As a result, many of them aren’t working people anymore. They’ve lost their jobs, thanks to the crushing tax hikes she announced in her autumn Budget, and are now unemployed. Nice work, Chancellor.
During the election campaign, Reeves and PM Keir Starmer pledged not to increase the big three personal taxes: income tax, national insurance (NI) or VAT. Reeves still insists she’s kept that promise, despite imposing a £25billion tax raid on jobs by hiking employers’ national insurance contributions, which came into force in April.
Reeves says the rise in employer’s NI doesn’t touch individuals. But that ignores how business really works. Employers don’t just absorb higher taxes, they pass them on.
In many cases, the alternative is to go bust. That means higher prices, lower wages, fewer new hires and rising redundancies.
Reeves couldn’t have picked a worse time to make hiring people more expensive, as artificial intelligence threatens millions of jobs.
Working people are at the sharp end of her tax war, and the evidence is stacking up by the day.
Nearly 50,000 companies are now at risk of collapse, according to insolvency experts at Begbies Traynor.
Its “Red Flag Alert” for the second quarter of 2025 found the number of firms in critical financial distress has surged 21.4% compared to a year earlier.
The warning lights are flashing loudest in exactly the kinds of industries that rely most on large numbers of working people: pubs, restaurants, retailers and tourist businesses.
Bars and restaurants are seeing a 41.7% spike in distress, general retail is up 17.8% with more stores closing by the day. Huge brands such as Jaguar Rover are axing staff too.
Begbies chair Ric Traynor pointed to global issues like Donald Trump’s tariffs, but stressed that Reeves’s tax hikes were inflicting “immense strain”. He pinpointed employer’s NI and the inflation-busting hike to the national minimum wage, also from April.
What a relief that no “working people” are employed in hospitality, tourism or retail, then.
Except, of course, they are. Sorry, were. Young people are particularly hard hit, because they do the type of minimum wage starter jobs that Reeves has hammered.
Official HMRC figures published in June show a staggering 276,000 jobs have gone since the Budget in October. And the pace is accelerating, with 109,000 gone in May alone.
That’s the biggest monthly drop since the Covid lockdowns of 2020.
We still don’t know what Reeves was weeping about in Parliament that time. But if I’d destroyed that many jobs, I wouldn’t stop crying.
Unemployment has hit 4.7%, the highest rate in four years. And it’s not stopping there.
Forecasts from respected economic consultancy EY Item Club predict another 100,000 working people are set to lose their jobs by the end of this year, as employers cut yet more staff to cope with rising costs.
EY expects unemployment to hit 5% by year end, a level not seen since the pandemic, as businesses shed workers or simply shut down.
Chief economic adviser Matt Swannell said the jobs carnage will continue next year, thanks to anaemic growth and Reeves’s “job tax”.
And this is before deputy PM Angela Rayner piles another £5billion of costs onto businesses through her Employment Rights Bill.
Reeves is wiping out jobs by the bucketload. And if many of those affected are no longer “working people”, it’s because her policies have destroyed their work.
Don’t forget, she’s coming back for even more taxes this autumn. Which are likely to hit working people even harder. If they’re still working by then.