It’s not terribly helpful for Keir Starmer that Elon Musk is creating polls on X, asking his 210 million followers if ‘America should liberate the people of Britain from their tyrannical government’. Nor does the Prime Minister seem very happy about the attacks on his record as chief prosecutor, using the Q&A of his healthcare speech this morning to insist that he used his five years in the role to tackle child exploitation ‘head on’.
But the mudslinging back and forth across the pond has buried one of the most worrying indicators for 2025 announced so far: business confidence has sunk to its lowest point since Liz Truss’s infamous mini-Budget. According to the latest poll from the British Chamber of Commerce, 63 per cent of businesses say they are concerned about taxation including National Insurance (this is the highest level on record) while fewer than half of companies report they expect ‘their turnover to increase over the next 12 months’.
It’s yet another blow in an increasingly expanding series: just last week the Financial Times’s survey of economists pointed to disappointing annual growth figures, which they forecast will fall below the Office for Budget Responsibility’s 2 per cent prediction for the year.
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