Frankly, I wonder whether we all read the same newspapers. For disclosure, I tend to follow the Times, FT, BBC R4 and glance at the Telegraph and Guardian most days. But I only read the news and business pages, and not the features (although I am a sucker for interiors and furniture).
Both sets of politicians are mendacious with facts, based on their ingrained world view. As a soft centrist Tory, I tend to think that the small business person is the fulcrum of economic growth and progress. Whether you are, like two young people I know locally, an electrician and a beautician, who started or bought tiny one-person operations at 21, and are building towards prosperity by being good and reliable, and charging fair prices, or a small town mechanic or builder (I know a lot of those too), once you start to build a good reputation, then demand grows because word goes round. You then need to sub-contract some of the work...........
Once you let politicians cloud the distinction between business (obviously all of whom are exploitative) and employees (who are all down-trodden morons who only want 10 hours a week bashing a checkout to qualify for their UC) or angels in scrubs [I am exaggerating wildly here for clarification and avoidance of doubt], then the realities of life are not quite so stark. Most people work very hard. The competent do well; some are unlucky and have awkward families, disabilities that hold them down, and a (not insignificant) few think that rules don't apply to them.
As this is a budget thread, I will say that I thought it unnecessary for RR to levy £40bn to fill a £22bn hole, but that I was quietly delighted by the decision to regulate agricultural reliefs to quash the city moguls buying tracts of land at acreage values well above the means of real working farmers. I'm sure the NFU can work out what is a viable farm and what constitutes an investment in rural acreage.