Your boozer’s future is more important than the silly things Labour is wasting your money on
Over Christmas, I went for a long walk with my family.
We rambled across fields and hedgerows, we hopped over stiles and we splashed through muddy puddles, until we got to the point when we were pretty cold and fed up. And then we went to the pub.
Something most Labour MPs don’t understand is that pubs aren’t the same as bars and restaurants in London – important though these are. They serve a completely different purpose. They are the places that knit our towns and villages together.
That cold winter’s day, sitting in front of a roaring fire, people were catching up with friends and family. They were basking in the warmth of a room full of strangers, and many were enjoying the only social interaction they would have that day.
Pubs are part of the fabric of our nation – or at least in many places they used to be. Because in Britain today, we are losing a pub nearly every single day.
In government, we did what we could to support them. We slashed their business rates during the pandemic. We reformed alcohol duty and made it so that you’d always pay less tax on a pint bought in a pub than in the supermarket. And we helped hundreds of communities buy their local pubs to save them from closure.
It wasn’t enough for every pub, but it made a big difference for many.
Instead of keeping up this support, the Labour Government has seemingly decided to kick pubs while they’re down.
First, they hiked up taxes on employing people with the Jobs Tax. Then they oversaw pubs’ energy bills going up, despite promising, pre-election, to bring them down.
And now, hidden in the small print of the recent Budget, they’ve slapped our pubs with an average 76 per cent rise in their business rates over the next three years.
Like so many of Britain’s small businesses, pubs are being treated by Labour like cash cows to milk, instead of as places to protect. Just another group of people to squeeze to fund their pet projects and handouts.
Well, the Conservatives have not giving up on saving the Great British Pub. Since we have left office, things have got a whole lot harder for them. And so, under my leadership, we are going be bolder and take radical action to save your local boozer.
Starting by scrapping business rates for thousands of pubs. Not cutting rates, not freezing them, not pausing them until a later date. Abolishing them entirely for thousands. The future of pubs is more important than any number of silly things the Government is currently wasting money on.
We have identified billions of pounds of savings from things like bringing down the welfare bill and reducing the size of the Civil Service.
And under our golden economic rule, we will use half of that money to pay down the deficit, and with the rest we are going to reduce the insane tax burden crippling our country. Pubs and hospitality businesses are going to be some of the first to benefit.
Then we are going to bring down pubs’ energy bills. Like all British businesses, our pubs are currently paying some of highest energy bills anywhere in the developed world. They are being crippled by net zero dogma and a failure to invest in domestic energy production.
We will end that. Our Cheap Power Plan won’t just save the average family £165. It’s going to save the average pub more than £1,000.
These measures are just they start, as the Conservatives continue to work on our detailed plan to get Britain working again.
The Telegraph is right to be campaigning about the future of the British pub.
Pubs are the canary in the coal mine of the Britain we want to be. If we lose them, we don’t just lose a load of small businesses and the centre of local communities – we lose a huge part of our way of life.
This article was originally published in The Telegraph
