If the writing wasn’t on the wall for UK business owners present and future when Labour won a huge 172 seat majority, it is now as the Government have set its HMRC attack dogs on anyone they consider to be ‘rich’.
Officially HMRC’s crack troops targeting the so-called ‘rich’ are known as the Wealthy and Mid-Size Business Compliance (WMBC) team – you would have thought they might make their attack on British business a little less obvious!
But no, this elite squad does exactly what it says ‘on the tin’; well almost, depending on how rich you feel if you’re making £200k a year, or living in a two million quid house.
Last year this group paid £119 billion in personal tax, which amounts to 25% of the UK’s total tax take. Talk about milking the proverbial cash cow until it keels over and dies!
I remember a speech by former Bank of England Governor, Mervyn King, where he pointed out to the business owners present that every penny a government has to spend is generated by businesses. It’s a very simple point, but one that Rachel Reeves and Co. fail to understand or refuse to acknowledge.
Worse still, this bunch of champagne socialists, most of whom have never had a real job in their lives, can’t see that targeting UK businesses and entrepreneurs is a brutally effective way of strangling the economy. Maybe not as incendiary as Loopy Liz’s 2022 mini-budget, albeit she didn’t take a sniper shot at business, but nevertheless targeting small and medium sized businesses (SMEs) is economic suicide.
Napoleon famously said that England was a ‘nation of shopkeepers’ a comment that was intended as an insult, but in truth was the polar opposite. Today, as was the case in 1794, the British economy is a sum of the 99% of SMEs, which in 2024 amounted to 5,500,000 SMEs battling to make a quid and keep workers in a job.
You’d think they’d go after the foreign mega-corps who duck and dive their way through the small print to pay as little as sod all. But no, the current anti-business pro freebie administration is zooming in on the far easier target that is UK PLC.
More than 11,000 millionaires have left the UK in the past year, including myself, which is not a good sign for future investment. But what is far worse is a government policy of financial persecution against anyone who goes into business for themselves, makes a few quid, and creates wealth and jobs.
With national debt at around the same level as GDP, the UK desperately needs to make a huge financial comeback, and after Rachel Reeves’ spending review, the country needs growth to service our current debt, but also the billions more promised by the Chancellor.
Spending money on housing, health and the military are no bad things, but it all needs to be paid for, and battering SME businesses in 2025 will not pay dividends in the future.
In fact, all that will happen is we will have less income and more bills.
