BUSINESS EYE: Not our finest hour...

If you are in business you already understand the huge capacity government has for making our lives more difficult. Larger government generally means a less prosperous country.

It is the added value generated by private sector businesses which both keeps most people from the dole and is the font of the taxation that pays for all we hold dear.

Without taxed added value, there can, in the long run, be no resources for our roads, hospitals or schools because you can’t borrow your way to economic sustainability. We have to competitively earn our place in the world. It is business that does this, not government.

My own business turns over around £5m and even if it makes no net profit at all, it will still generate for the Treasury around £1.5m in VAT, income taxes, national insurance taxes, fuel taxes, insurance taxes, flight taxes, business rates and so on.

Taking a hard approach to Brexit is not helping most of us because it is undermining a volatile weak currency which means everything we have to buy abroad costs much more.

Last year our company profit was £150,000. The exchange rate shift alone since Brexit has cost us £200,000.

But it’s much worse because choosing to unnecessarily shrink the economy by more than needed and aggressively driving up inflation will undermine consumer confidence and could easily send us spiralling into the horrors of stagflation.

The Government has made it easier to turn offices into flats with the direct consequence that we are being asked to move out of one office to make way for apartments. Where will the inhabitants find work if the offices all get developed?

The rise in the minimum wage is causing huge impacts for small businesses in particular, as are the now compulsory contributions to pension schemes. These are massive burdens on the small guy.

We’ve just received a letter indicating the need for a business rates revaluation, no doubt to try and squeeze even more from the remaining pips. Adding insult to injury, AVDC is leading the national local authority charge into setting up in competition with its own business base.

You couldn’t make it up.

It seems our unelected government is choosing deliberate irresponsibility and recklessness as its policy guideline. It is playing fast and furious with our prosperity, and, more alarmingly with the futures of our children and grandchildren.

Not our finest hour.

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