Read the Small Print

Three British numbers, three asterisks

Every big British number this week came with an asterisk. The taxman's was invisible: fiscal drag will pull nearly a million more into higher tax bands this year — 500,000 into the basic rate, 410,000 into the 40% band — leaving the average worker £640 lighter, a rise no minister had to announce. Andy Burnham's was louder but softer than it looked: a 20% cut to pub business rates, a £100m gesture funded by a vape-shop and online-seller crackdown that's a projection, not a cheque. And BT's looked like a disaster and wasn't: it will shed 800,000 broadband lines this year, but that's a copper cull by design, with a record 574,000 fibre adds underneath and the shares off 2.2% to 191p.

In Washington, a crypto bill trips over its own author

Crypto had its own asterisk. Bitcoin slipped to $65,500, off Wednesday's $66,700, but nothing inside crypto broke. The drag was imported: oil back up to $88.60 a barrel, and a US two-year Treasury yield at 4.31% — its highest since early 2025 — that makes a yieldless coin harder to hold. The regulatory prop buckled too. Washington's Digital Asset Market Clarity Act split the Senate, the very Democrats Republicans need — Booker, Warner, Warnock — branding its ethics language too weak before the 7 August recess. The awkward centre: President Trump's own disclosure showed more than $1.4bn earned from crypto last year, turning every line on conflicts of interest into a pointed question. Polymarket's odds on passage slid from 46% to 38%.

A tax nobody announced, a giveaway nobody's fully funded, a customer loss BT calls a win, and a crypto bill tripping over the man who profits from it — the small print did all the talking this week. To the rest of the issue. — M.B.

Get a pay rise this year, but the taxman quietly takes a bigger cut — and no minister ever stood up to raise your rate. That is the stealth tax, and new analysis says it will drag nearly 1m more Britons into higher bands this year alone. Frozen thresholds do the work a Budget speech never has to. The average worker is already £640 worse off, and that is not exactly loose change.

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For once, the great British local is getting a tax cut instead of another bill. Andy Burnham has pledged a 20% cut to pub business rates — a £100m move funded by squeezing vape shops and online sellers that dodge tax. It is his first offer aimed at businesses rather than households, and it lands after Rachel Reeves’ Autumn Budget sent hospitality tax bills soaring. Whether it saves the high street is another question entirely.

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There's a certain genius to a tax rise that never needs a speech: freeze the thresholds, let the pay rises do the rest, and let a pub-rates cut grab the headlines instead. One hand hands out a lifeline for the local; the other quietly relieves you of a little more each payday. Westminster has always preferred the announcements it doesn't have to make. — MJB.