Beloved cafe serving loyal customers classic English breakfasts for nine years is forced to close due to cost of living
The owner thanked customers for the "wonderful journey"
TEATIME'S OVER Beloved cafe serving loyal customers classic English breakfasts for nine years is forced to close due to cost of living
A BELOVED cafe that served customers classic English breakfasts for nine years has been forced to close due to the cost of living.
The owner said it is "impossible to carry on" in the current climate.
Advertisement
2
The traditional cafe served big English breakfasts for nine yearss
Traditional cafe Deb's Diner in Birmingham posted the sad update on Facebook.
"It is with great sadness that Deb's Diner has closed it doors for the very last time.
"Due to ill health and the current cost of living crisis, it has become impossible to carry on so we have decided not to renew our lease.
"We would like to thank all of our customers for their continued support over the last nine years, it's been a wonderful journey."
Advertisement
Customers commented to express their sadness and to send best wishes.
It comes after the Chancellor's hike to national insurance contributions and minimum wage for firms kicked in at the start of April.
The NI rise has hit investment, recruitment and prices.
Businesses were dealt the £25 billion 'Jobs tax' raid at the Budget with the increased contributions as confidence among entrepreneurs taking a hit.
Advertisement
From April 6, businesses have to pay a higher rate of employer National Insurance contributions (NICs) of 15% from 13.8%.
The threshold at which they are paid is also being lowered from £9,100 to £5,000.
The Government confirmed it was making the changes in its Autumn Budget last October in a bid to increase revenue.
It also said the move meant it wasn't increasing taxes for working people.
Advertisement
However, it will have an impact on shoppers and everyday consumers as businesses look to pass on the additional costs.
Figures show that almost a third of businesses affected by the hike are planning to cut jobs or freeze hiring.
It comes on the back of 160,000 part-time retail jobs are on the cusp of going in the next two years due to a rise in Labour costs.
2
Rachel Reeves, Chancellor of the Exchequer, after presenting her Spending Review
Credit: Alamy
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The National
2 hours ago
- The National
Scotland trapped in doom spiral of disappointment under Labour
WHEN it was put to him that his notorious Vow – which promised a federal UK within three years of a No vote – had failed to deliver anything remotely close to federalism, Gordon Brown infamously and patronisingly dismissed complaints with an airy: 'Look at the small print.' That's a caveat which always needs to be borne in mind whenever the Labour Party makes a promise, especially a promise to the people of Scotland. You might have thought that anyone in Scotland tempted to vote Labour might have learned that lesson by now, but obviously not. Labour keeps lying and people keep voting for them. As long as they do, Scotland is trapped in a doom spiral of continual disappointment. (Image: free) In the latest iteration of Brown's, above, injunction to look at the small print, the Labour Government has yet again watered down its commitment to create a new publicly owned renewable energy company based in Scotland. The litany of broken promises regarding Great British Energy is long and dismal. We discovered shortly before last year's Westminster general election that the company would not in fact be an energy company in any commonly understood sense of the term. READ MORE: Kemi Badenoch questions Reform UK and Labour 'belief in the Union' GB Energy would not generate energy to sell to consumers, nor would it own any energy infrastructure. Instead, it was to be an "investment vehicle" for funnelling public money into privately owned renewable energy projects. Last year, Keir Starmer announced that his government would invest £8.3 billion into the state-owned clean energy company in a bid to invest in renewable energy projects and decarbonise the entire UK electricity system by 2030. We were also promised that the new company would create 1000 jobs in Aberdeen, where we were assured that it would have its headquarters. It was clear by this point that these jobs would mostly be low level office based administration jobs, not highly skilled trades positions which might be attractive to the offshore oil workers who face losing their jobs as the industry in the North Sea winds down. We later discovered that Jürgen Maier, the new company's chair, would continue to work from an office in Salford in Greater Manchester, which, the last time anyone checked, is not in Aberdeen. We also learned that the new company would not have its own dedicated office building but would share premises with other governmental departments. Most damningly of all, we found out that the 1000 new jobs which the company was supposedly creating in Aberdeen would not actually materialise for 20 years. As if all these betrayals were not enough, a new insult has now been added to the existing injury. It came out in Chancellor Rachel Reeves's spending review that GB Energy will now have to share the promised £8.3bn in funding with a new body which will invest in nuclear energy. The Treasury's spending plans said that Great British Energy and 'Great British Energy – Nuclear', which was quietly renamed from Boris Johnson's Great British Nuclear a day before the spending review, would now split the funds, with £2.5 billion going towards a new generation of small modular nuclear reactors. This leaves £5.8 billion to be invested in renewable energy projects, a very far cry from the £28 billion which the party had been promising to invest in green industries back in 2023 when Labour was still in opposition. In shades of Gordon Brown's patronising small print comment, when asked about the decision to hive off a large chunk of the funding promised to GB Energy to develop green renewable energies and spend it on nuclear instead, a Whitehall source told The Guardian newspaper: "This has always been part of our plans, but I think perhaps not everyone was paying attention." READ MORE: Unionists just don't view the status quo the same way we do So there you go. It's not that the Labour Party has been underhand and duplicitous yet again – it's all our fault for not paying attention to a change that Labour made in the dead of night, a change which they knew would immediately be buried in the media attention given to the headline announcements in the spending review. SNP MSP Bill Kidd said: 'The fact Labour is raiding its promised funding for GB energy to spend on nuclear is shocking but not surprising. "Scotland is already a global leader in renewable energy, and we generate far more electricity than we consume. Our priority must be a just transition that delivers long-term economic opportunities for all - not more nuclear.' Tories trapped in a death spiral The Tories are due to hold their Scottish conference in Edinburgh this weekend as the party faces an existential crisis. In recent weeks it has lost a dozen councillors to the Nigel Farage fan club, with yet another Aberdeenshire Tory defecting on Thursday. Meanwhile, the Tory group in Dumfries and Galloway council has disintegrated amidst bitter in-fighting with seven of the council's 16 Conservatives departing, four to form a group called Novantae – the name of the Celtic tribe which inhabited the region during the Iron Age – and three to create the Dumfries and Galloway Independent Group. Tory leader Kemi Badenoch speaking at the party's Edinburgh conference (Image: PA)Despite selecting a candidate who is a member of the Orange Order in a blatant attempt to appeal to the sectarian vote in the recent Hamilton, Larkhall, and Stonehouse Holyrood by-election, the Tory vote collapsed to single figures. They only narrowly avoided the humiliation of a lost deposit as their voters deserted them en masse for the even more vile Reform UK, which appears to be hoovering up the staunch vote. With an unpopular and uninspiring leader in the form of Kemi Badenoch, and with Reform UK outflanking the Tories on the right, the Conservatives seem trapped in a death spiral. They won't be missed.
Telegraph
2 hours ago
- Telegraph
The ‘experts' you've never heard of inspiring Rachel Reeves's disastrous economic policy
A little like the Chagos Islands giveaway and, more recently, the apparent Gibraltar sell out, it's almost impossible to work out the motivations behind each and every idiotic decision this Labour Government takes. There's a palpable sense of incredulity spreading across Britain as the Prime Minister and Chancellor continue to insist that everything is going swimmingly despite most key markers showing precisely the opposite is true. Take the economy. In Wednesday's Spending Review, Rachel Reeves boasted that she had 'wasted no time' removing the barriers to growth. Less than 24 hours later, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) revealed that UK GDP had shrunk by 0.3 per cent in April. Labour continues to splurge taxpayers' hard-earned cash despite the national debt sitting at around 96 per cent of GDP, the budget deficit more doubling in the past seven years, and public spending being on a par with the profligate Labour government of the 1970s, which almost bankrupted the country. Back then, taxes as a share of GDP were around 33 per cent. Forecasts suggest that, by 2027, they could reach 37.7 per cent. Unemployment is at its highest level in four years, UK payrolls have lost 276,000 employees since the autumn Budget, and a millionaire is reportedly leaving the UK every 45 minutes under Labour. Still, no one in the Cabinet appears able to rule out further tax rises, with Paul Johnson, the outgoing chief of the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) concluding that 'council tax bills look set to rise at their fastest rate over any parliament since 2001-05.' Who is advising Reeves on tax policy, and her relentless assault on our wallets? Readers may not have heard of Arun Advani and Andy Summers, but these little known academics may have been the inspiration for Labour's seemingly never-ending tax grab. They run the Centre for the Analysis of Taxation (CenTax), which some credit for Labour's farm tax. Advani, who is associate professor in the economics department at the University of Warwick, called for inheritance tax 'loopholes' on farms to be scrapped in two reports for the Institute for Fiscal Studies, as well as writing a further report for CenTax making the same arguments for changes to both Agricultural Property Relief (APR) and Business Property Relief (BPR) last October. After Advani boasted at the Labour Party Conference that he was 'optimistic' because the Labour government is 'genuinely listening' to his ideas, Reeves announced in the Budget that the availability of 100 per cent relief for agricultural and business property would be capped at £1 million. So far, so predictable, you may argue. What's the harm in tapping up Left-wing think tanks for radical tax ideas? Do Conservative governments not rely on the research of free market institutes? Well, some have alleged the Treasury relied solely on CenTax's projection that the changes would raise £520 million, without doing its own calculations. As it conceded in response to a Freedom of Information request: 'H M Treasury does not hold a disaggregated cost projection for the revenue raised from the measure announced at Autumn Budget 2024 to restrict these reliefs. This is a combined policy across the reliefs, rather than separate policies for each relief.' Even more problematically, the £520 million figure has been challenged. The OBR itself said it was uncertain how much would be raised as a result of behavioural responses, whilst CBI Economics calculates that the new tax on both family firms and farms will actually cost the Treasury £1.9 billion over the next five years. Advani claimed that only around 500 farms would be affected by the tax. As the Adam Smith Institute points out, however, 'the government's much-quoted '500' a year is really 15,000 a generation.' The true number of farms could be more than 40,000. Separate research, commissioned by Ashbridge Partners, found that one in 10 farmers surveyed said they will face an IHT bill of more than £1 million due to the inheritance tax hike, with 31 per cent expecting to pay more than £500,000. Why didn't Labour listen? Treasury minister James Murray, who referenced back in 2022 how many Zoom meetings he'd held with Dr Summers, even hosted CenTax's official launch in Parliament last November when he declared his desire 'to make sure that collaboration between CenTax, Treasury and HMRC continues for many years into the future.' Advani and Summers also influenced Labour's pledge to scrap non dom status with Treasury ministers again seeming to unquestioningly swallow their claim that it would raise £3.2 billion, a figure repeatedly cited by the Government. The trouble is, that number was also based on some misguided premises, perhaps including Advani and Summers' quite ludicrous prediction that out of 70,000 non-doms, only 77 would leave. As other economists later pointed out, the projection did not take into account the impact of abolishing non-dom inheritance tax protections. Even the OBR assumed that the changes would likely lead to a loss of 25 per cent of non-doms with trusts, which could cost the UK more than £12 billion during the course of the parliament. Still the Government swallowed the £3.2 billion figure hook line and sinker despite some now estimating that 10 per cent of non-doms may have already left the UK. A report by the CEBR predicts the ongoing exodus could reach 40 per cent – costing the Treasury a self-defeating £7.1 billion over this parliament. This combined with the £1.9 billion revenue lost as a result of the farm and family firm tax could mean the Government is down £9 billion thanks to listening to these nitwits. CenTax also wrongly predicted that increasing the tax rate on carried interest to 45 per cent would raise additional revenue of £0.8 billion per year. Labour settled on 32 per cent – but a January 2025 estimate by the OBR suggests that only £100 million will be raised and since then Reeves has watered it down. Labour claim to be a 'party of business'. So why are they seemingly listening to two economists who are laying the intellectual groundwork for an expansion in taxation that could come to look like Corbynism on steroids.
North Wales Chronicle
2 hours ago
- North Wales Chronicle
Bowie challenges Tories to ‘step up' against Miliband's ‘eco-zealotry'
The Scottish Conservative MP criticised both Labour and the SNP over their opposition to new oil and gas developments in the North Sea. Accusing the UK Government of 'overseeing the wilful deindustrialisation of this nation', Mr Bowie hit out at the 'frankly dangerous eco-zealotry of Ed Miliband', the Energy Secretary. Speaking at the Scottish Conservative conference at Murrayfield in Edinburgh Mr Bowie told his party: 'We must step up. Britain needs us more than ever.' The Tory insisted: 'The future of Scotland and Britain is at stake, our country's security depends on a strong Conservative Party to stand up for what is right.' He recalled how former US president Ronald Reagan had 'once said the first duty of government is to protect' – but added that 'on every front the SNP and Labour are failing to do that'. Attacking both Labour and the SNP, Mr Bowie, who is also his party's shadow Scottish secretary, said: 'They haven't protected everyone's economic security, by raising taxes, or ripping away their winter fuel payment, even if they are now apparently going to hand it back to them. 'They haven't protected our energy security by insisting on no new oil and gas developments.' The Conservative MP continued: 'We can all see what is happening in the world, there is more risk out there, we as a country are more vulnerable. 'That is why the decisions of this Labour Government are so gravely concerning. Their economic incompetence, coupled with their frightening ineptitude when it comes to our energy security is making the United Kingdom more vulnerable.' He attacked the Labour Government over its 'madcap drive to clean power by 2030', as he said ministers were 'actively accelerating the decline of our North Sea'. This, he said, was 'forcing us to become increasingly exposed to over-reliance on imports from overseas, imports that are shipped in diesel-chugging tankers across the Atlantic from America or from Norwegian wells'. The Tory said the opposition to new oil and gas developments meant 'investment is drying up, work is being put on pause, companies are literally shutting up shop and jobs are being lost'. But he added: 'This hostility for our oil and gas workers is not simply the preserve of the zealots in the Labour Party. 'The SNP have their fingerprints all over the job losses, the well closures.' It's Scottish Conservative Conference! 🇬🇧🏴 Hello Murrayfield! @ScotTories @Conservatives — Andrew Bowie (@AndrewBowie_MP) June 13, 2025 Mr Bowie added: 'We need Conservative leadership because we know where the SNP and Labour will take us.' He also used his speech to attack the 'snake oil salesmen' in Reform UK, insisting that Nigel Farage's party do not 'care one jot for Scotland, or for our United Kingdom'. The Tory said: 'Let me be clear. Reform is quite simply not a conservative party, not a unionist party, frankly they are not a serious party.'
