Small Business of the Month Award

Dear Editor,

Sarah Russell MP’s saccharine Facebook reel extolling her “Small Business of the Month Award” represents the apogee of political disingenuity. In it, she professes to champion independent enterprises that “keep our towns vibrant, create jobs, and bring our community together.” One might reasonably ask: if this government truly esteems such businesses, why has it systematically rendered the commercial milieu far more onerous and punitive since assuming office?

This is performative theatre at its most egregious. Labour’s fiscal onslaught — elevating employers’ National Insurance Contributions to 15% while eviscerating the threshold to a mere £5,000 — constitutes a brazen levy on employment itself. Hundreds of thousands of smaller firms have borne the brunt, their ledgers strained by this stealth tax on jobs. Compounded by successive National Living Wage escalations, proliferating regulatory encumbrances, the inexorable creep of Making Tax Digital mandates, and perennial business rates afflictions, the cumulative effect is unmistakable: constricted margins, curtailed hiring, and small-business sentiment languishing at nadir levels.

Yet rather than ameliorate these self-inflicted wounds, we are proffered platitudes and a glossy award scheme — shortlisting and public voting as panacea. How exquisitely convenient: inflict the pain through rapacious taxation and bureaucratic proliferation, then masquerade as benefactor with digital laurels. Small proprietors do not crave baubles or nomination portals; they require respite from the relentless fiscal predation and administrative asphyxiation that erode viability.

Congleton’s independent traders have exhibited admirable tenacity amid adversity. They merit authentic succour — substantive reductions in payroll burdens, meaningful rates reform, and a diminution of red tape — not vapid virtue-signalling from a representative whose party has exacerbated the very exigencies it now purports to assuage.

Hypocrisy, when cloaked in community-minded rhetoric, remains hypocrisy. It is high time for tangible alleviation over theatrical posturing.

Yours faithfully,
Andy Large

Alsager West


   

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