Busiest time of the year for hospitality and the industry is SUFFERING. The last two budgets, on top of an already immensely heavy tax burden. Skyrocketing rates. Insurance costs exploding. Energy costs soaring. Hospitality runs on tight margins. It cannot absorb endless tax rises, stealth charges, and regulatory costs imposed by people who have earned a penny in the private sector. It will break. It is breaking. How can Reeves not understand it? Someone running a pub will look at these numbers at just not hire the additional staff, not invest in the new beer garden, not refurbish the pub, not pour any money into the local economy. It DRIES UP. What's the point? When it's all just taken in tax? Why bother? So there aren't jobs for local youngsters, there aren't new contracts for redecorating firms, there is nothing. I just cannot fathom how those in Government don't understand this. There is one answer. CUT TAX. Brutally cut tax. Everything else falls around that. One way, and that's to make the risk worth it. They want to grow the economy. We all do. But tax, tax, tax is not the way. It will never work. You need to give people INCENTIVES. And I don't mean back to pre-Labour levels - people forget how bad it has been for years. Slash it all back, in the most spectacular way. Make the gamble worth taking. If they do expand the business, hire more staff, invest their capital? It has to be WORTH IT. The risk is big, but the possible reward must also be big. ANYBODY who has run a small business understands this - it is so painfully obvious. Can you imagine how fantastically well the British economy would prosper in a low tax, low regulation environment? Instead we have this - a filthy tax swamp that is suffocating our rainmakers. Nothing will change until we get MPs, and civil servants, who have built businesses in the private sector. I sit on the Public Accounts Committee in Parliament, listening to these people who take/implement the decisions. They are clueless about the real world. Honestly, clueless. Let's get them running a pub in the current climate. How would Reeves fare? She'd be in tears by the end of the day. And I mean that. They simply do not understand the pressure. The current approach is entirely unsustainable. It hasn't worked, it isn't working, it won't work. First step in the immediate short term? Review business rates changes. It cannot go ahead. That has to change. It has to. Or there won't be any pubs left for Christmas next year.