𝓤𝓷𝓲𝓽𝓮𝓭 𝓝𝓮𝔀𝓼

If you want to understand what makes a place tick, spend an evening in its local pub. It’s true wherever you go, town or country, but sitting in a village pub, you can meet everyone in a matter of a couple of hours. Countryside pubs aren’t just a business, they’re the beating heart of community life, and often the centrepiece of the village. Predictably, Labour doesn’t understand this. To them, pubs up and down the country are just another sector to tax, regulate and squeeze until the pips squeak.

The hospitality industry more broadly has been subjected to a relentless assault since Sir Keir Starmer and his Chancellor Rachel Reeves took office, and while the whole sector reels, the rural pub is sadly facing a cliff-edge because of this Government’s incompetence. First came the hike in employers’ National Insurance contributions, a body blow to an industry that employs hundreds of thousands of people, many of them in small, family-run establishments where every penny counts.

Then came the changes to business rates, a tax system so antiquated that it actively punishes businesses for improving their premises. Add to that the persistent mule-like stubbornness to reform the duty on alcohol, and pubs face a regulatory burden that would make a Soviet commissar blush.

The British Beer and Pub Association has warned that thousands of pubs are at risk of closure. Thousands.

When a village loses its pub, as so many have, it doesn’t just lose a business. It loses its hub and the place where the elderly pop in for a chat and a shandy. Where young families gather for Sunday lunch and where the cricket club celebrates victories and drowns sorrows after defeats. I do not believe that metropolitan politicians grasp this because they have never lived it.

Our Government is presiding over policies that will decimate the very institutions that create genuine community bonds. They will wring their hands about loneliness and isolation, then cheerfully tax the village pub out of existence.

My advice to the Chancellor, if she cares to listen, is simple. Get yourself to a proper countryside pub – not one tarted up for London weekenders, but a working village local – and sit there for an evening. Watch the landlord juggle staffing costs and supplier invoices and talk to the regulars about what the pub means to them.

That being said, it may be hard for Rachel to find one that will let her in. Hundreds have reportedly barred Labour MPs from coming in. And, with the ruinous assault on their bottom lines, who can blame them?

At last there is some good news, and all too often that gets sidelined. In all the bleakness and misery, a lifeline has been thrown to the Somerset town of Yeovil, with a new helicopter contract awarded to the firm Leonardo.

It has been months of wrangling to get the contract signed, but for the thousands of people living in the town whose livelihoods depend on the manufacturing jobs it brings, it is a blessed relief. I went to school in Yeovil, and increasingly, the town was falling behind through no fault of its own.

High street shops are boarded up, and fewer and fewer people are working. It once had a proud manufacturing heritage, and those who worked at the chopper plant were pleased to be doing their part to keep it alive. It may seem like small fry in Westminster, but the new contract is a huge win for this West Country community.

Britain is facing a crisis of national importance, and for once it isn’t in Downing Street. News reaches the agricultural press that there’s a shortage of sheep shearers. Apparently, there are not enough people willing to spend their days wrestling 80-pound ewes in the blazing June heat.

We’re told it’s due to a lack of visas for overseas workers, which could mean thousands of sheep will go unshorn this summer. When I was younger, we used to get a man over to wrestle some Jacobs sheep and set about them with the clippers.

It was great entertainment for me, and a decent day’s work for the shearer. This summer, the ewes could be left looking like woolly blimps wandering the hillsides. Shearing is backbreaking work that requires genuine skill, but fortunately, I’ve got a solution.

Perhaps we could retrain some of the civil servants currently employed to think up new regulations for farmers, and get them out shearing instead? They might learn something useful, though I suspect most of them would take one look at an irritable ram and decide the paperwork was not so bad after all.