There is something exquisitely British about watching a government try to sweet-talk the very people it is about to fleece. Like putting out the good biscuits before the bailiffs arrive.
And so we have Sir Keir Starmer — a man whose natural habitat is somewhere between a Select Committee hearing and an apologetic queue at Pret — inviting the grandees of British business to No 10 for what Downing Street insists on calling an “informal reception”.
NatWest, Sage, Marks & Spencer, Taylor Wimpey, Octopus Energy… all the familiar names trooped dutifully through the famous black door, like polite wedding guests who know full well that the groom is a wrong ’un but have still bought a gift from the list because, well, it’s tradition. And what did they get for their trouble? A drink, a handshake, and the creeping realisation that Rachel Reeves is sharpening her fiscal guillotine for 26 November.
Because let’s be honest: corporate Britain is not stupid. It can smell a tax raid long before it hits. Businesses up and down the country have been braced for this budget ever since Reeves’s first go at the Treasury last year, when she hiked employer national insurance and the minimum wage so aggressively you could practically hear the collective groan from every payroll director in the land. That budget, you’ll remember, destroyed in about nine minutes the painstaking courtship Labour had undertaken in the years after Corbyn — a sort of political couples therapy designed to assure business leaders that yes, the party had changed; no, nobody was coming for their yachts; yes, they could come out from behind the sofa.
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