I fear my pub will shut down for good in a matter of years and Rachel Reeves will be to blame - Adam Brooks

Let’s start with the carnage in hospitality, the sector they love to ignore until it suits their photo ops. Since the Budget dropped last autumn, around 110,000 hospitality jobs have vanished, gone, wiped out. These aren’t abstract statistics, these are pubs, restaurants, cafes, night time venues, the lifeblood of British communities.

The very sector that dragged this country out of the Covid slump, is now being choked to death by Labour’s tax hikes, NIC increases, and the scrapping of much of the rates relief.

I run a pub. I live this every day. When they hiked National Insurance contributions, they didn’t target big corporations hiding in tax havens, they hit us, the employers on the ground, who actually give people jobs. Taking on more staff is now a luxury. Most of us have done the same thing: we’ve cut shifts, cut hours, and cut the wage bill just to stay afloat. How can you grow a workforce when the Government punishes you for employing people?

And the irony? - Hospitality has always been the springboard out of economic downturns. After Covid, it was pubs, bars, and restaurants bringing people back to the high streets, generating tax revenue, and giving young people a foot into work. Now those same businesses are shutting at record breaking levels, because Labour ripped away the breathing space we desperately needed.

Then there’s the ticking time bomb they refuse to discuss, one million young Britons aged 16–24 are NEETs - not in education, not in training, not in work. That’s a million young people cut adrift while Labour tells us everything’s fine and that taxing employers is “responsible economics.”

Responsible? It’s economic vandalism. You don’t get young people into work by making it impossible for businesses to hire them.

And let’s talk about small businesses, the supposed backbone of the British economy. Labour treat us like an afterthought.

Between soaring costs, pointless regulation, scrapped reliefs and higher payroll taxes, thousands are shutting up shop for good. You can’t run a business when every pound you earn is swallowed by the state before you’ve even paid your staff, suppliers or utilities.

And Rachel Reeves? She has no clue, she talks like an accountant and governs like a bureaucrat. She is totally out of her depth, and we’re all paying for it.

The reality is brutal, Labour is crashing the economy in real time, and the people losing out aren’t lobbyists in Westminster, it’s the British public, our young people, our small business owners, our workers, and the very sectors that hold communities together. Hospitality is hanging on by a thread. If I’m still a publican in three or four years, I’ll be amazed, and thousands of others are saying the same.

We don’t need platitudes, slogans and hashtags about “growth”, we need a government that actually understands that if you want jobs, you have to stop strangling the people who create them. Let businesses breathe, let us hire, let us invest. Instead, Labour is squeezing the life out of us and pretending it’s progress.

Britain needs change, not another lecture from people who’ve never signed a payslip or paid a wage bill. Until this Government is removed and replaced with one that actually respects employers, workers and enterprise, the decline will continue. And the tragedy is this, it didn’t have to be this way.