Is Jeremy Hunt’s ‘British Isa’ worth having? The new £5,000 tax-free allowance for UK equity investment comes on top of the existing annual £20,000 Isa limit, so on the general principle that it makes sense to maximise tax-efficient savings, the answer might be yes. But will it achieve the Chancellor’s aim of allowing patriotic savers to buy into the growth of ‘the most promising UK businesses’ while supporting them with capital to expand? To that, I’m afraid, the answer from the professionals has been a resounding no.

UK stock-market performance has been so limp in recent years that UK-only share-buyers would have reaped barely a third of the returns earned by those who opted for global equity funds – and done worse still by comparison with US investors. Demand for British Isas is highly unlikely either to change that pattern by driving UK share values sharply upwards or to generate capital flows that might make the London Stock Exchange a more attractive home for high-growth, high-tech companies. Those objectives can only be achieved by a radical change of mindset among institutional investors and a slashing of listing red tape.

In short, IFA Magazine was probably right to say the British Isa is ‘doomed to fail’ – and Michael Summersgill, chief executive of the stockbrokers A.J. Bell, wasn’t wrong when he called it ‘ill-conceived’, ‘politically motivated’ and no better than ‘a rounding error’ in terms of new investment it might generate. In a Budget that failed to ignite Tory prospects, this may well have been the dampest squib in the box.

A new bike for Branson

You’ve got to hand it to Sir Richard Branson. Indeed, that’s what Nationwide is about to do to the tune of at least £400 million (some reports say £650 million) if the building society completes a £2.9 billion bid for Virgin Money, the business Branson created largely by taking the remains of Northern Rock off taxpayers’ hands in 2011.

Now 73 and last seen looking rather battered after crashing his bike into a Caribbean pothole, Branson is not just a survivor but a very canny manager of the Virgin brand he created for his vinyl record business in the early 1970s. Nationwide will pay him huge fees for continuing use of Virgin Money’s name as well as buying out his 14.5 per cent shareholding: not a bad outcome considering his first rejected approach to Northern Rock in 2007 was greeted, as one report put it at the time, by ‘a sneer’ from the City which never liked the cut of his jib.

Nationwide-Virgin would be the UK’s second-largest mortgage and savings provider behind Lloyds. Importantly, it promises to retain the mutual structure on which Nationwide’s reputation for customer care and management caution is based. It might even sustain a decent branch network while its rivals continue to close. Good news for high-street banking – and a new bike for Branson.

Crypto for villains

As the bitcoin surge continues, the UK Financial Conduct Authority has pragmatically shifted its previously sniffy attitude towards everything crypto: it will allow crypto-backed ‘exchange-traded notes’ to be held by regulated investment firms and banks, while continuing to bar the selling of them to retail investors.

Meanwhile, as bitcoin advances, so does ‘de-dollarisation’ of international payment systems – to the great advantage of Russian and other geopolitical villains, who can use cryptocurrency channels to avoid oversight, sanctions and asset seizures. Right now, the crypto phenomenon looks like a fiesta for punters; one day soon we’ll grasp the full depth of its dangers.

Help for hospitality

My quest for interesting places to eat (latest discovery: Levan, a ‘modern European’ bistro in downtown Peckham Rye) prompts lively debate with players in the hospitality trade. This week I’ve been asking whether the Hunt Budget did anything to help them.

No, says Peter Martin, one of the gurus of the sector. Raising the VAT threshold from £85,000 to £90,000 is a drop in a bucket, the minimum wage will rise next month, wholesale food price inflation is still acute and chefs are still in short supply. Overall, it’s ‘an asymmetric market’ in which private-equity-backed chains that can afford cost-saving technology – the likes of Hawksmoor steakhouses, owned by Graphite Capital – are on the up, while cash-strapped independents fight to survive. According to UK Hospitality, 1,169 restaurants lost that fight in the past year.

What’s worse, an observer of the London eating scene tells me, much of the private-equity money is American or European, so where profits arise they’re often remitted abroad. Meanwhile, out in the sticks it’s VAT at 20 per cent that’s the killer, complains a good citizen who bought his Cotswolds local. The sector’s Covid VAT reduction (5 per cent from July 2020 to September 2021, then 12.5 per cent until March 2022) was a blessing. Why not reinstate it to avert more half-dead villages and high streets?

Then again, why favour hospitality over other sectors? Perhaps because it’s one thing we British have actually got better at in recent decades. And in a work-shy economy – in which the Office for National Statistics says more than a fifth of all adults are not in work or even looking for it – hospitality generates large numbers of worthwhile jobs for young people. Serial investor Luke Johnson, who employs ‘hundreds’ of baristas in his Gail’s Bakery chain, tells me: ‘Many of them are obsessed by coffee and love the work… There is real skill in doing a task well. And always better in work than being idle!’

To twist a phrase that makes Downing Street wince, it’s now too late for Chancellor Hunt to help out the eating-out trade. But chancellor-in-waiting Rachel Reeves should look round her Leeds constituency and ponder how many livelihoods and premises a modest VAT intervention might save.