It’s a curious thing, this sense of waiting for a Budget. For most, it’s an exercise in mild anxiety – a check to see whether wine duty is up again or whether you can still afford to fill the tank. But for business owners in London right now, the wait for Rachel Reeves’ first full Budget on 26 November feels less like a nervous twitch and more like a death row countdown.
Charlie Gilkes, who co-founded Inception Group and runs some of London’s most imaginative bars – Mr Fogg’s, Bunga Bunga, the kind of places where post-pandemic optimism briefly came alive again – summed it up with alarming accuracy: “It feels like waiting on death row, waiting until the very last moment to let us know whether she will grant a stay of execution.”
And you can see his point. Reeves’ Budget, which has been rescheduled, delayed, and wrapped in more mystery than a Bond villain’s plot, is arriving under the kind of cloud that usually means someone’s about to pay – and it’ll probably be London.
For weeks now, the rumours have been circulating through Westminster corridors like wasps around a picnic: a wealth tax here, a mansion tax there, a shake-up of partnerships, a business rates “super multiplier”. Each idea lands like another nail being gently tapped into the coffin of the capital’s competitiveness.
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