Tom Rainey runs a restaurant, a hotel and a pub on Botley Road in Oxford. Botley Road has been shut since April 2023. Network Rail closed it to rebuild Oxford station, a £161 million job, and it is due to reopen next month, three years and four months later. Throughout all of that the businesses along it have been billed their rates in full, on premises the public cannot drive to, cannot easily walk to, and in a good many cases can no longer find. Because government actions have seen to it that he cannot conduct his business, Rainey has refused to continue paying the business rates. He has let it be known that if the authorities want the business rates they have been charging him, they are welcome to send him to prison for them. "If I end up with a jail term, then I would accept that." Tom's not the only one. The Porter House, The Punter, First Stop Spannerworks, The Westgate Hotel, and Pack & Send, trading together as the Botley Road Independent Traders Association, have decided that nothing more leaves their accounts for a government coffer until somebody makes them whole. There has been help of a sort. An £850,000 government fund was assembled to make one-off goodwill payments to small businesses on the closed road, with six criteria attached. Courtney Pianos applied and was turned down, on the ground that Network Rail had judged the shop was not dependent on footfall or through traffic on Botley Road. A piano shop, situated on Botley Road, informed by the organisation that closed Botley Road that Botley Road has no material bearing on its trade. Oxford City Council's own contribution was a pop-up shop on Broad Street, half a mile away, to showcase the businesses of Botley Road. Think a moment about how business rate is calculated. It is a tax on the rateable value of premises, and rateable value assumes a road outside with people moving along it. Remove the road for three years and the valuation becomes a fiction. Everybody administering the charge knows it is a fiction. The demand goes out on time regardless, because our state is a bandit state and enjoys the feeling of crushing the small business-owner like a bug under a wheel; because they believe the state is entitled to your money; because the money has already bee spent in somebody's budget for the year on something vain and useless. "And besides, what are the likes of Tom Rainey going to do to stop us? Refuse to pay and risk going to prison? They'd never do that." Well, apparently they would. Every town in this country has its own version of this. The road up for a year. The scaffolding that never comes down. The diversion that kills a parade of shops while the works overrun by eighteen months. And the envelope landing on the mat every quarter from an authority that has never once been required to demonstrate that it's going to use the money it's extracting from you for anythig useful. Progress begins from a plain proposition about the people who keep a high street breathing: where the state itself has destroyed the trade, the state settles up, and it should have to show its charge is honest before it collects it. We have written into our programme a duty on every regulator and department to test the proportionality of what it imposes on the smallest firms before imposing it, because the weight always comes down hardest on the businesses with nobody spare to fight it. A man running a pub should not have to volunteer for prison in order to get a hearing. A return to common sense and decency, where accommodations can be made like reasonable people could make them. The road opens next month and the bills will carry on arriving. Rainey will probably never see the inside of a cell, because the whole force of the threat is that somebody in an office now has to decide whether to test his resolve; if I were them I think I'd rather not. The British state has spent 40 years assuming the small trader will pay up and say nothing, and for 40 years it has been right. Rainey has stopped making it right. If there are more of you out there in the same temper, we should be talking to each other.