There is a particular kind of dinner I have, every couple of months, in a particular kind of place, a Soho members’ club that lets you bring more than three people without an interrogation, in this case, with a particular kind of British technology founder.

He is, by his late thirties, on his third successful company. He has, between them, raised something north of £180 million in venture capital. He has, currently, about 220 employees in London, with another fifty due to be hired in the coming twelve months. He has, last week, sold a further $40 million tranche of his Series C to two American funds.

And he has, somewhere between his second and third glass of red, told me that he is moving the company’s headquarters to New York. Not on principle. Not on tax. Not on regulation. Not even, despite the obvious temptation in this column, on the Chancellor. He is moving because the next $200 million he needs, in 18 months, is in New York, and the practical day-to-day life of a CEO in a series of monthly trips to a city eight time zones from his children is, frankly, too painful. So he is moving the family. The London office will remain. It will, over time, get smaller. A version of this conversation has happened, by my count, with at least twelve British founders I know personally in the last two years.

Britain does not, in 2026, have a start-up problem. We start-up exquisitely. We have, by any international comparison, more new technology businesses per capita than nearly any other developed economy. Cambridge is, on its own, one of the great clusters of the world. London’s software and fintech ecosystems are deeper than Berlin’s, deeper than Paris’s, comparable to New York’s on most measures, with a couple of exceptions. We have brilliant universities, a working tax-incentive regime in EIS, a meaningful angel community, and a steady flow of seed and Series A capital.

What we have is a stay-at-home problem.

The numbers are visible if anyone bothers to look. UK technology IPOs, by listed value, are running at less than 12 per cent of US listings adjusted for relative GDP. UK Series C and onwards rounds are dominated, by deal count, by American lead investors. The proportion of UK technology companies founded in 2018 that have, by 2025, relocated their corporate domicile overseas, to the US, to Delaware, to Ireland, to Singapore, is now over 22 per cent. The proportion of all UK-founded unicorns that listed on the New York Stock Exchange or Nasdaq, rather than the London Stock Exchange, is over 80 per cent for the last decade. Eighty.

Why? It is not, despite the City lobbying, primarily a tax problem. American capital gains rates are not, in any meaningful sense, more friendly to founders than British rates. It is not, despite a great deal of Treasury-led discussion, a corporate-tax problem. The US corporate tax rate, when you blend federal and state, is comparable. It is not, despite the political mood music, a regulatory problem in the technology sectors that matter, the FCA, where it counts for fintech, is a notably more friendly regulator than its American equivalent.

It is, primarily, a depth-of-capital-pool problem. The UK pension system, despite the most articulate efforts of the Edinburgh Reforms and the Mansion House Compact and a half-dozen subsequent initiatives, allocates an embarrassingly small proportion of its £3 trillion of assets to growth-stage British equities. Canadian pension funds are, statistically, more invested in British scale-ups than British pension funds. This is the absurdity of the present situation: the world’s ninth-largest pension industry, hosted in Britain, is not investing in British growth, and is being out-deployed, in British growth equity, by Canadians, Australians, and Americans.

Fix the depth, and the rest of the problem largely goes with it. There are about three things to do. First, get UK Defined Contribution pension money, which is, by the way, growing at over £100 billion a year, into a properly structured British scale-up vehicle, at a meaningful target allocation, with a proper governance overlay. Second, restore the pre-2008 status of the London Stock Exchange as a competitive listing venue for technology businesses, by reforming the dual-class share structures and the listing-rules architecture that has kept it stranded in the era of utilities and miners. Third, make the EIS reliefs permanent, generous, and unfussy at the seed stage, so that the early-stage capital remains the easiest tier to raise.

None of this is impossible. None of this is even, in the international context, particularly bold. The Australians did most of it in 2008. The Canadians did most of it in 2014. The Singaporeans built theirs in around six years. We are, in 2026, still pondering it.

And in the meantime, my Soho friend will, in the autumn, leave. He will take the family. He will keep the London office. The American round will close. The next British unicorn, and there will be a next British unicorn, will, on present trajectory, list, again, in New York. The Mayoral candidates will, on the day after, all denounce the loss to “Brand London”. And the bottle of red, in our particular Soho members’ club, will be uncorked, again, by someone else.

We start-up brilliantly, in this country. We just need, finally, to learn how to keep them. The May locals, it turns out, are not the only thing on the ballot.

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Britain doesn’t have a start-up problem, it has a stay-at-home problem

Tomorrow is May Day, and somewhere in the middle of the country, a married couple in their early forties is opening up a small bakery for the third Friday in succession on which they have not, between them, drawn a salary.

They started the business in 2022. They re-mortgaged the house. They missed two of their daughter’s school plays last term, including the one where she had a line. They have not, for nineteen months, taken a day off. They are, on the official ONS labour-market classification, “self-employed”, which is to say they are not, technically, considered workers at all.

I would like, on this particular May Day, to suggest that they are.

There is a particular sleight-of-hand in British political language that has, over the last fifty years or so, produced an increasingly narrow definition of the word “worker”. A worker, in current usage, is someone who is paid by an employer in return for doing a job, ideally with a contract, a payslip, and a pension contribution. The “workers’ movement”, in modern parlance, is the political and industrial movement representing exactly that figure. Anyone outside the definition is, by implication, something else, an entrepreneur, an investor, a self-employed person, a small-business owner, a family-firm founder. They get other ministries, other sympathies, other adjectives. They do not, on the whole, get celebrated on May Day.

This is, frankly, ridiculous. The bakery couple work, on the broad numbers, more hours than any of their employees. They take home, on average, less per hour than their employees. They have less holiday, less protection, less pension, less sick pay, less of everything. Their economic risk is total. Their political clout is somewhere between negligible and non-existent. Their public image, in much of British political discourse, is closer to that of the tax-avoiding non-dom than that of the sympathetic NHS porter, which is, when you actually meet either, a perfect inversion of reality.

There are, by the latest ONS estimate, just over 4.3 million self-employed workers in the UK. Of those, around 600,000 run businesses with employees of their own. They collectively contribute approximately £303 billion to UK GDP, which is more than the entire UK financial-services sector. They pay corporation tax, dividend tax, capital gains tax, employer NICs, business rates, VAT, and insurance premium tax. They keep more than three million Britons in PAYE jobs. They are, in any meaningful definition, the productive backbone of the country.

And, for at least the last decade, they have been treated by every successive UK administration with a mixture of mild benign neglect and occasional, almost incidental, cruelty. IR35 was a cruelty. Making Tax Digital is a cruelty. The narrowing of business property relief on inheritance tax has been a cruelty. The withdrawal of various small expenses and reliefs has been a cruelty. None of these things has been done because anyone in Whitehall actively dislikes the small-business owner; it is rather that, in the present political configuration, the small-business owner is too small to matter, too dispersed to organise, and too busy to march. The civil servants drafting the SI get the headline figures right, and the headline figures, individually, are small.

May Day, in its original conception, was a workers’ holiday, but, as anyone with any knowledge of the period will tell you, the “workers” it commemorated were not, exclusively, the wage-labour pay-packet figure of present-day usage. They were the broader productive class: artisans, shopkeepers, mechanics, makers, the journeymen in the literal sense who worked with their own tools to produce something useful. A baker in Walsall, in 2026, getting up at 4am to mix the dough, fits that older definition perfectly. The fact that she has, technically, incorporated herself as a private limited company should not, surely, exclude her from the holiday.

I do not, please understand, wish to undermine the more familiar version of May Day. The march, the bunting, the speeches, the flag, they are part of a recognisable British political tradition that I rather enjoy. I just would like, this year, to make a small modest plea for the inclusion in it of the people whose labour is no less skilled, no less hard-won, no less honest, and considerably less protected, than the labour the day was originally meant to celebrate.

So if you are in the bakery this morning, or the small workshop, or the family-run pub, or the consultancy that lives at the kitchen table, or the farm that has been in your name for thirty years, happy May Day. The country is, despite the available evidence, better off because of you. Take five minutes off, if you can. Drink a coffee. Watch the bunting. And, before you go back to it, remember that whatever the textbook says, and whatever the marching song goes, the work you do is, exactly, work.

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On May Day, spare a thought for the workers who took the risk and built the bloody company

I wrote, last year, about how worried I was for the British rural economy, and a few of you wrote back to ask, kindly, what I thought we should do.

The honest answer, I have realised over the intervening twelve months, is that the most important and most fragile thing we could do is keep the village pub open. I have been thinking about this, since the spring, almost every day. So allow me, this week, the personal column. I think it is the right week for it.

The pub I am writing about, and yes, of course it is a particular pub, is in a small village in Suffolk, on a road that the satnav lies about. It has been there in some form since the 17th century. The current building is largely Georgian, with a Victorian extension and a 1990s kitchen that I would generously describe as character-building. The current tenant has been in place for eleven years. The previous tenant for twenty-three.

It is, by the present trade body’s definition, a “community wet-led” pub. About 60 per cent of its trade is drinks; 30 per cent is food; the remainder is the upstairs rooms, which were converted in the 1990s for the kind of weekending Londoners we used to call “townies” and which we now call, less affectionately, “zoom refugees”. It employs four full-time and seven part-time staff. The full-time staff include the chef, who came up from Hackney during the pandemic and never left, and a young lad of 22 who started as a glass-collector five years ago and has just qualified as cellar-master. The part-time staff are mostly women from the village, two of whom would, in a different country, be working in a primary school that closed in 2019.

It is the wettest, most stubbornly British piece of social infrastructure I know, and it is, on the present rates revaluation, in a kitchen-equipment-replacement cycle that nobody saw coming, and in a year of unusually aggressive energy contracts, about £42,000 a year away from solvency. This is not a private detail. The publican, when I rang him on Monday, told me himself.

There are, in our village, no shops. There has been no post office for fourteen years. The bus runs twice a week. The primary school, in 2019, lost its Year 6 cohort permanently. The doctor’s surgery closed for new patient registrations in 2018 and is, now, more of a dispensing arrangement than a clinic. The church holds services once a fortnight. The mobile library, which had one stop here on a Tuesday afternoon, was wound up in the funding round of 2022. The pub is, in any meaningful sense, what the rest of the village now is.

Were it to close, the geography of village life would not be replaced by something else. There is no shop ready to take over the “community” function. There is no village hall with a working kitchen, it lost its Aga in 2017 and the trustees never raised the £6,200 to replace it. The Cubs, who use the pub’s back room on Wednesdays, would, on past form, drift to a town six miles away and, on past form, shrink. The Sunday lunches, which give an unmarried woman of 78 her main weekly social contact, would not happen. The wakes, and we have had four, this year, in a village of 273, would have to be held in someone’s living room.

I am aware, as I write this, of the metropolitan eyebrow being raised. The countryside has been moaning, the eyebrow says, for as long as anyone can remember, and the countryside is not what it once was. Both of those things, technically, are true. They are also evasions. The countryside is materially different from any other part of England in one specific respect: when its institutions go, there is, almost without exception, no replacement. London has, in any one square mile, three public houses, four cafés, a couple of pubs that aren’t very good, several restaurants and a handful of community spaces that do roughly the same social work between them. Suffolk does not. The English village, almost uniquely in the British Isles, has put all of its community infrastructure into a single building, and that building, increasingly, is the pub.

What would I, accordingly, do? Almost everything I have already proposed in this magazine: VAT at 12.5 per cent for hospitality; a community-pub-specific multiplier on rates; the “asset of community value” reform with the burden of proof reversed onto developers seeking to flat-pack a Grade II listed pub. Plus one more, which I have been quieter about until now: a small, ring-fenced national fund, perhaps £150 million a year, to provide low-interest loans to community pub buyouts in areas where the only alternative is closure. We have such a fund for cinemas. We have a far larger one for football. We do not, anywhere in our policy stack, have one for the rural pub.

We will know, in two or three years, whether we kept these places open. I’ll be in the Suffolk one as long as it’s open. So will, on present form, the village. The country, very quietly, would be better for the same.

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I worry for the rural pub, and yes, this one is personal too

There is a particular kind of silence that descends on a once-busy restaurant when last orders have come and gone, the candles have guttered, and the chef is out the back having a cigarette and contemplating bankruptcy. It is the sound of a small dream dying. And right now, across Britain, that silence is becoming deafening.

I have just returned from dinner at a perfectly nice neighbourhood bistro in west London, where the owner, a man who quit a comfortable banking job to chase the romance of feeding people, confessed somewhere between the burrata and the lamb that he is closing in September. Not because nobody comes. They come. They eat. They tip. They order the second bottle. But the maths, he sighed, no longer mathses.

The story is the same in every postcode. UKHospitality reckons we lost roughly one pub or restaurant every single day last year. The Hospitality Rising figures are grimmer still: chefs walking away, dining rooms going dark, sites being flogged off to coffee chains and vape shops. And yet our Chancellor has decided that what this fragile, brilliant, world-beating sector really needs is a thumping great kicking.

Let us count the bruises. From April 2025, employer National Insurance jumped to 15 per cent. The threshold at which businesses begin paying it was slashed from £9,100 to £5,000, which is a fancy Treasury way of saying that every waiter, every glass-polisher, every Saturday-morning kitchen porter is now considerably more expensive to employ. Throw in the National Living Wage rising to £12.21 an hour, business rates relief shrivelling from 75 per cent to a measly 40 per cent, and a stubborn refusal to cut hospitality VAT to anything resembling our European competitors, and you have what UKHospitality calculated as an additional £3.4 billion annual hit on the sector. Three-point-four. Billion. With a B.

To which Rachel Reeves and Sir Keir Starmer have essentially shrugged and said: tough. Get on with it. Be more productive. Use AI. Yes, really, the Prime Minister actually suggested artificial intelligence was the answer to the front-of-house labour crisis. Has the man ever tried to get a chatbot to recommend the Picpoul de Pinet over the Sancerre, or to deal with a four-top of accountants splitting the bill seventeen ways?

I am not, as a rule, a conspiracist. But I am beginning to wonder whether this is plain incompetence or something darker. Because if you sat down with a clean sheet of paper and deliberately tried to design a policy package guaranteed to incinerate independent restaurants, you would land more or less exactly where this Government has landed. Hammer the labour costs. Hammer the property costs. Refuse the one tax cut, VAT, that would actually move the needle. Drive away the high-spending non-doms who used to keep Mayfair humming, propose extending the smoking ban to pub gardens and pavement tables, then make it harder still to recruit from abroad. Magnifique.

The rationale, presumably, is that restaurants are a luxury, frequented by people who can afford it, staffed by people who do not vote Labour. Easy political target. Wrong, of course. Our sector employs 3.5 million people, more than half of them under 30, many in their first proper job, learning skills no classroom ever taught, graft, courtesy, and how to charm a furious German tourist out of a complaint about the size of the prawns. Killing restaurants does not punish the rich. It punishes the kid from Croydon who wanted to be a sommelier, the Polish chef who built a life here, and the landlady whose pub still kept her village alive.

And here is the bit Reeves seems incapable of grasping: hospitality does not just feed us. It powers tourism, it props up high streets, it fills supply chains from Cornish dairies to Yorkshire breweries to the Kentish vineyards her colleagues love being photographed at. When a restaurant closes, the butcher feels it, the laundry firm feels it, the cab driver feels it, the florist feels it. You do not just lose a place to eat. You lose an entire ecosystem.

I had hoped, fool that I am, that this Labour Government might understand that. Many of its members, after all, claim to enjoy the occasional supper out, although one suspects most of theirs arrives by Deliveroo on the public purse. But policy after policy has revealed either profound ignorance of how a small business actually functions, or active hostility towards anyone who took a punt on themselves rather than waited patiently for a public sector pay rise.

The lights are going out across our high streets. The chairs are being stacked. The wine is being sold off at cost. And our Chancellor, when asked, musters only the platitude that growth takes time.

So does dying, Rachel. So does dying.

Read more:
Last orders for British hospitality: Are Reeves and Starmer trying to kill the UK restaurant sector?