The Financial Times this morning reports the Bank of England is expected to vote for its second interest rate cut this year, despite predictions that Rachel Reeves’ budget will boost near-term demand, as the UK central bank focuses on a longer-term picture of slowing inflation.
Linked to this, Labour’s much-maligned budget tax raid has continued to make the (wrong) headlines over the weekend and into today.
The FT reports chancellor Rachel Reeves’ comments yesterday, which suggested UK businesses can ‘absorb’ national insurance rise, “by accepting reduced profits or making efficiencies, rather than passing on lower wage rises to workers”.
But the same publication also runs a piece by NFU president Tom Bradshaw deriding new inheritance tax rules – which will see farming businesses worth more than £1m slapped with an IHT tax rate of 20%.
Bradshaw writes “very few viable farms are worth under £1m”, and together with impending hikes in employers’ National Insurance and increases to the National Living Wage, “many of these businesses will not be able to absorb the financial strain”, he warns, in a comment piece ominously titled “British farmers have nothing left to give”.
Reeves’ “spiteful” budget, and her IHT move in particular is also one of The Times’ top stories this morning, with an interview with entrepreneur James Dyson warning of the “death of entrepreneurship”. A separate op-ed by Dyson claims the budget will “rip apart the very fabric of our economy”.
Elsewhere, The Times says M&S is set to announce “strong sales” this week in its H1 results, as its turnaround continues. “Current consensus forecasts estimate that M&S will report first-half sales of £6.6 billion, an increase of 7 per cent from the same period last year,” it reports.
The group’s share price has climbed 70 per cent since the beginning of the year, to an eight-year high, in a “vote of confidence” from investors in its growth strategy.
As The Grocer reported this morning, Sainsbury’s has moved to match the price of up to 200 Aldi products in its smaller stores.
The BBC reports that while shopping locally for groceries may be “handy”, those who depend on C-stores “can end up paying more” – in a piece it uses to resurface claims from a Panorama episode in September, that found dozens of Tesco products price-matched to Aldi “were not like-for-like”.
Read The Grocer’s take on those Panorama revelations here…
All major media outlets have also continued their coverage of the devastating floods in Valencia, Spain, with the King and Queen pelted with mud yesterday by residents angry at the government’s response to the catastrophe.
Hundreds of people have died in the floods, and as The Grocer reported last week, the rains have also devastated thousands of hectares of land in a key fruit & vegetable production region.
The Times on Saturday returned to last week’s Neal’s Yard cheese theft story, with a piece arguing high value British artisan cheeses should be regarded as “like fine wines or sports cars”. A 63-year-old man was arrested in connection with the case last Thursday, Met Police has confirmed.
Finally, The Observer yesterday reported that campaigners are calling on new gene editing legislation for crops to be extended to farm animals, in a bid to increase their resistance to disease or lower their carbon footprints. Prof John Hammond, director of research at the Pirbright Institute, told The Observer: “In an age of climate change and other threats, we need to be able to make the best use of technologies like gene-editing to improve the lives of animals.”
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