Stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive…

You don’t make the poor richer by making the rich poorer

Listening to the Today programme on my way to work this morning, I actually heard a government spokesman – the Secretary of State for Health, Wes Streeting no less – say something sensible. He was talking about bringing in a ban on those disgusting high-caffeine, high-energy drinks that kids are mad about, preventing them from being sold to children under the age of 16, putting them on a similar footing, if two years less, to those restrictions on tobacco, vapes and booze.

Of course, there will be youngsters who find their way around such a ban, as they do regularly with all the other forbidden fruits, but it’s a move in the right direction. When you look at the ingredients list on some of those drinks it’s terrifying to think what long-term damage it might do to bodies that, let’s not forget, are still developing.

Anyway, this isn’t about the rights and wrongs of banning Red Bull for 15 year olds, rather it’s about the line that Streeting used: “we want to make sure that retailers have sufficient time and notice to be able to manage the new rules. We want to work with business rather than impose things on business”.

Well, that sounds all good doesn’t it, boys and girls? Shame that that sentiment is coming out of the Department of Health rather than the Exchequer. How much consolation was there with business about the abolition, for businesses of a certain size, of Business Property Relief? I’ll wait…..

I was talking to a few people about this recently, one my fabulous farmer friend, one an independent builder’s merchant (I’m not going to dob them in by naming them), and one in a slightly different sector. All of them said something along the lines of, when we have everything else to worry about – soaring prices, falling prices, slow markets, the weather – here’s another one. What do we do about our parents?

The parents in question are of varying ages, and in varying states of health. None of them doddery, none of them quite in the place where they want to transfer all their assets to their children now, and go and sit their days out in a retirement community solving crossword puzzles and murders. Neither, however, are they so fit-of-fiddle that they could easily contemplate another 10 years steering their family business ship.

The choices seem to be, try and squirrel away enough cash now to pay the tax should the business need to be handed down – not forgetting that it needs to be paid within six months of transfer, regardless of how well the business is doing, transfer the business now, right now, sell up completely, or simply take great care to ensure that the parents outlast the Labour government. Assuming that this is a one-term-wonder of course. That is by no means certain. If Reform do enough to be a proper challenge to the Conservatives, they might just split the vote, allowing a Labour victory again. It’s happened before.

Another option might be to just keep campaigning. Use the organisations like the BMF, the NFU, the local MPs to keep the dialogue going with the government. To really try and make them see that penalising family firms – and farms – who employ local people, who are the backbone of UK business, who feed not just the economy but us, just because a few farmers own half a county, is not just short-sighted, but a betrayal of some of the hard-working families that the government professes to be on the side of.