What just happened
The new Prime Minister has put business rates at the heart of his first Budget on 28 October: 20 per cent relief for pubs and clubs, and a promise to “look at business rates more broadly for high street businesses“.
An uncomfortable truth first: ask on any high street who stands up for the shopkeeper, and few will say the Liberal Democrats. Yet on business rates we have carried the best answer for eight years. Labour is now campaigning on ground that has been ours for years, though the message has never reached most voters.
Why this is liberal ground
A high street is not just an economy. It is where a community sees itself: the baker who knows your order, the salon giving a teenager her first job, the pub where the ward hears its own news. It is also liberalism in practice: hundreds of people running their own lives, answerable to their customers rather than a head office, with power spread along a street instead of held by one chain or one landlord.
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