Chancellor Reeves needs to get the economy moving to bolster our defences (Image: Getty)
If PM Keir Starmer is serious about boosting military spending to support and stand up to , he’ll need a booming economy.
Cutting foreign aid won’t fund the missiles, aircraft, tanks, drones and troops we’ll need as pulls back from .
It wouldn’t be easy finding the cash at any time. But especially now, with the UK economy under siege from its own Chancellor.
Every day brings alarming new evidence of the damage Reeves is doing, as she forces the UK to the brink of recession.
She’s done a lot of terrible things, from axing the to slapping inheritance tax on farmers.
But her biggest tactical error was to heap £25billion worth of taxes on UK businesses, mostly by hiking employers national insurance (NI) bills.
These measures don’t even come into force until April, but they’re already wreaking havoc.
By some estimates, the NI hike will destroy 300,000 jobs, and all the tax revenues they would have generated.
While also adding to the benefits bill.
Today, we’ve got yet more evidence – as if any was needed – of the damage done.
Yet another major business is pulling back on UK investment in response to Reeves’s war on enterprise.
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This time, it’s the PPHE Hotel Group, which runs a £2.2billion portfolio of hotels across the UK and Europe.
Co-chief executive Greg Hegarty says he’s giving up on the UK to prioritise Spain and Italy, where conditions are “more favourable to the hospitality sector and easier for a business to grow”.
That’s a damning indictment.
The UK should be a proud entrepreneurial economy but Labour has never embraced that. Instead, it competes to tax and regulate businesses to death.
PPHE is just the latest example of the damage done. The entire hospitality industry is up in arms over Reeves’s NI raid, .
Many UK businesses were already running on razor-thin margins. The Budget was the final straw.
If Putin had inflicted this much damage to our productive capacity, we’d be up in arms.
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UK businesses are now slashing jobs at the fastest rate in more than four years, .
Reeves has also been , borrowing nearly £13billion more than expected.
Now she’s scrambling to slash spending and potentially hike taxes again in her Spring Statement on 26 March to plug the gap.
To be fair, the squandered billions on everything from HS2 to dodgy contracts, while gutting the armed forces.
Between 2010 and 2015, the Tory-lead coalition cut the Ministry of Defence’s budget by 16%.
But it’s horrible to see fiddling the figures to pretend he’s spending more than he really is. Putin will see straight through that.
The home front needs fixing if we’re serious about taking the fight to .
Instead of sabotaging the economy, Reeves needs to rebuild it. And fast.