At 68, Wetherspoons boss Tim Martin has no plans to call time on his career

At age 68, many business people would be thinking about retirement. But not Tim Martin, the very candid executive chairman of the trusty pub chain JD Wetherspoon.

“We were made to work and that suits me,” he says over a latte at The Great Harry pub in Woolwich, south-east London.

While Martin, who founded Wetherspoons in 1979, is an enthusiastic member of the working population, official figures show that an increasing number of Britons are leaving work before they reach the state pension age of 66.

Some politicians and economists blame this trend on labor shortages, saying it is holding back the economy.

Last Thursday, Work and Pensions Minister Mel Stride went so far as to say income tax could be cut by 2p if those who left their jobs during the pandemic – many of them older workers – returned to work .

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Martin doesn’t mince words on the subject, which he says is putting ‘quite a lot of pressure’ on his FTSE 250 pub chain.

“I think we need to get the b*****ds back to work,” he says. “I think me and Warren Buffett [the legendary US fund manager who is still working at 92] should launch a campaign saying that life is more fun if you go to work when everyone else is retired.’

He recognizes that while when people decide to retire is a personal choice, employers also have a major influence. of the oldies in our business.’

According to Martin, an elderly worker in Clacton-on-Sea recently told him she had no intention of retiring, adding: ‘What am I going to do? Stay at home and look at the wall?’

While running a business would be enough for most people, Martin also sticks to the campaign style he honed in the run-up to the EU referendum when he was an outspoken Leave supporter.

For example, he is a staunch opponent of the decision by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Chancellor Jeremy Hunt to raise corporate tax from 19 percent to 25 percent

Martin also last month joined business leaders led by hotel magnate Sir Rocco Forte and senior Tories, including Sir Iain Duncan Smith, to call on Sunak to abolish the tourist tax for foreign visitors, who will no longer have to pay the VAT they pay when shopping. can recover. in the United Kingdom.

In addition, he is a passionate advocate for tax equality between pubs, bars and restaurants, and the supermarket chains that pay lower taxes on the sale of food and drink.

Supermarkets can sell beer cheaply, he says, because they don’t pay VAT on food sales, but pubs and restaurants have to pay 20 percent. Martin says this has led to a slower post-pandemic recovery for the industry, as it encourages people to buy alcohol in supermarkets and drink it at home. Despite all this, Wetherspoons seems to be getting stronger.

The £1bn group, which has 834 locations, reported last week that it is heading for a record year after a stellar Easter week followed by the ‘busiest ever’ Saturday at the end of April.

The coronation was a ‘noticeably quiet’ day, but that may also be because the rainy weather caused people to choose to stay home.

This buoyancy marks a change of tone after Martin said in January that expectations for a boom in the pub industry had fallen short and sales recovery was slow.

He opened his first Wetherspoons pub in North London’s Muswell Hill 43 years ago – famously named after the character JD Hogg in the US TV series The Dukes of Hazzard, and a teacher named Wetherspoon who told him he was never going to be anything .

When Martin founded the company, Margaret Thatcher lived at number 10 for about six months.

Britain’s first female prime minister had launched a radical program of tax cuts and deregulation as part of a mission to revive business after years of industrial strife and economic downturn under a Labor government. It was therefore an extremely exciting time for entrepreneurs. Britain’s pro-business agenda continued through the premierships of John Major, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, and Wetherspoons quickly grew into one of the country’s largest pub groups.

But Martin, one of Britain’s largest taxpayers, is pessimistic about current politicians. “We have a government and a political class with relatively little business experience,” he says. ‘From the 1970s not only the Conservative government, but also Labor genuinely realized that entrepreneurship is the key to future success.’

He says things are different these days, adding, “It’s not often you hear people say we need to drive business.”

Martin is not a fan of Sunak, saying he “doesn’t set the world on fire” and “could be more businesslike.”

He has decided to ‘remain neutral’ in the Labor Party, which many expect to win the next general election. “I’m sure Keir Starmer is one of the nicest people I’ve ever met,” he says, adding that he “can’t see” the pair campaigning together.

Wetherspoons was one of the most recognizable names in British business before the EU referendum in 2016. Martin subsequently made headlines for his criticism of the Remain campaign and for his decision to print pro-Leave diatribes on coasters . Despite the Leave camp’s victory, he is not satisfied with the policy followed.

He is aiming in particular at former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, with whom he had pints in the run-up to the referendum.

“I find many of the economic decisions the government has made since the referendum appalling,” he says. “No more than when Boris was in charge. He wouldn’t run Wetherspoons’ finance department.’

But Martin still believes in the UK’s decision to leave the EU, highlighting historically low unemployment and the London Stock Exchange hitting record highs. He also emphasizes that Brexit has ‘raised the level of democracy in the UK’.

He said: ‘By far the most powerful economic force in world history is democracy.

‘If you look at the 50 most economically successful countries in the world, except for a few oil states, they are all democracies. And if you look at the freest states, they’re all democracies.

So you have a mix of freedom and democracy, and what Brexit did is raise the level of democracy in the UK.

‘That is no guarantee of nirvana, but it is a condition for future economic success.’