GET out the ticker tape and start planning the parade.
After just one year in the job, the Chancellor Rachel Reeves has already achieved her main goal in office. We finally have GROWTH.
Chancellor Rachel Reeves has one heck of a Midas touch
PASir Keir Starmer pointedly failed to restate his manifesto pledge to not raise the rates of the three main taxes on working people[/caption]
Growth is a very big thing for this Labour Government.
Indeed, it was all Reeves talked about during the 2024 election campaign because growth was going to pay for everything they planned to do.
What a pity, then, that the only growth the Chancellor has overseen in our economy has been a massive increase in the size of our economic black hole.
So maybe that parade will have to wait for a while, eh?
The National Institute of Economic and Social Research, a respected think tank, reported this week that the £22billion black hole identified by Reeves last July to justify slashing Winter Fuel payments and raising taxes in her Budget has now more than doubled in size to £51billion.
Not going to be pretty
That’s one heck of a Midas touch she has. But, hey, what’s a mere £29billion between friends?
So now the nation will have to brace itself for what is coming next as she prepares to deliver her second Budget in the autumn.
Because unless an economic miracle happens and we suddenly get that long-elusive economic growth, that black hole needs to be filled. And it ain’t gonna be pretty.
Reeves has three main levers she can use to get the numbers to add up.
She can borrow more, she can cut spending or she can raise taxes. Or a combination of all three.
But they all come with a hefty political cost.
Borrowing more looks like the easy option but doing so would break the Chancellor’s “fiscal rules”, which would quickly see the markets spinning, our debt costs spiralling and Reeves out of a job.
We are, after all, already paying £110billion a year just to service our existing sky-high debts, spending more than double on our debt interest every year than we spend on defence, without a single penny ever being paid off.
That is not a recipe for economic success.
Cutting spending is the obvious answer for many sick of seeing so much of our hard-earned taxes wasted by the Government.
The trouble is that a little tinker here or there really is not going to do the job.
Cutting red tape, improving efficiency, getting rid of HR diversity staff and even cutting overseas aid simply will not touch the sides of the sorts of cuts needed to balance the books.
The fact that a single penny is spent on housing illegal Channel boat arrivals in four-star hotels is an insult to hard-working taxpayers
Julia Hartley-Brewer
Of course, dumping the economically suicidal policy of Net Zero would go a long way to save money, but there is no sign of Labour seeing sense on that madness any time soon.
We also cannot get on top of our finances while we are still importing half of the Third World to our shores every year.
The fact that a single penny is spent on housing illegal Channel boat arrivals in four-star hotels is an insult to hard-working taxpayers.
But the biggest spending savings would have to come from the welfare bill which, at £327billion, accounts for a quarter of all government spending.
No Chancellor can hope to stem the tide of our economic collapse without swingeing cuts to everything from disability and sickness benefits to housing benefits and possibly even an end to the triple lock on the state pension.
Given that the Prime Minister gave in to Labour backbench MPs over a measly £5billion of disability benefit cuts only a few weeks ago, it is pretty unlikely that Reeves would be willing to face them down with the massive cuts needed to fill that £51billion black hole.
So we all know what’s coming, don’t we? Yes, more tax rises.
Dig bigger hole
Labour MPs might like to delude themselves that a “wealth tax” would pay for everything, but the fact is there simply are not enough super-rich people in Britain to pay all the bills, and the ones that are here will quickly leave if we tax them even more.
The Chancellor and the Prime Minister made a manifesto pledge not to raise the rates of the three main taxes on working people — income tax, National Insurance or VAT — but Sir Keir Starmer pointedly failed to restate that commitment this week.
Whether Ms Reeves breaks that manifesto promise or not, there are plenty of other ways that ordinary working people will end up footing the bill, with more taxes on their businesses, higher council tax, more green taxes and yet more middle income earners dragged into the 40 per cent higher income tax bracket.
This Government may have pinned all its hopes on economic growth to solve the country’s problems but all it has done so far is dig an even bigger black hole for itself — and leave us to pay for it.
ONE-IN, YVETTE-OUT, PLEASE
AlamyDeporting the Home Secretary Yvette Cooper might not be such a bad idea[/caption]
THE first migrants have been detained under the UK’s new “one-in, one-out” deportation deal with France after crossing the Channel in a small dinghy.
Yay! So that’s the small boats problem solved then.
Well done, everyone.
Except, of course, no one actually believes this pilot scheme will make any difference at all.
Even in the best-case scenario, we will return 50 of the 800 illegal migrants who arrive every week from Calais, and in return France will send us “genuine” asylum seekers in their place – and eventually all their extended family will follow too.
So we’ll end up with MORE migrants than we started with.
Which doesn’t sound like a great deal to me.
And that’s assuming the detainees haven’t already found some nice lawyers to challenge their deportation under human rights laws, all funded by legal aid, to stop them from being sent back to France.
We’ve got more chance of deporting the Home Secretary Yvette Cooper.
Which, come to think of it, might not be such a bad idea.
IF you’ve ever sat for hours waiting for the taxman to answer the phone, now we know why staff at HM Revenue and Customs don’t have time to pick up your call.
They’re too busy attending woke seminars to do any actual useful work.
This week some HMRC staff reportedly spent an hour on a Zoom seminar called “Guilt of Being British” which covered vital tax queries such as “the emotional weight of colonial history and inherited trauma”.
Doesn’t this tell us exactly what’s wrong with far too many public servants at the heart of Whitehall?
The people paid to be – literally – the servants of the public are ashamed of our country, our culture and our history.
No wonder they are content with giving us such poor public services when they have nothing but contempt for Britain and its people.
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