I've made £200m as an entrepreneur. There is only one tax that can save Britain in the Budget - Simon Dolan

Get serious about the tax burden

For a start, we must stop pretending that the current tax burden is remotely sustainable. Britain hasn’t taxed this heavily since the 1940s, and the consequences are obvious.

Wealth creators are leaving, investment is cooling, and entrepreneurs now talk about London the way they once talked about Paris: culturally rich but economically self-sabotaging.

Politicians and lefties sneer at those who leave, but when you treat productive people like an ATM, they eventually go somewhere their hard work is respected.

It isn’t unpatriotic. I’d argue the opposite. Only when the Socialists finally run out of other people's money will they realise who was bankrolling their fantasy economy.

A flat tax system would raise more revenue and get us back to a position where success is rewarded, and young people feel they have a stake in society.

Why don't governments adopt it? Simple: it rewards success, and you can't win elections these days by telling voters they might have to stand on their own two feet.

There would, of course, be less need to raise taxes in the first place if we would instead get a grip on our spending. Starmer and Reeves have already embarrassingly climbed down on welfare once, but they can’t run away from it forever.

Depression, anxiety and stress are part of being alive, not disabilities requiring lifelong taxpayer support. It helps no one. It traps people by giving them a better pay-day than the working class, and it diverts resources from those who genuinely need help.

The NHS, too, remains politically sacrosanct despite its obvious structural failings. Spending now exceeds £200billion a year, and yet no one can plausibly claim the service is efficient, responsive or fit for purpose.

Politicians have quietly stopped using the phrase “envy of the world” because they can no longer say it without blushing.

We need to stop treating the NHS as an object of worship and start treating it as the vast, unwieldy bureaucracy it truly is. Alternatives exist. We just aren't allowed to talk about them because the NHS has become a religion in this country.

Bring down the lanyard class and cut bureaucracy 

Reeves insists that her “modern industrial strategy” and planning reforms will spark investment. Business Secretary Peter Kyle has even been taking to the airwaves in the past few days (with a straight face) espousing that Labour has a pro-business short-, medium- and long-term plan.

How can that possibly square with Angela Rayner’s workers’ rights bill, for example? Or the disastrous rise of employers’ national insurance contributions? It’s laughable.

All Labour do is create new layers of bureaucracy and central control. Business does not need more pilots, frameworks, oversight boards or “missions”.

It needs permission to build. It needs planning decisions in weeks, not years. It needs regulators who act as enablers, not obstacles.

Britain is now run by the lanyard class - endless managers, coordinators, strategists and compliance officers who multiply paperwork but rarely value.

The UK has regulated itself into paralysis and then wonders why investment goes elsewhere.

Hanging over all of this is the bizarre modern habit of governments leaking their policies to journalists weeks in advance. The former Chief Economist at the Bank of England, Andy Haldane, was right when he said that budget rumours are a key part of the blame for our weak economic growth, as worries over tax hikes hit business and consumer spending.

The Budget should be a tightly kept secret that lands, is voted on and implemented. No wonder this government can't get anything done when they spend half their time leaking to the media to see if their policies can survive X.

What Britain needs is not another timid, pre-leaked, poll-tested Budget designed to avoid offence. It needs courage. It needs a government willing to celebrate success rather than punish it. It needs a Chancellor prepared to say that growth, not envy politics, is what lifts living standards.