When Margaret Thatcher famously said that “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money,” she might as well have been looking into a crystal ball. Just when you thought the Starmer government couldn’t get any worse, this week Rachel Reeves dropped a budget so blatantly communist, it’s a wonder it didn’t include a call to liquidate the Kulaks.
Sir Keir Starmer and his chancellor Rachel Reeves have placated their restive Labour backbenchers in the short term by delivering a vicious and punitive budget that directly targets all workers and the aspirational […]
Labour is raising taxes by a further whopping £26 billion in order to hand a lot of it out to the work shy.
Reeves and Starmer are belting working Britons with tens of billions in new and higher taxes, all to throw more money at the benefit class. Most odious of all, from a chancellor who committed a criminal offence when she rented her house at thousands of pounds per month without a licence, is the so-called ‘mansion tax’ – which in fact imposes massive new taxes on very ordinary London homes.
My pensioner neighbours were in tears about the mansion tax (which taxes homes worth more than £2 million [AUD $4m] with a surcharge of at least £2,500) which means they may have to move from their home of three decades because they would not be able to afford the extra thousands of pounds from their fixed budget to go into central revenue.
If two million sounds a lot, remember, this is London.
Their three bedroom, one bathroom house would be considered an ordinary suburban home in a suburban Australian city: but it has no parking, is semi-detached and located half an hour outside of central London. It has a courtyard-size backyard you could just about swing a cat in.
“Mansion” it is not but Starmer and Reeves are determined to get their claws deep into any house price growth over the past years.
In the film Darkest Hour, Winston Churchill (Gary Oldman) takes a tube train ride to gauge wartime Londoners’ opinions. It was fiction, of course: no more real than the idea of a multi-millionaire Starmer government minister dirtying her Christian Louboutins and risking a stabbing on the tube today, which is a pity because she might have learned something.
On my train leaving central London after she delivered the budget […] normally head-down commuters were openly hostile to what they were reading on their phones. Several conversations sprung up among strangers focused on one thing: that the pain and extra tax they were all about to pay was “going to be wasted on people who don’t want to work” […]
the Labour party may as well rename itself the Shirkers party, because the benefits to rising numbers of illegal immigrants and the unemployed are worth more now than the wages earned by lower earners such as delivery drivers who rise at 5am, construction workers who battle the chilly mornings and even pensioners who still struggle with meeting huge heating bills.
Reeves has imposed a staggering raft of new taxes on everything pensions, dividends, investments, savings and landlords. Even a finger-wagging tax on ‘sweet dairy products’ such as milkshakes. Maybe she’s hoping, if she taxes the price high enough, no one will be able to afford to throw one at her.
Most insulting to hard-working Britons is the removal of the two-child benefit cap.
It means tens of thousands of families who have no one in work but have six children will get an extra £14,000 a year, angering workers with two children who struggle with the high cost of living.
Hmm. Now I wonder which demographic tends to have six children and no one working?
Tory leader Kemi Badenoch has come into her own in attacking Labour’s profligacy, saying the benefits for 560,000 families will rise by an average of £5,000.
Badenoch ripped Reeves apart for her broken promises, particularly her vow that she wouldn’t come back for more after last year’s £40bn budget which hammered businesses and stymied growth. But this latest budget is also bereft of any growth measures, raising concerns about how the country will be able to stay afloat.
“There are a million more people claiming Universal Credit than there were at the time of the last budget,’’ Badenoch said.
“Government spending up. Welfare spending up. Universal credit claimants up. Unemployment up. Debt interest up. Inflation up. And what about the things you want to go up? Growth down. Investment down. Business confidence down.”
Now watch those who can afford to flee Britain for economically friendlier climes.
At 46, Reeves is too young to remember Britain in the ’70s. But she’s on a fast-track to make the Winter of Discontent happen again.
