By Lucy Kenningham
Britain has a tendency to chop down the tallest of our poppies, from growing tech businesses to promising young footballers. Some try to do that with one of our more appealing recent success stories: English wine.
One recent article elsewhere said the red tasted like vimto and the good stuff was too expensive; buy French, seemed to be the lesson we were supposed to take.
What a tremendous shame that would be, and what an own-goal. Climate change, grim as it is, has delivered to the south east an industry that in time will deliver not just jobs and employment on the land and in related jobs in the making and selling of wine but create an entire tourism industry just an hour or so from the capital.
Such things should be celebrated, but politicians often struggle to see the benefits of these growing industries – seeing them instead as a cash cow.
Sparkling wine has received a welcome boost from recent tax changes, but the wider wine industry is squealing about the impact on their still products.
The beer industry, an area in which Britain appears to lead the world both in the quality of production and perhaps consumption, has suffered a similar fate.
The West End, an obvious asset to the wider economy, is now missing out thanks to the removal of tax-free shopping for tourists. Such a collection of own goals would be disappointing even in a country rocketing along at three per cent annual growth; it is downright stupid when we’re struggling for every tenth of a percentage point.
All of this will sound familiar to a financial services industry that has for so long been treated at best as an afterthought and at worst as some kind of national shame.
Jeremy Hunt and Rishi Sunak, thankfully, seem more interested in nurturing than exploiting the Square Mile. Let’s hope that attitude becomes more commonplace across the economy.
