If Britain really is still a nation of shopkeepers, the Government seems to be picking its enemies rather unwisely with its plans to ramp up business rates – in some cases by as much as 400 per cent over the next five years. The policy – and the somewhat bungled attempt by Communities Secretary Sajid Javid to defend the plans – has already sparked a big row, which shows no signs of calming down. The Daily Mail is clear who we should point the finger at: Sajid Javid. The paper says the Communities Secretary made a ’magnificent’ arrival on the frontline of British politics with his speech in 2015 in which he promised that the Government would be a ‘true friend’ to business owners. He seems to have forgotten those warm words, the Mail says. After all, with some 500,000 firms looking at 300 per cent rises in business rates from April, Javid is less interested in ‘speaking up for those who will suffer from the new rates’ and more keen instead to ‘defend the indefensible’. Shops, pubs and business could be forced to close as a result of the changes; and this ‘iniquitous tax takes no account of companies’ ability to pay’. What makes this tax worse , the Mail says, is that some of those bigger firms – companies like Amazon – will actually be better off – a bitter pill to swallow given that, the Mail says, such firms have ‘done so much to destroy the traditional High Street’ in the first place. The Mail – which has so forcefully thrown its weight behind Theresa May – puts Javid on warning: he must ‘honour his promises of May 2015’, the paper concludes.
Sajid Javid certainly hasn’t helped himself , says the Times. The Communities Secretary ‘arguably poured fuel on the fire by dismissing’ the worries of Tory backbench MPs – who, the paper says, are ‘the only opposition Mrs May truly needs to worry about’ these days. There’s a chance that Philip Hammond will shake-up this policy in his budget, says the Times, which calls on the Chancellor to do so quickly in order to put small businesses at ease. But the paper also says this row touches on a much wider point: Theresa May has said that ‘the EU referendum was about more than a referendum’ and the PM has made much of championing corporate reform. Yet the irony, says the Times, is that Brexit will mean she has to court ‘exactly the sort of vast businesses that many of her supporters feel were getting altogether too much attention already’. This ‘burgeoning Conservative rebellion’ should serve as an ‘early warning’ to the Government of how carefully it ‘must tread’ to balance both ‘the economic rewards of big business and the social rewards of smaller ones’.
This week’s Brexit debate in the House of Lords meanwhile has brought the upper chamber into the firing line in the Sun. The Lords is, the paper says, ‘a bloated, undemocratic embarrassment in need of total reinvention’. Brexit will give the Prime Minister an opportunity to shake-up Britain for the better. She should start, the Sun suggests, by making a step ‘to improve our democracy’ and halve the number of peers. The paper lists a litany of failings by those in the Lords, saying that too many show up just to collect their £300-a-day allowance, while some barely bother to vote. It’s been a ‘long time coming’, but the Brexit debate has confirmed it: ‘unelected codgers and useless cronies should play no part in making laws’, the Sun concludes.
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