quiet mugging. £260.38 for a service that, as it turns out, could be had for a third of the price if you knew where to look.

Being the dutiful son (and, frankly, unable to resist a little consumer sleuthing), I fired up the laptop. Three minutes on the AA’s own website later, I had a quote for exactly the same cover: £97.64. “Introductory offer,” it said. “Full price £162.43.”

So, £97.64 for a new member, or £260.38 for a customer of sixty-four years. You don’t need a degree in behavioural economics to see what’s going on here. The so-called “discount” on the renewal was a magician’s trick: look at this £107 off! – while your wallet quietly disappears.

It’s a swindle dressed in the polite language of British customer service. And my parents, like so many others of their generation, would have paid it. Because that’s what loyal customers do. They trust. They assume that six decades of prompt payment and polite correspondence entitles them to fairness. But in the world of modern subscriptions and annual renewals, loyalty isn’t rewarded, it’s monetised.

The British have always had a sentimental attachment to loyalty. We like to think that staying with the same insurer, bank or utility company means something. It’s a vestige of that post-war mindset where you had your man from the Pru, your chap at the bank, and your account with the AA. You stuck with them and they looked after you.

But that social contract has long since been ripped up. Today, loyalty is treated as a sign of weakness. Companies like the AA rely on inertia,  on the quiet assumption that most customers, especially the elderly, will simply renew whatever number appears on the letter.

Meanwhile, the marketing department pours its energy into wooing the new, the fickle, the flighty, those who’ll take their “introductory discount” for a year, cancel at renewal, and start again under another email address. The whole business model has become a revolving door of introductory offers and loyalty penalties.

It’s not just the AA, of course. Every industry plays the same game. Broadband providers, insurers, even the streaming platforms. The longer you stay, the more you pay. It’s a perverse inversion of what loyalty once meant. It’s like being charged extra for ordering the same pint every night at your local.

What’s really galling is how clever it all is. The renewal letters are written to sound reassuring, trustworthy, a little paternal even. They thank you for your custom, list your “discounts”, and refer vaguely to “enhanced cover” you probably never asked for. They hope you’ll glance at the total, shrug, and write the cheque.

In my parents’ case, it was only luck, or filial nosiness, that stopped them being charged nearly triple what the policy was worth. And there’s something morally wrong about that. It’s one thing to overcharge the inattentive; quite another to quietly exploit a generation that built your business in the first place.

Imagine if the AA sent out a letter saying: “Dear Mr X, as one of our longest-standing members, we’re delighted to offer you the same price we give to new customers.” Now that would be loyalty. But of course, that would mean voluntarily surrendering profit. And in the boardroom logic of today’s Britain, that’s heresy.

There’s a wider moral here for all businesses, especially those that like to boast about their heritage. True loyalty is built on mutual respect, not on tricking your oldest customers into overpaying.

We’re entering an era where trust is the scarcest commodity. Consumers are savvier, angrier, and far less forgiving than they used to be. Social media ensures that one story of a pensioner being overcharged can go viral in hours. And yet, the temptation to milk existing customers remains irresistible – it’s easy revenue, and it rarely makes the news.

But brands that behave this way are mortgaging their reputation for short-term gain. Because once people cotton on, as they inevitably do, the damage is irreversible. Sixty-four years of loyalty can vanish in sixty-four seconds.

In the end, I cancelled my parents’ renewal and signed them up anew. The process took less time than boiling the kettle. My mother was delighted. My stepfather, ever the gentleman, just shook his head. “So much for loyalty,” he said.

Quite. The AA may get them back on the road when the car breaks down, but when it comes to customer loyalty, it’s the company itself that’s stranded on the hard shoulder – hazard lights flashing, engine sputtering, wondering where all its good will went.

We asked the AA for a response and an AA spokesperson said: “Our pricing reflects the service offered. The new member price is discounted, but doesn’t provide the same member benefits.

“We would welcome the chance to talk to this member to look at their renewal and see what they are comparing it to online.” My response to  this, is sorry AA, but it is exactly the same service for exactly three times the cost.

Read more:
The AA’s loyalty problem: sixty-four years and still taken for a ride

Let’s get one thing straight: business is not an Olympic sport. No medals. No referees. No level playing field. It’s not drug-tested either, and you can forget about fair play.

The idea that commerce is some noble amateur pursuit where everyone lines up at the same starting line, toes behind the white paint, and waits for the gun is a comforting delusion. Out here, in the mud and chaos of modern busines, it’s survival of whoever’s got the better kit, the smarter coach, and the secret stash of performance enhancers that no-one else has worked out how to get hold of yet.

And right now, that secret stash is artificial intelligence.

There’s an enduring British fondness for the idea that if you just work hard, play fair, and put in the graft, you’ll win out in the end. Lovely in theory. Utterly laughable in practice. Anyone who’s ever tried to run a small business knows that it’s like trying to sprint uphill through treacle while Amazon and Apple whizz past on hoverboards powered by other people’s data.

The big players have teams of analysts, consultants, and developers all optimising every click, every purchase, every breath their customer takes. They’ve built their own Olympic training camps with altitude tents and nutritionists and shiny machines that make the rest of us look like we’re still using a fax.

And yet – here’s the twist – the gap is closing. Because, for once, the performance-enhancing substance that levels the field isn’t locked behind a corporate paywall. AI is available now, to everyone, and it’s legal, cheap, and astonishingly effective when used properly.

Think of AI not as the 12th man cheering from the sidelines, but as your 10th, 11th, 12th and 20th employee. The one who doesn’t need sleep, doesn’t call in sick, and doesn’t ask for a raise. The one who remembers everything, analyses faster than you can blink, and can spin out content, customer replies, financial models or product ideas while you’re still buttering your toast.

For years, the big breakthroughs were about infrastructure. Cloud computing cut costs and freed small firms from the tyranny of on-premise servers. SaaS platforms eliminated the need for entire IT departments. Suddenly you didn’t need a team of developers in a windowless room just to get a basic CRM running.

But AI? AI is the rocket fuel. The TNT. The caffeine shot to the jugular that lets a small business move like a giant. It’s the difference between a post-war racing car and a modern Formula 1 machine – both technically cars, yes, but one will still be cornering while the other’s already halfway round the next lap.

From Admin Assistant to Strategic Advisor

The beauty of AI is that it scales across everything. A café owner can use it to forecast demand and cut waste, while a marketing agency can generate entire campaign strategies before lunch. The accountant who once spent all night building spreadsheets now gets the same insight in five minutes flat.

And let’s be honest – the notion that AI will “replace” humans is the least interesting thing about it. Of course it will replace the dull bits. The repetitive, life-sucking admin that nobody misses. What matters is what you can do with the time and headspace it gives back.

You can serve customers better. Build faster. Think longer-term. Give a level of service the Dalai Lama would nod approvingly at, because your systems are actually listening to your clients instead of losing their emails in a spam folder.

There’s always a chorus of sceptics who say, “Oh, we’ll see how it pans out.” The same people who thought websites were a fad and email would never replace the fax. They talk about AI “maturing,” as if it’s a wine that’ll be better in five years. Newsflash: the people using it now will have built entirely new business models by the time you’re still swirling your glass and sniffing for notes of oak.

Small businesses that adopt AI today won’t just get more efficient – they’ll become more ambitious. The micro-brewery will start exporting. The artisan shop will go global. The consultant who once handled five clients can now manage fifty, because her virtual assistant is quietly doing the logistics while she focuses on the high-value work.

Of course, someone will object that it’s all a bit unfair – that using AI is like doping. But again, this isn’t sport. There’s no governing body, no World Anti-Doping Agency for the self-employed. Nobody’s taking your gold medal away because you used an algorithm to spot a trend before your rival did.

The ethics here aren’t about “cheating.” They’re about using every tool available to serve your customers, your team, and your sanity better. If your competitors are juicing up on automation, insight, and instant data while you insist on staying pure with spreadsheets and Post-it notes, that’s not moral integrity. That’s self-sabotage.

The great thing about this particular drug is that it rewards curiosity more than cash. You don’t need to be a billionaire to get started. Most AI tools cost less than a round of drinks and deliver a measurable return before you’ve finished the pint. The only barrier is the mindset that says, “This is for someone else.”

Use it to draft. To plan. To analyse. To dream bigger. Test, refine, repeat. The magic isn’t in the machine – it’s in what you do with it. But like any performance enhancer, it only works if you actually take it. Sitting there admiring the vial won’t win you the race.

So stop pretending business is a polite 400-metre jog. It’s a street fight. And if someone offers you a completely legal, side-effect-free, performance-enhanced boost that could turn your scrappy start-up into a medal contender – you’d be mad not to take it.

Because when the dust settles and the doors are blown clean off, the only question that matters will be: did you have the guts to take the shot?

Read more:
Business is not an Olympic sport, so invest today in that performance-enhanced boost

Rumour has it that Rachel Reeves is limbering up for November with a Budget that will make the taxman’s quill squeak like a stuck pig. Property, pensions, profits, pasties — all grist to the Exchequer’s mill.

The Treasury is leaving no stone unturned, no pocket unpicked, no cupboard unopened. The only thing, one suspects, that remains miraculously safe from her fiscal scythe is Larry the Cat’s supper.

Cat food, so far, has escaped. But give it time. If Reeves wakes up one morning and thinks Felix is a luxury good, then Larry may be forced to reacquaint himself with the vermin of Whitehall.

Which would be, let’s face it, the first proper day’s work he’s done in a decade.

The mood music is grimly familiar. Reeves is billed as Britain’s most hawk-eyed chancellor since Gladstone, scrutinising every allowance and relief with the intensity of a headmistress checking pockets for contraband. She talks of “closing loopholes” and “fiscal responsibility”, which translates as: if you earn it, spend it, save it or feed it to your cat, I want a slice. There is a whiff of the Victorian workhouse about the whole thing — the sense that leisure, comfort, and small mercies are indulgences for which the State must extract a fee.

The thought of Larry’s pouch of Sheba being clobbered with 20% VAT is only half a joke. Reeves hasn’t said it. But given the way she’s nosing through the nation’s shopping basket like a customs officer at Dover, it might only be the fact that she’s scared of the animal-loving electorate that keeps Purina safe from the Chancellor’s paw.

Larry, then, becomes the perfect stand-in for the rest of us. He lives in the lap of political luxury, adored, photographed, never held accountable for his failure to deliver on the “mouser” part of his job title. And yet even he is only one Treasury brainstorm away from being told to pull his weight. The day the food bill doubles is the day Larry starts catching mice again.

And so it is with us. Once pampered, now fleeced, the British taxpayer is being nudged towards self-sufficiency by stealth. First you taxed our booze, then our cars, then our pensions, and now our every side-hustle. Tomorrow it will be our pets, the next day our plants, and eventually our patience.

The truly comic element is not that Reeves might be tempted to tax pet food, but that it has come to feel plausible. When a government makes you believe even the moggy’s supper is at risk, you know you’re in the realm of fiscal parody. It’s like imagining air being metered. Please insert £1 to continue breathing.

If Reeves could work out how to slap a duty on belly rubs or a surcharge on purring, you sense she’d do it before breakfast. The only thing stopping her is the optics of being seen to shake down a cat who has a bigger fanbase than most cabinet ministers.

And yet, strip away the feline froth, and the point is clear: this scattergun approach to taxation is not sustainable. You cannot tax your way to prosperity any more than you can slim by raiding the fridge at midnight. What Reeves needs — but seems reluctant to risk — is growth, investment, something genuinely bold. Instead we get a Budget that looks like the frantic contents of a handbag tipped out on the kitchen table: receipts, half-chewed mints, and a few coins scavenged from the lining.

Larry’s food may survive unscathed this time, but the message is unmistakeable: the Treasury has its nose in our cupboards, its paws on our wallets, and its eye on the cat’s dish. Heaven help us when they start eyeing the litter tray.

Read more:
Reeves’ Budget: is Larry’s cat food the last refuge?

While the Conservatives stumble in search of relevance, Nigel Farage’s Reform UK has seized the spotlight as Labour’s true challenger. Forget Kemi Badenoch’s protestations—Keir Starmer’s real battle is against populist fire, not Tory embers.

Let’s be perfectly candid: the serious bits of politics, those that demand formidable talent and intellectual gusto, are beginning to look less like a battle between Labour and the Tories, and more like a punch-up between Sir Keir and Nigel Farage’s Reform. It’s as though our sat-nav of British politics has decided to detour from the predictable “Conservative vs Labour” road and veer dangerously towards “populist clown car vs cautious earnestness”.

According to that stirring Bloomberg opus—let’s call it the canny Adrian Wooldridge dossier—it’s Farage and Reform UK, not whichever Rishi-less rump remains of the Conservatives, who occupy the true mantle of Opposition. And he’s quite right to suggest as much. Labour’s uneasy incumbency doesn’t need a nostalgic Tory defeat so much as it needs something radical—some spark—to truly galvanise. And lo! That spark has arrived in the form of a party that revels in grievance, culture wars, and incendiary sloganeering, wrapped in a Union Jack, and slapped firmly across the headlines.

Now, I’ll confess: I had my doubts. The Tories, apparently toothless though they seem, have had the fare of a timeshare spoon to sage electoral mischief. But the rise of Reform is not a mere fill-in-the-gap phenomenon; it is real opposition. Despite their relative parliamentary modesty, Reform UK have capitalised on summer disquiet and Labour’s taciturn approach to dominating narrative—hardly the mark of a party content with being mere theatre, rather than a serious panto villain.

Let’s not mince words. Labour’s summer motto seems to have been: “If we speak less, we might survive the lighting strike.” Meanwhile, Reform threw itself into our unguarded skies with a barrage of immigration rhetoric, welfare us-against-them framing, and a creeping mastery of the media soundbite  . Populist politics at its, er, most refined.

And yet, forgive me if I bristle when Kemi Badenoch, whispering in between tweets, suggests otherwise. Kemi, dear, pull up a chair. Everyone with a functioning moral compass—and a toe dipped into the latest polling—knows that Reform UK, not your current Conservative ensemble, are Labour’s chief electoral challenge. Polling isn’t speculation; it’s reflection. As The Financial Times and others warn, business leaders are worried Labour might cede political ground unless they reassert themselves swiftly.

There is something deliciously ironic about a party once derided for being a “clown show” now being viewed as the firm bedrock of Opposition. And yet, there it is. Reform’s ascendant narrative means Labour can no longer weaponise nostalgia for the Conservatives. Nor can it lazily allude to “the right-wing” as if it were a hazy abstraction. This isn’t an argument about ideological purity—it’s about electoral reality.

There’s more: Farage’s party has won symbolic victories. A dramatic by-election gain in Runcorn and Helsby overturned a Labour majority that seemed comfortably etched in stone—a mere six-vote margin, mind you, but enough to give boarding-up instructions to Labour HQ. And in local elections, Reform surged ahead, even gaining control of several councils, leaving the Tories gasping for relevance. That’s not just noise—it’s institutional presence.

Now, critics of my little diatribe might argue Reform lacks substance beyond the anguished slogan. They may point to Labour’s campaign for a wealth tax and a more egalitarian metaphorical reframing of national grievances—not to mention the argument, from voices like Polly Toynbee, that reforming electoral systems is Labour’s real legacy in waiting . Or that speaking truth to populism requires elevated ideas rather than shouting back.

Yet the nurse never argues the pain away. When the drizzle turns to rain, you need an umbrella – or in this case, a powerful counter-narrative. And yes, Labour is trying: a cupboard reshuffle here, a communications failure patched there . But it might want to recalibrate from “methodical cautiousness” to “competent ferocity” before Farage has swept Britain into enough local government offices to call himself a shadow Prime Minister.

There’s a final twist in this jolly tale: I suspect Labour might, if all goes disastrously, end up thanking Reform – because nothing sharpens your strategy like an opponent who refuses to be politely ignored, and instead yanks your complacent trousers down in broad daylight.

So Kemi, I recommend you empty your irony-laden snark of “he’s no threat”, toss in the washing machine with some humility, and acknowledge that yes – Farage’s Reform is the real opposition to Starmer, right now. And in politics, real is what matters.

Read more:
Sorry Kemi, but Farage’s Reform is the real opposition to Starmer

I’ve been to Los Angeles many times over the years — for work, for pleasure, and occasionally for that curious hybrid of both that journalists tell their accountants is “business travel”. I’ve always loved the place: the optimism in the air, the palm-lined streets, the sun-washed hills rolling down to the Pacific.

But this time was different. The hills were scorched. The air was acrid. Driving into Altadena, I was met not by the familiar suburban hum but by the sight — and smell — of destruction. Houses gutted. Trees reduced to brittle, blackened bones. A haze that clung to the lungs.

The Altadena fires had not just burned through land. They’d burned through lives. People who had built homes, memories, and futures there now stood in the ash, holding nothing but what they’d managed to carry out in the scramble to safety.

And it wasn’t just the physical damage. It was the mood. Conversations were quieter, eyes heavier. You could feel the shared trauma — the knowledge that the place they loved could, at any moment, be taken again.

I was so moved by what I saw that I did something I rarely do on the road: I stopped, set up my phone, and recorded a short video for the EV Powered YouTube channel. Standing there in the still-smouldering aftermath, I spoke about the urgency of action on climate change. You can watch it here: EV Powered – LA Fires.

And yet, despite the unarguable evidence — the rising temperatures, the worsening storms, the lengthening wildfire seasons — there are still those who stand before cameras and insist that climate change is some elaborate hoax. In the US, Donald Trump has made a sport of it. His casual dismissal of climate science has been a defining theme of his politics, playing to the crowd but abandoning the planet.

It’s a dangerous luxury, this denial. It allows leaders to dodge difficult policy decisions, to swerve the costs of action, to keep the machine humming exactly as it always has. But it comes at the expense of people like those in Altadena, and the farmers in Oxfordshire, and communities everywhere that are already paying the price in floods, droughts, fires, and food shortages.

And climate denial is not confined to the MAGA circuit. In Britain, we too have our own chorus of sceptics — some in the press, some in the pub, and some, regrettably, in positions of real influence, and then there is Reform UK’s very strong opinion on the topic. They cloak themselves in the language of “common sense”, as though ignoring a problem is somehow more practical than solving it.

This is where my LA trip connected in my mind to my previous column on Jeremy Clarkson. Clarkson is no Trump — he’s not campaigning to roll back environmental protections, and he’s done more to educate the public on the realities of farming than any politician I can name. But when he waves away the link between extreme weather and climate change, it feeds the same complacency that lets fires burn hotter, seas rise faster, and communities like Altadena bear the brunt.

Here’s the hard truth: the cost of action is high, but the cost of inaction is ruinous. Businesses know this — supply chains are disrupted by floods, crop yields are hit by droughts, insurance costs soar with every “once-in-a-century” disaster that now happens every other year. Whether you’re running a farm in Chipping Norton or a logistics hub in California, climate change is a line on your P&L whether you acknowledge it or not.

The lesson from Altadena is not simply that wildfires happen. It’s that they are happening more often, more intensely, and in places that didn’t used to burn. And unless we accept the link to our changing climate — and act accordingly — they will keep happening.

Flying home, I thought about the people I’d met there. Not activists, not lobbyists, not political operatives — just residents, trying to rebuild. They don’t have the luxury of debating whether the climate is changing. They are living in the aftermath of the answer.

If there’s one thing the business community can take from this, it’s that leadership means facing reality, even when it’s inconvenient. We can’t keep treating climate change as someone else’s problem, or tomorrow’s problem, or — worst of all — not a problem at all. Because by the time the flames are at your door, it’s too late to deny they’re real.

Read more:
From Altadena to Westminster: climate denial is a luxury we can’t afford

Oh, Jeremy. We all adore him, the pompous baritone, the deadpan wit, and that slightly feral Yorkshire charm. Plus the man who taught the world that farming wasn’t just admiration-worthy, it was uncomfortably gruelling.

Clarkson’s Farm splendidly ripped back the curtain on rural toil, reminding us that to put food on the table is to wrestle with mud, weather tantrums, bureaucracy, and occasionally a minuscule orchestra of pigs. It is delightful and infuriating, and undeniably educational.

But—and there’s always a but—when Clarkson waves away the weather troubles as unrelated to climate change, I’m forced to clutch my tea and think: “Oh, come on now.”

Let’s be clear: one can love Clarkson for his comedic misadventures, his honest fascination with arable reality, and his big, bonkers personality, while still scolding him for what borders on wilful denial.

His unwavering dismissal of any connection between extreme weather and climate change—particularly when crops are drowning one minute and the next cooking under an unprecedented heatwave—is frankly bonkers. The phrase “it’s just weather, why make a fuss?” might work as a gag on Top Gear, but in the muddied fields of Diddly Squat, it’s an unforgivable dodge.

Clarkson’s Farm is, in reality, a gift to public understanding. It’s the sort of documentary that has converted metropolitan pesticide-phobes into defunct-subsidy ponderers and brake-lights watchers into early risers gauging rainfall. It is the most unfiltered, unpretentiously riveting showcase of British farming there is, and for that, Clarkson deserves not just applause, but maybe a medal—or at least a free pint at his pub, The Farmer’s Dog.

The very idea that he sneers at climate change while simultaneously portraying its effects—and then blithely disconnects them—feels, to put it politely, like telling the vicar to stop worrying about sermons because “it’s just words.”

To be fair, Clarkson seems, in recent times, to have eased off. In a surprise u-turn, he’s admitted that shrugging off global warming was part of an exaggerated persona—“a joke” staged for shock value—rather than a deeply held conviction  . If this is indeed the case, bravo for the epiphany. Farming, as he’s now well aware, is not a sitcom; it’s a power‑soaked education in geology and long-term planning, where weather isn’t seasonal angst—it’s existential risk.

And what a year on Diddly Squat it’s been. A TB outbreak, a harvest that’s been nothing short of catastrophic, and the dramatic failure of some 400,000 beetroot seeds—of which two grew—sound like satire, but they’re the grim reality of natural volatility and mounting climate stress.

Add in the revelation that most farms don’t make a profit, that many farmers work moment to moment, reinvesting every pound to stay afloat—often without even making their own wage—and it’s clear: this is about more than crumbling onions and drowned seeds  .

Clarkson might well argue that the sleuthing of journalists or politicians can’t match the visceral awareness born of daily farm life. And he’s quite right. There’s no carbon calculator or policy paper that will ever tell the story of a flooded field with the same visceral punch as an old bloke in a hi‑viz jacket stomping through mud, grumbling about yet more rain when everything’s already sodden. That’s television—no, that’s modern life—made palpable.

But ignoring the link between that “funny farm weather” and our shared, warming planet is, to borrow Clarkson’s own language, “a fucking nightmare”  . The struggle between farms and climate isn’t a coincidence—it’s systemic. Clarkson’s willingness to stare that truth down, with that same blunt honesty he brings to power harvester misfires, would elevate Clarkson’s Farm from great television to essential cultural reckoning.

So here’s my toast to Jeremy: May you continue to farm with furious passion and accidental finesse. But if you’re going to nudge climate change off the podium with a flippant shove, you’ll have to parry the feral glare of every farmer—and pretty much every sane viewer—who knows the weather isn’t just a performance. It’s a warning.

Read more:
Why Clarkson’s Farm should tackle climate change – before the business of farming crumbles

The cancellation of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert is not, as CBS executives would desperately like us to believe, a “purely financial decision.” It is, quite transparently, the ceremonial sacrifice of satire on the altar of political appeasement and corporate consolidation.

Yes, late-night ratings have slipped. Yes, ad revenue is tighter than an intern’s skinny jeans at a Soho House party. But let’s not pretend Colbert was dead wood. His was the highest-rated late-night show in its slot. Emmy-winning. Critically lauded. Socially vital. And very much still watched — I know, because I watch it religiously. Not sure I’ve missed an episode in over a year. Hell, I even went to a taping the last time I was in New York.

In a year when American networks have spent billions on bloated reboots no one asked for and IP cash-ins so lazy they make Love Island look like Shakespeare, we’re supposed to believe that the network couldn’t find the budget for one of the most popular talk shows on American television?

No. That’s not how this works. That’s not how any of this works.

What happened?

Paramount, CBS’s parent company, was trying to finalise a merger with Skydance Media. But the Federal Communications Commission, chaired by a Trump appointee, had the deal under review. A spurious Trump lawsuit against CBS was hanging over everything like a fart in a lift. So they paid up. $16 million to the president and, coincidentally, soon-to-be-founder of the Trump Presidential Library & Golf Superstore. The lawsuit was laughable — claiming a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris had been maliciously edited. Spoiler: it hadn’t. But CBS paid anyway.

That’s not metaphor. That’s the scent of compromise disguised as corporate prudence. Trump wanted money. The FCC, chaired by Trump’s man Brendan Carr, was delaying Paramount’s merger with Skydance Media. And then, as if by magic, a deal was struck, the FCC smiled, and Colbert — that cheeky, persistent thorn in the Trumpian posterior — was told he’d be off the air come May.

How wonderfully coincidental.

And Donald, never one to let subtlety get in the way of smugness, took to his rickety digital pulpit on Truth Social:

“I absolutely love that Colbert got fired. His talent was even less than his ratings.”

“I hear Jimmy Kimmel is next. Has even less talent than Colbert!”

He wasn’t done.

“Greg Gutfeld is better than all of them combined, including the Moron on NBC who ruined the once great Tonight Show,” referring to Jimmy Fallon, who must be nervously counting down his own commercial breaks now.

The president of the United States is openly celebrating the removal of his political critics from network television. No nuance, no shame. Just straight-up banana republic behaviour. And CBS is letting it happen.

Colbert himself saw it coming. Three days before CBS dropped the axe, he went after the $16 million settlement live on air. “As someone who has always been a proud employee of this network, I am offended,” he said. “I don’t know if anything – anything – will repair my trust in this company. But, just taking a stab at it, I’d say $16m would help.”

The crowd laughed. CBS board members did not.

Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders weren’t laughing either. Warren posted, “CBS canceled Colbert’s show just THREE DAYS after Colbert called out CBS parent company Paramount for its $16M settlement with Trump – a deal that looks like bribery.” Sanders was blunter: “Do I think this is a coincidence? NO.”

Let’s not forget, satire has always been uncomfortable — it’s meant to be. But in Britain, we understand that discomfort was part of a healthy democracy.

Did Margaret Thatcher, no fan of dissent, ever phone the BBC and demand that Ben Elton be pulled off the air for his relentless “Mrs Thatch” tirades on Friday Night Live? No. She rolled her eyes and got on with it.

Did John Major ask for Spitting Image to melt down his dead-eyed puppet with the greying underpants? No. He probably winced, but understood that being lampooned is part of the job. If you can’t take a latex satire to the chin, you’re in the wrong line of work.

But Trump? Trump doesn’t do satire. He doesn’t even do irony. His skin is thinner than a Ryanair seat cushion and twice as easy to tear. And so, rather than rolling with the punches, he’s throwing elbows — at networks, at comedians, at newspapers, at anyone who doesn’t flatter his ego.

And with Colbert off-air, who’s next?

This isn’t just the end of a show. This is the end of an era. Colbert didn’t just fill a chair behind a desk — he held a mirror to power, to hypocrisy, to puffed-up politics and the empty suits who manipulate them. He took the absurd and made it art. He made you laugh while making you think, which is increasingly dangerous currency in a world dominated by clickbait, culture wars, and billionaires with fragile egos.

Colbert began in satire — not the fluffy late-night banter of falling asleep with Fallon but the hard stuff: The Colbert Report, his creation of a right-wing pundit who was somehow more believable than the real ones. He gave us “truthiness” before we knew how badly we’d need it. And when he moved to The Late Show, he didn’t neuter himself — he sharpened the blade.

So yes, this is personal. Not just for the 200 staffers soon out of a job. Not just for viewers like me, who tuned in for comfort and clarity and cleverness. But for anyone who still believes journalism — in whatever format — should punch up, not shut up.

What’s next? More of Trump’s wish list being fulfilled under the guise of economic restructuring? Will Jon Stewart be next for the guillotine? (“Shameful,” he said of the settlement.) Will NPR be shuttered because Trump doesn’t like vowels?

And now, as the stage lights dim and the applause fades, the future of satire feels uncertain.

Or does it?

Because while the suits in broadcast boardrooms pretend this is about balance sheets, over on YouTube — where the only approval required is a “Like” button — audiences are flocking. In fact, someone else has already made the leap: Piers Morgan, that perennial marmite of British broadcasting, has quietly – well it was a quiet as Morgan gets – shifted his Uncensored show from linear TV to YouTube, where it reaches more people, with less interference, and no need to pander to a regulator or advertiser with cold feet.

It’s ironic, isn’t it? Trump — the man who cut his teeth on reality TV, who turned CNN into a hate-watch for the MAGA faithful — may have just accelerated the future of television. By bullying broadcasters into silence, he’s made online freedom more attractive, more necessary.

Late-night satire might be dying on CBS, but it’s thriving elsewhere. Jon Stewart. Hasan Minhaj. Sarah Cooper. Even amateur YouTubers with a microphone and a sense of decency are picking up the mantle. The audience hasn’t disappeared — it’s migrated.

So maybe The Late Show is ending. But the idea of the late show — the honest, punch-up political comedy show — might just be evolving.

And as for Colbert? Don’t bet against him. The man once played a right-wing pundit in character for nine years without breaking once. He’s not afraid of a fight. He’s just lost his stage. For now.

So here’s my suggestion, Mr Colbert: light up a YouTube channel, Dust off all the covid-era tech. Call it The Even Later Show. Stream it straight from your living room. No censors. No FCC. No overlords with shareholder nerves. Just you, your writers, your desk — and your audience, who are very much still here, very much still watching. Plus if Morgan is believed you might even earn more!

And this time, the only cancellation that matters is the one your subscribers can control.

Read more:
Colbert gets cancelled – and with him, satire itself

Labour should be worried. That’s not to sound like a gurning tabloid—we’re better than that—but the early signs are far from reassuring.

Since April, when the non‑dom knockouts arrived and Chancellor Rachel Reeves scrapped the centuries‑old offshore loopholes, stories have been piling up: wealthy directors departing, shell‑companies relocating, ultra‑rich heirs re‑domiciling elsewhere. A Financial Times investigation found that nearly a third of non‑dom clients are now decamping to UAE, Italy or Switzerland. Henley & Partners has predicted a loss of 16,500 millionaires this year alone—evacuating around $92 billion in investable assets.

That’s the headline. But is it the full story? Dozens will always shuffle off, and some early sell‑offs were likely opportunistic, triggered by panic‑selling in overheated London markets. Indeed, in 2017 when Osborne tightened non‑dom rules, there was a spike—but by 2019 emigration had fallen back below pre‑reform levels. That suggests the real economic damage comes not from those who’ve bolted already, but from those still sitting on the fence, ready to skedaddle at the next tax trumpet.

So, what might Rachel Reeves do? Reports suggest she’s already reconsidering charging inheritance tax on offshore holdings after ten years of residence—the element deemed most punitive. Expect softening. The Treasury is apparently exploring “tweaks without backtracking” to stem capital flight. In plain English: make it slightly less unpalatable, so the bleats from Mayfair aren’t quite so loud.

One might say: why worry about millionaires offloading handbags and primary residences when ordinary UK voters are left draped in austerity? The hard truth is that non‑doms aren’t merely sitting ducks; many are significant investors, philanthropists and employers. Some weigh in with a hefty £400,000 annually in tax contributions and average asset investment of £118 million. The FT warned that a mass exodus could burn a hole in public finances and shutter growth strategies  .

That said, losing a tranche of “wealth parkers”—those who simply stash foreign money in London—might be a blessing. New Statesman’s Will Dunn points out that many non‑doms contribute little in economic substance; they can afford swanky flats but don’t generate domestic employment. Their departure could, perversely, free up homes for productive buyers and ease the supply bottleneck—an upside indeed.

Labour’s dilemma is this: it promised fairness (“those with the broadest shoulders…” etc.) and scrapping non‑dom was a powerful symbol. But symbols aren’t budgets. If the revenue is illusory—if exits exceed estimates and the tax base shrinks—this tightrope act looks reckless. The Office for Budget Responsibility’s projected £33.8 billion revenue gain over five years could quickly unravel  . Worse still, if wealthy high‑flyers vanish, office windows darken, venture capital freezes and the party is left with empty coffers and failing pledges.

Reeves now faces pressure on two fronts: to stand firm and close loopholes, and to not frighten capital. Early indicators suggest she’ll settle somewhere in between—curtail non‑doms in principle, soften key elements in practice. That may mollify non‑doms enough to stay, yet to Labour’s own base it will look like a climb‑down. And paralysis is worse than policy—because inaction portends shrinking receipts and yet more austerity.

So how worried should Labour be? Quite. Even if a full‑scale exodus doesn’t come to pass, the uncertainty, headline scares and wavering reforms haven’t been kind. And against that backdrop, whispers of a wealth tax—on assets over £10 million at two per cent—only add fuel to the flight fantasy  .

Perhaps the answer is not simply hammering the wealthy, but offering carrots: adjustment periods, phased implementation, exit taxes, residence bonds. A meaningful immigration route linked to investment, as others have suggested. But this requires imagination—and a sense that Labour is still in the game.

In short: Labour should worry, but not panic. Instead of reversing, they must recalibrate. The non‑dom rebellion isn’t a political crisis unless treated as one—by shutting down the exodus without sacrificing the underlying principle of a fairer tax system. Reassurance, clarity and nuance are key—anything less invites both rich people and public trust to take flight.

Read more:
Flight of the non-doms: how worried should Labour be about the super‑rich leaving the UK?

It says a lot about the state of modern music that the most hyped tour of 2025 is led by a band who last made a decent album when Blair was still in Downing Street.

Oasis have reunited for a £100 million world tour that sold out faster that you could say “Don’t Look Back in Anger”, then there is Sting, a man who’s now into his seventies, still touring the world with more grace than most 30-year-olds can muster after a pub lunch, and you’ve got to ask: where are the next generation of greats?

Not just stars, you understand. We’ve got plenty of those—shiny, streaming-friendly, hashtag-driven stars who can dance, duet, and disappear in under a year. I mean artists. Icons. People you’ll still be playing when your hair’s gone grey and the Bluetooth speaker has replaced the record player. Because when you look at the current Top 40, what you see is a conveyor belt of catchy choruses with the shelf life of supermarket sushi.

Now, I should declare my bias. I’m a lifelong lover of jazz. Proper, vinyl-scratched, soul-drenched jazz. And much of that passion, I owe to one man: Robert Elms. For years, his midday show on BBC Radio London has been my cultural North Star. To most black-cab drivers, he is London. “Mr London,” they call him, and rightly so. The man practically soundtracked the capital’s soul.

He was the first to champion artists like Amy Winehouse and Jamiroquai, long before record execs were convinced the public had the stomach for them. And yes, he’s the same man credited with coining the name Spandau Ballet, a band whose best suits and worst haircuts are permanently stitched into the fabric of the ‘80s. But as traditional radio listening dwindles—particularly among younger audiences—we’re losing the gatekeepers, the tastemakers, the people who could spot a genius in a smoky bar and get them on the air the next morning. No TikTok algorithm can do that.

This lack of long-term thinking is the rot at the heart of today’s music machine. Labels now chase virality over vision. Artists aren’t nurtured—they’re churned. We’ve moved from careers to campaigns. And while that might boost short-term streams, it doesn’t make legends.

Of course, there are flickers of hope. Eddie Piller, the man behind Acid Jazz Records, remains a keeper of the flame. He discovered and launched Jamiroquai, a band that brought style and soul to the mainstream when it badly needed both. Now he’s championing Nick Corbin, back with New Street Adventure.

I genuinely think that Corbin is a rare talent in today’s landscape—honest songwriting, velvet vocals, and a live show that actually means something. If the world were fair, he’d be headlining Glastonbury. Instead, you’ll find him on stage at 9.30pm, somewhere in Camden, for £12 a ticket and a pint in a plastic cup.

And what of the others? Olly Murs, that affable X Factor graduate, is still clapping along, still charming daytime TV audiences and provincial arenas. Sam Fender, the critics’ pick to inherit the Springsteen mantle, is perhaps the best bet we’ve got—a gritty voice, big choruses, and lyrics that occasionally rise above the pub-poster politics. But will he be doing this in 30 years? Will his songs still soundtrack weddings, break-ups and boozy karaoke sessions? Too early to say.

The truth is, we’re living in a music culture of disposability. The Top 40 albums of 2025—according to the Official Charts Company—are filled with names who, talented as they may be, feel fleeting. Tracks are written for clips, not for concerts. Verses are designed to land on social media before they land on stage. And with attention spans now shorter than the average bass solo, we’ve trained audiences to swipe, not stay.

What we’re really missing is longevity. The kind that used to be cultivated through gigs, independent radio, late-night TV performances, and—yes—passionate presenters like Robert Elms. He played the songs no one else would. He had the ear to hear brilliance before it charted. Now, with legacy media being strangled by cuts and algorithms, we’re watching that entire ecosystem fade away.

And as it fades, so too does the route for new talent. Without the Elmses of the world, how many future Amy Winehouses or Jamiroquais are we losing to the scroll?

So yes, I’ll be at the Oasis tour, with the overpriced merch and a tear in my eye when the first chorus of “Live Forever” kicks in. And yes, I’ll admire Sting’s stamina as he glides across the stage like a tantric Peter Pan. But I’ll also be wondering: when today’s headliners hang up their guitars and holograms take their place, who will be left with the weight, the artistry, and the staying power to replace them?

Read more:
Where is the music industry going?

You’ll hear a lot of nonsense these days about “British jobs for British people”, as though talent stops at Dover and genius requires a passport. I’m here to tell you—rhetorically, floridly, perhaps even provocatively—that if we carry on down that road, the only thing we’ll be exporting is our future.

Because here’s the cold, unapologetic truth: some of the best companies in Britain right now weren’t started by blokes from Bromley or lasses from Loughborough. They were built—boldly, brilliantly—by immigrants. Entrepreneurs who came here with no old-school tie, no Oxford college affiliation, no seat at the Garrick. Just vision, stamina, and a burning need to build something better.

Take Revolut, the digital bank that made high-street banking look like dial-up internet. Started by Nikolay Storonsky (pictured), born in Russia and schooled in physics and hustle, Revolut tore through the crusty layers of traditional finance like a chainsaw through suet. Or Monzo—built with help from a multicultural team whose mission wasn’t British tradition, but global innovation.

Then there’s ElevenLabs, the AI voice tech company that’s gone from zero to warp speed in less time than it takes HMRC to answer a phone call. Co-founded by Piotr Dąbkowski, who’s Polish, and Mati Staniszewski, who is—whisper it—also not from Guildford. They’re building the future of media from a country still arguing about Radio 4.

And Synthesia. God bless it. A startup so cool, even the Americans are jealous. An AI video platform used by companies all over the world—led by a team of immigrant founders whose collective ambition makes the Houses of Parliament look like a village fête. They didn’t come here for the weather or the late trains. They came here to build something. And thank God they did.

Now, imagine for a moment if we’d told them all to bugger off at passport control. “Sorry mate, can’t let you in. We’ve got a lad in Swindon with a Raspberry Pi and a dream.” Ludicrous, right? But that’s the direction we’re drifting in. A little more visa red tape here, a little more rhetoric about “taking back control” there—and suddenly, the UK becomes a nation of heritage rather than a hub of invention.

I’m not saying British-born entrepreneurs don’t deserve praise. They do— many of them are sensational. But if we want to build a truly great entrepreneurial economy, it’s not about geography. It’s about gravity. The UK must become a gravitational centre for the best minds in the world. The brightest thinkers. The hungriest founders. The wildest dreamers. Not just the ones born within the sound of Bow Bells.

We don’t win by narrowing the gate. We win by making the UK the best bloody place on Earth to start a company. That means generous and intelligent visa schemes. That means startup tax incentives with real teeth. That means investment channels that don’t require your uncle to be in the House of Lords. And it means—crucially—a culture that doesn’t sneer at ambition or treat innovation like an awkward dinner guest.

If you ask me, the Home Office ought to be handing out platinum-tier welcome packs at Heathrow. “Welcome to Britain, here’s your Innovator Visa, a coffee, and directions to the nearest co-working space.” Let’s treat entrepreneurs the way we treat Premier League footballers: as indispensable imports that raise the whole game.

Instead, we get Nigel-from-Twitter banging on about “taking our country back”, while the most talented people on the planet quietly buy one-way tickets to Berlin, Austin, or Dubai.

Do you know what makes Silicon Valley what it is? Not just code and venture capital. It’s the constant influx of people who don’t give a monkey’s about status quo. People with accents, ambition, and absolutely no sense of when to quit. Sound familiar? It should. That’s the same spirit that built the UK’s best startups.

And yet, for all our history of trade and talent, empire and enterprise, we now seem more interested in walling ourselves off than inviting brilliance in. It’s short-sighted, self-defeating, and stupid. Like unplugging your router because the internet’s “a bit foreign”.

The truth is, we’re in a global arms race for innovation. AI, biotech, climate tech—it’s all moving at warp speed. If we want to be in the room where it happens, we need to open the door.

And no, this isn’t about immigration versus opportunity. It’s about immigration as opportunity. About recognising that talent is our last competitive advantage in a world where supply chains are broken, politics is polarised, and interest rates are doing the Hokey Cokey.

So let’s be bold. Let’s be a magnet for ambition. Let’s stop pretending that greatness wears a particular passport and start building a Britain that says to every global innovator: “Yes. Here. Now.”

Because if we don’t, the Revoluts and ElevenLabs of the future won’t be British. They’ll be Belgian. Or Balinese. Or based in Boston.

And we’ll be left here, proud and poor, wondering why all our best ideas now come with a return address in Zurich.

Read more:
We must make Britain the best place to build companies for the world’s best talent

I’m all for a bit of back-patting. Especially when it’s well deserved, and even more so when the hand doing the patting is someone else’s.

So when Press Gazette – the hallowed trade rag of media geeks and PR doyennes – recently ran a lovely write-up on the growth of Capital Business Media, I was delighted. Beaming, in fact. There’s something satisfying about seeing your company’s hard graft recognised in print (or pixels), nestled among the news of who’s made substantial redundancies, who’s pivoted, and who’s just hired a former TikTok influencer as their new head of strategy.

But then came the kicker. The buzzkill. The frustrating, fingers-on-a-blackboard twist in the tale: the piece was behind a paywall.

Now, I get it. Journalism isn’t free. Reporters need to be paid. Publishers need to keep the lights on. And websites – even the ones with clunky UX and a cookie banner the size of a duvet – need revenue. But when your shiny new bit of PR, lovingly pitched, massaged, and nudged into a slot by your PR team, is suddenly visible to… well, about 37 subscribers and a bloke named Colin who still has an RSS reader… it all feels a bit, well, pointless.

The actual growth that the Press Gazette piece on Capital Business Media was talking about came about directly because we do not use paywall’s – and never will –  on any of our websites, and Press Gazette could most probably make themselves more revenue but not using one.

Because PR – real, strategic, value-generating PR – is about more than egos. Or at least, it should be. It’s about reach. Visibility. Shaping the conversation. A great media hit should do more than sit on your mum’s fridge door. It should drive traffic, get people Googling you, earn you a bit more swagger in the pitch meeting.

But when it’s locked behind the “Subscribe now for £14.99 a month (or £149.99 a year)” barricade, the value begins to erode. Not immediately, and not always fatally, but in a death-by-a-thousand-clicks sort of way. The headline teases. The intro loads. Then—bam. The wall comes down like a guillotine. And the potential impact? It vanishes into the digital void.

And this isn’t just me having a sulk because my feature couldn’t be screen-grabbed and paraded across LinkedIn like a new baby photo. This is a broader issue facing the entire PR industry. If the holy grail of coverage – the big-name title, the high-profile platform – can only be seen by those who already live and breathe media, then what’s the real ROI for the client?

Will businesses keep paying four or five figures a month to get coverage they can’t properly leverage? Will CMOs sign off on budgets to secure placements in titles their customers, partners, and stakeholders can’t even read without creating yet another login and parting with a tenner?

There’s an uncomfortable truth here. One that PR firms – especially the big, glossy ones with exposed-brick offices and scented reception desks – might not want to admit: the value of PR is increasingly in visibility, not just placement. And visibility, in a post-paywall world, is getting harder to quantify.

As a company we come at media ownership at a slight different angle to others, as I used to be a partner in a highly successful Cardiff based PR company and we are in the process of launching a new digital coverage company The Content Crafting Company and the entire premiss will be to work with non-paywall media outlets.

Yes, there’s still cachet in a Financial Times mention. A Times write-up can still lend serious clout. But if your audience is entrepreneurs, SMEs, or anyone under 35 who thinks paying for news is a crime against the internet, then your impact is limited.

We live in an age where LinkedIn posts, podcast appearances, and cheeky YouTube shorts get more engagement than some magazine articles. I’ve seen company founders go viral with a single raw, self-shot iPhone video explaining their mission – reaching more eyeballs than a full-page spread in a national broadsheet could ever hope to.

That’s not to say traditional media is dead. Far from it. But the model is creaking. It’s not built for the distribution-hungry, scroll-happy, SEO-driven landscape we now operate in. And PR firms, frankly, need to adapt. Because clients are starting to ask better questions. Not just “Can you get us in The Guardian?” but “How many people will see it? How many will click? Can we share it freely? Will it help with our Google ranking?”

If the answer to all those is “no”, or “only if they pay for the privilege”, then PR – the good kind, the strategic kind – needs to find new ways of proving its worth. That might mean a shift towards owned media. Thought leadership. Influencer outreach. Or yes, even paying to boost your own press coverage on social.

I’m not here to slate paywalls. They’re a necessary evil in a world where journalism has been gutted by ad models, clickbait, and social media giants. But let’s not pretend they don’t complicate the picture for PR.

As for that Press Gazette article? It was nice. It was flattering. It was a professional moment of pride. But when I tried to share it with a potential client and he replied, “Mate, I’d love to read it but I’m not subscribing just to see your face”, I had to laugh.

Because if a brilliant bit of coverage falls in the forest, and no one’s there to click on it – did it ever really happen?

Read more:
Yes, it’s great to get PR coverage – until it’s locked behind a bloody paywall

The thing about Rachel Reeves—apart from the ironed hair, the thousand-yard stare and the curious knack for speaking in spreadsheets—is that for someone who claims to be building economic stability, she’s remarkably good at causing chaos.

The sort of chaos that isn’t loud and fast and wrapped in flashing lights, but a slow, calculated, exchequer-shaped car crash. With every tax tweak and fiscal fiddle, the Chancellor seems less like a guardian of growth and more like a reverse Robin Hood—robbing not the rich to feed the poor, but hammering the hopeful to satisfy the ideological.

Let’s start with the millionaires, because of course we should. They’re the villains in the modern morality play, aren’t they? The hedge-funders, the tech bros, the Notting Hill set with unearned six-packs and actual pensions. But here’s the thing: they’ve gone. Vanished. Left faster than a party donor in a non-disclosure scandal. Spain, Portugal, the UAE—take your pick. Anywhere with sunshine and fewer punitive taxes on the fruits of your own bloody graft.

Capital gains? Hiked. Dividend taxes? Squeezed. Non-dom status? Dead. You can feel Rachel’s satisfaction radiating from the red dispatch box—“Look, I’ve made the system fair!” But fair to whom, exactly? Not to the rest of us who rely on those millionaires for investment, for job creation, for risk capital. You can’t build a booming economy while running a “For Sale: One Prosperous Nation, Owner Fled” sign in the City.

And then there’s the private school VAT debacle, a policy so proudly self-sabotaging you’d think it was dreamed up during a particularly long wait on hold with HMRC. Because nothing says “levelling up” like adding 20 per cent to school fees, causing a mass exodus from the independent sector and dumping thousands of bewildered middle-class children into a state system that can’t afford to mend the loos, let alone fund a Latin department.

We’re now in a situation where overstretched comprehensives—already juggling teacher shortages, dilapidated buildings and half-a-dozen TikTok-inspired behavioural epidemics—are being asked to accommodate pupils who were doing fine where they were. Because their parents, often two-job families scraping everything to give their kids a chance, suddenly can’t make the numbers work. So in one fell swoop, Reeves has created more pressure on state education and ensured that the very notion of aspiration has been subject to VAT.

And let’s not forget the little guys. The small businesses, the freelancers, the self-employed who, in the dreams of policy wonks, are seen as plucky start-ups in Shoreditch lofts, but in reality are your plumber, your dog groomer, your mum’s mobile nail technician. These people don’t have tax loopholes or offshore accounts. They don’t “max out their ISA” or play currency arbitrage on a second screen. They just want to make a living. And now, thanks to Reeves’s drive to close “the tax gap,” they are treated with the same suspicion as a Russian oligarch buying a Belgravia townhouse in crypto.

Every “crackdown” on self-employment, every tightening of IR35, every demand for real-time tax data is a signal: you are not to be trusted. And who gets hurt? Not the CEOs, not the multinationals with lawyers by the dozen. It’s the part-time bookkeeper in Bolton, the roofer in Romford, the events planner in Epsom. All of whom are now expected to carry the burden of fiscal fairness while HMRC plays hide-and-seek with the people who owe actual millions.

It’s one thing to talk about redistribution. It’s quite another to perform an economic exorcism on the country’s productive classes. Reeves doesn’t seem to realise that prosperity isn’t a finite pie to slice ever more thinly, but a delicate ecosystem. You scare off the high earners, overtax the employers, kneecap the educational ladder and shackle the self-employed, and you’re not left with equality. You’re left with inertia.

The Labour line is that all of this is necessary. A little pain now for stability later. But the pain always seems to be in the same place. It’s never Whitehall. Never the unions. Never the quangos or the consultants or the eye-wateringly wasteful procurement contracts. No. It’s families. Workers. People who run corner shops and send their kids to modest private schools because the local comp has had five headteachers in four years and is best known for a viral video involving a hamster and a Bunsen burner.

The tragedy of Reeves’s approach is not that it’s radical—it’s that it’s regressive. A kind of fiscal performatism designed more to tick boxes in a Guardian editorial than to encourage the next generation of wealth creators. She’s playing to the crowd, but the crowd isn’t watching. It’s working, or emigrating, or wondering if it’s time to switch the business to Dubai and homeschool on Zoom.

There was a moment, not long ago, when Labour could have genuinely claimed to be the party of the working ambitious. Of the kid from Leeds who wanted to start a coffee chain or build an app. But now? Now they look like the party of “No.” No to incentives. No to innovation. No to keeping what you earn. A party suspicious of success and hostile to the ladders that help you get there.

Every Chancellor has to make tough decisions. But Reeves has confused toughness with punishment, and prudence with paranoia. With every tax, she’s not just balancing the books. She’s burning the blueprint for growth. And once you’ve lost that, no amount of fiscal rules will bring it back.

Read more:
With every tax, Rachel Reeves does more damage

It started, as all great things do these days, with a streaming binge. Somewhere between insomnia, jet lag, nostalgia, and a desperate need for a bit of idealism in a very unideal world, I found myself rewatching The West Wing, and then The Newsroom. And then bits of A Few Good Men, The Social Network, even that short-lived, overambitious love letter to television, Studio 60, having watched a taping of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert in New York.

Before I knew it, I was deep in the Sorkinverse — half-preaching the Bartlet doctrine to Bruno the Spaniel,  and half-wondering why no one in real life ever has an epiphany at 90 miles an hour over a White House staircase.

And it hit me — the reason these monologues still rattle in my skull, the reason I rewind them like old C90’s, is the same reason I return, time and time again, to Shakespeare.

Because in their own utterly different, perfectly precise ways, both Aaron Sorkin and William Shakespeare do the same thing: they put the human soul on a stage, hand it a mic, and let it speak until the walls shake.

That’s why I’m writing this. Not as a TV critic or a frustrated playwright, but as someone who genuinely believes Sorkin is the Bard of our times — swapping swords for subpoenas, and soliloquies for Senate smacks.

Now, I can already hear the English professors howling into their quills. “Sorkin? That caffeinated chatterbox with a West Wing fetish?” Yes. Him. The king of walk-and-talk. The maestro of monologue. The man who gave us Jack Nicholson’s “You can’t handle the truth!” and Jeff Daniels’ brutal verbal exorcism of American exceptionalism in The Newsroom. Say what you like, but the man writes.

And crucially, like Shakespeare, Sorkin has given us characters that don’t just talk — they testify.

Shakespeare had Hamlet’s “To be or not to be,” Macbeth’s “Is this a dagger?” and Lear’s primal wails on the heath. Sorkin has Colonel Jessup, finger jabbing at the bench, roaring, “You want me on that wall!” He has President Bartlet standing alone in the National Cathedral, soaked to the skin, screaming in Latin at God. He has Zuckerberg, stone-faced across a conference table, delivering one of the iciest put-downs in legal history: “If you guys were the inventors of Facebook, you’d have invented Facebook.”

I mean, come on.

If Shakespeare was the master of poetic introspection, Sorkin is the laureate of caffeinated conviction. His soliloquies aren’t whispered into the void. They’re blasted across courtrooms, newsrooms, and corridors of power. They don’t just ponder mortality or fate — they punch bureaucracy in the face, then drop the mic and stride off with perfect posture and a billowing trench coat.

Take The Newsroom. The pilot opens with what can only be described as an intellectual ambush. Jeff Daniels, wearing the haggard face of a man who’s read too many poll results and seen too many idiots on Twitter, lets rip with a monologue so sharp it practically perforates the American flag.

“We stood up for what was right… we reached for the stars… we aspired to intelligence…”

It’s Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar crossed with The Economist. And it’s bloody brilliant.

Then there’s President Bartlet in The West Wing, grieving the death of his secretary Mrs Landingham — a woman who had, let’s be honest, more moral compass than half his Cabinet — and taking on God Himself in a deserted cathedral. The lighting is gothic, the rain torrential, and the president is pissed.

“You’re a son of a bitch, you know that?”

You don’t get that in Love’s Labour’s Lost.

And that’s the thing. Sorkin, like Shakespeare, understands that the most important theatre isn’t always in palaces or parliaments — it’s in the hearts of flawed, furious people trying to do the right thing while the world insists otherwise.

He gives us characters who burn with purpose. Sam Seaborn, the quixotic speechwriter, practically combusts with idealism every time he opens his mouth. In one episode, he blurts out:

“Education is the silver bullet. We don’t need little changes, we need monumental ones.”

He’s like Henry V, if Henry had access to a Princeton debate team and a MacBook Pro.

Of course, Shakespeare had his flaws. Longwindedness, for one. (Seriously, Bill, just get to the stabbing.) And Sorkin? Well, he has his. The verbal pyrotechnics can occasionally tip into theatrical gymnastics. The characters all sound a bit… Sorkiny. Like they’ve all gone to the same Ivy League dinner party and decided never to leave.

But even that sameness has its purpose. Sorkin doesn’t write people so much as he writes ideas wrapped in hair and tailored suits. And just like the Bard, he’s unashamedly didactic. He’s not here to reflect life as it is. He’s here to pitch life as it should be — rational, decent, and marginally better educated.

And yes, there’s ego. Mountains of it. But find me a playwright who doesn’t believe they’ve got something important to say, and I’ll show you someone who ends up writing for Emmerdale or Corrie…

Sorkin is at his best when he’s angry — but it’s a hopeful anger. A righteous indignation that still clings to the belief that a well-constructed argument, delivered at 90 miles an hour, might actually change something. And in this glacial, bureaucratic circus we call modern democracy, that’s no small miracle.

So yes, Sorkin is our Shakespeare. Not because he writes in iambic pentameter, but because he gives language weight. Because he understands that sometimes, one man talking into the abyss can still shift the ground beneath your feet.

And look, I get it. Sorkin’s not perfect. He’s not subtle. He’s not modern in the minimalist sense. But he is — indisputably — ours. Our generation’s bard. Less codpiece, more cable news. Less Tempest, more West Wing. But every bit as necessary.

And if you still don’t believe me, just watch the final scene in A Few Good Men again.

“You can’t handle the truth!”

It’s not just a line. It’s a challenge. A gauntlet. A tragedy in twelve syllables.

And like all great writers, Sorkin dares you to handle it — with both hands, and maybe a side of fries.

Read more:
Sorkin is the new Shakespeare — only with better suits and fewer dead kings

I had the rare luck to be in New York on the opening weekend of George Clooney’s stage adaptation of Good Night, and Good Luck a few weeks ago.

Yes, that George Clooney. Silver fox. Espresso salesman. Occasional director of films watched mostly by other directors. And now, it seems, Broadway dramatist. I’ll admit: I wasn’t expecting brilliance. But I was expecting at least a flicker of fire – and in that, Clooney didn’t disappoint.

The production, based on the 2005 film he directed, itself based on the righteous television crusade of CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow against the creeping poison of McCarthyism in 1950s America, is tight, slick and worryingly relevant. For a play set in a world of monochrome television screens, chain-smoking men in boxy suits and studio backrooms filled with cathode hum, it lands with the force of a modern slap across the face.

Because what struck me most as I left the theatre and walked into the honking chaos of Times Square – dodging tourists, bins, and overpriced pizza slices – wasn’t just the nostalgia for a time when journalism had guts. It was the inescapable realisation that somewhere between Murrow’s smoky sign-off and the arrival of TikTok news, we lost the fourth estate. Or if we didn’t lose it, we bloody well gave it away.

And look – I know this sounds like the usual hand-wringing of a middle-aged media junky (guilty), pining for the golden age of Woodward and Bernstein, and a press corps that didn’t get its political insight from someone’s Instagram story in a Pret. But it’s not just sentimentality. There has been a slow, grinding erosion of journalistic integrity, curiosity, and – frankly – courage. And it didn’t start with Twitter.

It started with fear. Fear of being shut out. Fear of losing access. Fear of being labelled “biased”, “fake news”, or – worst of all – “not impartial”. And so instead of asking the questions that matter, the British press (and I’ll include myself here) too often settled for the pantomime of the Westminster lobby, the Sunday spin cycle, and the weary ritual of ministers “doing the rounds” with their talking points on breakfast telly, unchallenged.

Take the Covid Inquiry. A moment – finally – for those in power to be held to account. For decisions that cost lives to be unpacked, explained, exposed. But what have we had? Carefully crafted apologies. The odd emotional wobble. And a press pack that largely reported it all like a dull episode of The Thick of It. Where was the outrage? The ferocity? The sense that this might actually matter?

The same applies to our relationship with MPs, councillors, police commissioners, NHS Trust heads, and all the rest of the laminated-card-wielding brigade of local power. Once upon a time, a backbench MP caught with his hand in the till or trousers round his ankles would be chased down the street by a horde of hacks demanding answers. Now we email their press officer and wait two weeks for a line that’s been “signed off”.

Clooney’s play reminded me of something more dangerous than apathy. It reminded me of complicity. Murrow wasn’t just speaking truth to power – he was speaking truth to his peers. “We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home,” he warned. And though he was talking about Communism and witch-hunts and the paranoia of a post-war America, you could just as easily apply that to our current predicament.

Because when journalists stop asking difficult questions, or worse, stop being allowed to, democracy falters. People tune out. Trust vanishes. And into that vacuum comes the conspiracy theorist, the populist YouTuber, the self-appointed truth-teller with a ring light and a Patreon page. And they thrive not because they’re more accurate, but because they sound angry – and anger, in the absence of integrity, is what people are left with.

I am as guilty as everyone here, and I accept that as on a different level, pre-Capital Business Media, between  1999-2004 we owned a local newspaper and magazine group which owned titles in London Docklands, West Essex and Cambridge and we did go soft of local investigations of planning decisions and restaurant reviews to name just two for purely commercial reasons. Like all media, from the CBS of Murrow to our Docklands News advertisers pay staff’s mortgages, rents and school fees so you need to be careful to not bite off the hand that feed you.

I’m not saying we need to turn every local paper into a remake of Spotlight. But maybe – just maybe – we need a bit more Murrow in the mix. A bit more discomfort. A bit more risk. And yes, perhaps a bit more George Clooney. Because for all his Hollywood gloss and obvious earnestness, what Clooney has done – whether he meant to or not – is to remind us of the stakes.

He’s reminded us that journalism, when it works, isn’t about access or awards or being first on X (née Twitter). It’s about scrutiny. It’s about saying what no one else will, at the moment it matters most. It’s about the courage to be unpopular – to lose friends, jobs, advertising revenue – in the pursuit of something bigger than yourself.

So yes, Good Night, and Good Luck does still have a point. A sharp one. It points directly at the vacuum where our national conscience used to be. And it dares us to fill it again – not with opinion or noise, but with truth.

Whether we will… well. That’s the real drama, isn’t it?

Read more:
The slow death of the fourth estate – and why George Clooney’s Broadway revival hits harder than he thinks

There was a time, not so long ago, when America was the greatest country in the world.

Not just because it said so on the telly, not because it could nuke you from space, or because every high school film ended with a slow clap and a national anthem. No — because it led. With ideas, with invention, with democratic ideals (however hypocritically applied), with a swagger that came from real cultural capital, real global respect. America didn’t just show up to the party — it built the damn house.

But not anymore

And I don’t say this with glee. I’m not some sanctimonious Brit revelling in Uncle Sam’s decline while sipping tepid tea in a London kitchen. I say this because facts matter. Because rhetoric isn’t reality. And because under President Donald J. Trump — not once, but now twice elected as Commander-in-Chief — the United States has taken a chainsaw to its global reputation, its domestic integrity, and its long-term prospects.

Let’s be clear: America hasn’t been ‘great’ in the aspirational, post-war, Statue-of-Liberty sense for a while. But this time, it feels terminal. It’s not just decline. It’s wilful decay.

The environment? A joke. Trump’s ghoulish love affair with coal has been re-consummated. In a flurry of pen-strokes that would’ve made a 19th-century industrialist swoon, he reopened the gates to coal-fired power plants. Actual coal, like it’s 1902 and we’re all still clapping at the lightbulb. His executive order gutted environmental protections that were already on life support, essentially telling the EPA to sit down and shut up while we choke on soot.

Meanwhile, while the rest of the developed world sprints towards renewables, the U.S. is trying to mainline fossil fuels through a rusty IV drip. All while the Colorado River dries up, wildfires turn into seasonal events, and Miami starts to look like Atlantis.

But maybe that’s just optics, right? So let’s follow the money

Trump’s tariff tantrum — sorry, strategy — has laid waste to international trade. The man has slapped 10%, 20%, sometimes 50% tariffs on everything from Chinese electronics to EU steel, Japanese cars to Korean microchips. The goal? “Bring manufacturing home.” The result? A global trade war that’s got American businesses stockpiling foreign goods like doomsday preppers while prices spiral and consumer choice shrivels.

Even AI — the very sector that could give America a 21st-century edge — is being throttled. Tariffs on the microprocessors, rare earth metals, and servers required for cutting-edge AI have forced U.S. firms to contemplate relocating R&D overseas. Imagine voluntarily handing the AI crown to Beijing because you wanted to punish Huawei. That’s what’s happening.

And what does Trump do? He brags. About the “billions” pouring into the Treasury from tariffs. As if we’ve forgotten that tariffs are just taxes with a passport. The American consumer pays for those billions, Donny — not Xi Jinping. Target shoppers are paying for your trade war.

Then there’s the moral rot

Trump’s executive orders have surgically dismantled diversity, equity and inclusion policies across federal agencies. Not trimmed. Not restructured. Erased. Gone are initiatives designed to level playing fields, improve representation, and — dare we say it — bring America into the modern age.

He’s gone further still, launching a frontal assault on transgender rights. Under the guise of “restoring biological truth” — a phrase that could’ve been nicked from an Orwell novel — he’s reversed federal protections for trans individuals in employment, healthcare, and education. In 2025. In America. The supposed land of the free. Unless, of course, you don’t fit a narrow, white, hetero-normative mould.

But the most stomach-turning development? The sudden halt of foreign aid under a 90-day “review.” Aid to Africa. To Latin America. To parts of Europe still clawing back from conflict and catastrophe. Trump calls it a realignment. The State Department calls it a pause. But make no mistake: it’s abandonment. From the country that once airlifted hope. That once promised to be the world’s emergency exit in times of crisis. Now, it’s just another door slammed shut.

And yet — the man remains popular. His rallies are Woodstock for the wilfully ignorant. He’s turned politics into vaudeville, diplomacy into dogfighting, and the Oval Office into a green room for Fox & Friends. And America, bizarrely, keeps clapping.

So no, America is not the greatest country in the world. Not anymore

Not when it criminalises compassion. Not when it treats knowledge like a threat and science like an opinion. Not when it confuses bullying with strength, isolationism with sovereignty, and nostalgia with policy.

Greatness is about more than flags on lawns and missiles on standby. It’s about vision. Inclusion. Progress. It’s about leading not because you can, but because others want to follow you.

And right now? Nobody’s following.

America may still be powerful. It may still be rich. But greatness — true greatness — requires moral authority, cultural curiosity, and the humility to evolve.

That America? The one that built the Marshall Plan, funded the Moon landing, and gave us Maya Angelou and Miles Davis?

It’s a memory.

And if Trump gets his way — it’ll stay that way.

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America is not the greatest country in the world anymore

It’s a strange thing, the way we form connections with voices. Proper, deep-rooted, personal connections. The kind that feel like friendship, even though the other person has no idea we exist. The kind that, when news breaks of their passing, leaves us unexpectedly bereft—as though a part of our own personal history has just been snatched away.

That’s exactly how I felt when I heard that former F1 team boss Eddie Jordan had died this morning. I never met the man, never stood in a paddock and shook his hand, but for the past year or so, I’ve had him in my ears week in, week out.

His podcast with David Coulthard, Formula For Success, was part of my routine. That distinctive Irish lilt, the playful jabs, the slightly rogue opinions—he was as much a fixture in my week as my Yorkshire Tea in the morning. And now he’s gone.

But it doesn’t just feel like a public figure has died; it feels personal. And that got me thinking—why is it that voices, specifically those on radio and podcasts, feel so much more intimate, more emotive, than anything we watch on screen?

Growing up, the biggest influence on my musical taste wasn’t an older sibling as I didn’t have one, a cool cousin, they just tried to subvert my choice of football team, or a particularly progressive music teacher, sorry Mr Powell. It was Robert Elms. His show on GLR (or BBC London, or whatever incarnation the station was in at any given time) soundtracked my GCSE ‘revision days’ and has been a companion ever since. Robert is the reason I’m a jazz obsessive, the reason I’m a member of Ronnie Scott’s, the reason I first heard Amy Winehouse—long before Frank was even a glint in a record exec’s eye. He had met her father in a sauna, as you do, and invited her on the show. One listen and I was hooked.

And before that? Before I had the excuse of ‘revising’ with the radio on? There I was, an 11-year-old, sneaking a radio under the covers at my grandparents’ house, listening to Steve Allen on LBC. Back then, it was less political and more just… soothing. A familiar voice in the dark, shaping thoughts, sparking curiosity, and making me feel part of something bigger than myself.

Compare that to television. I watch a lot of it. Too much, probably. But if one of my favourite TV personalities or actors were to suddenly pass away, and there are far too many to name check, I wouldn’t feel that same pang. I might be sad, I might reflect on their best performances and dive down a Youtube rabbit hole on their work for an evening, but I wouldn’t feel like I knew them. There’s a certain detachment with TV. Even with the most brilliantly written characters, the most charismatic presenters, there’s always a screen between us.

But audio? Audio is different. It’s direct. It bypasses all the visual noise and speaks straight to the brain. It’s there in your ear, shaping the way you think, the way you feel. And because it lacks the distraction of visuals, it forces you to truly listen.

And it’s not just me. Think about the power of radio in times of crisis. Think about Churchill’s wartime broadcasts, the way people clung to every word as though it was a personal reassurance, not a national address. Think about the shipping forecast—still listened to religiously by thousands who have never set foot on a boat, or know where either Dogger or German Bight are. There’s a romance to radio, a directness to podcasts, a kind of intimacy that screen-based media just can’t replicate.

Maybe it’s because a voice in your ear feels like a one-to-one conversation, whereas TV and film are always a performance. Maybe it’s because we consume audio in moments of solitude—walking, commuting, lying in bed—whereas TV is more often a shared, passive experience. Or maybe it’s because when you listen to someone long enough, week after week, year after year, their voice becomes a fixture in your life, as familiar and comforting as a friend’s.

That’s why Eddie Jordan’s passing hit harder than I expected. It’s why losing a radio presenter or a podcaster often feels like losing a mate. It’s why I’ll keep tuning into Robert Elms for as long as he’s on air, and why I’ll always treasure the nights spent under the covers with a crackly old radio, absorbing the world through sound alone.

Because audio isn’t just background noise. It’s connection. It’s companionship. And in a world where screens dominate, it’s a reminder that sometimes, the most powerful stories aren’t seen at all—they’re simply heard.

Read more:
Eddie Jordan made me feel like I knew him: why voices on radio and podcasts move us more than TV ever can

Kemi Badenoch has always prided herself on being the straight-talking, no-nonsense politician, unafraid to ruffle feathers and say the supposedly unsayable. A darling of the right, a would-be Thatcher 2.0, she has spent her political career carving out an image of economic pragmatism wrapped in a distinctly ideological package.

Whilst her delivery is far from the ‘Iron Lady’, her latest move—seemingly pandering to Reform voters by stepping back from the UK’s Net Zero commitments—feels less like a principled stance and more like a political gambit that could backfire spectacularly.

It’s not just political commentators raising their eyebrows at Badenoch’s latest pronouncements; even the usually diplomatic business leaders are pushing back. Rain Newton-Smith, CEO of the Confederation of British Industry (CBI), issued a stark warning: now is not the time to retreat from green growth. Her words carried weight, highlighting that the UK’s Net Zero economy grew by a staggering 10% last year, contributing £83 billion to the national coffers. This isn’t fringe economics—it’s hard, tangible, economic success. Yet Badenoch, with a seemingly calculated nod to Reform’s climate-sceptic base, appears willing to put it all at risk.

This latest shift is, of course, all about votes. With Reform UK nipping at the Tories’ heels in the polls, Badenoch knows that unless she can claw back support from the right, she has no chance of winning a general election. So, what better way to appeal to the disgruntled, anti-establishment, anti-green contingent of Reform voters than by rolling back commitments to Net Zero? After all, Nigel Farage and his ilk have long derided green policies as expensive, unnecessary, and an imposition on ‘hard-working Britons’ (a phrase that remains undefined but is nonetheless deployed with alarming regularity).

But here’s the problem: business leaders, investors, and economists all know that Net Zero isn’t just about virtue-signalling or appeasing climate activists. It’s about jobs, investment, and long-term economic security. The UK has built a reputation as a leader in green finance and clean energy investment, and businesses have made decisions based on the assumption that the government will continue down this path. U-turning now risks shattering that trust and driving investment elsewhere.

Badenoch and her supporters like to present this as a simple choice between economic pragmatism and Net Zero idealism. The argument goes that ordinary people shouldn’t have to bear the financial burden of green policies, that energy bills are too high, and that prioritising economic growth means loosening environmental commitments. But this is a false dichotomy.

The reality, as Newton-Smith pointed out, is that the transition to Net Zero is itself an engine of economic growth. From offshore wind to hydrogen power, from battery technology to carbon capture, the UK has been at the forefront of industries that are not just ‘green’ but fundamentally profitable. And let’s not forget the global context—countries like the US, China, and Germany are pouring billions into their own green economies. If Britain steps back, it doesn’t mean the world stops moving. It just means we get left behind.

There’s something eerily familiar about Badenoch’s rhetoric on Net Zero. The same chest-thumping, short-termist, ‘Britain first’ rhetoric that characterised the Brexit campaign is now being deployed to justify environmental backpedalling. And much like Brexit, this shift is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of global economic realities.

Brexiteers argued that leaving the EU would free the UK from economic constraints and allow it to chart its own course. In reality, businesses faced increased red tape, supply chain chaos, and a loss of international investment confidence. The same fate awaits the green economy if Badenoch follows through with her anti-Net Zero pivot.

Investors crave certainty. They don’t pour billions into industries that might be thrown under the bus in the next election cycle. The UK’s commitment to Net Zero has been one of the few constants in an otherwise chaotic political landscape, giving businesses the confidence to innovate and expand. Throwing that certainty into doubt isn’t just environmentally reckless—it’s economically suicidal.

The Cost of Doing Nothing

Badenoch’s strategy might win her a few Reform voters, but it will come at an enormous cost. First, the economic damage—if businesses sense that the UK is no longer a reliable partner in the green transition, they will take their money elsewhere. Second, the diplomatic fallout—while the world moves towards cleaner, greener economies, Britain will be left looking like the petulant child refusing to play along. And finally, the electoral miscalculation—yes, there is a faction of voters who oppose Net Zero measures, but the vast majority of the British public, including the all-important younger demographic, support ambitious action on climate change.

Badenoch might think she’s playing to the crowd, but it’s the wrong crowd. The voters who care most about Net Zero rollbacks are already in Reform’s camp, and the voters who might have been open to her leadership will be repelled by what looks like cynical, short-term politicking.

Badenoch is at a crossroads. She can either stand firm in the knowledge that Net Zero is not just an environmental commitment but an economic necessity, or she can continue to chase the Reform vote, gambling with Britain’s economic future in the process. If she chooses the latter, she may find that what seemed like a clever political manoeuvre ends up being the undoing of both her leadership and the country’s long-term prosperity.

The choice is hers, but the consequences will be ours to bear.

Read more:
Kemi Badenoch’s Net Zero U-turn: A Political Play or a Policy Disaster?