The British public will reportedly be on the hook for another £25 billion in tax hikes in Chancellor Jeremy Hunt’s budget next month, as the tax buden is set to hit its highest level since the 1940s.
The neo-liberal technocratic government of recently installed Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, rejected by Conservative party members in September but later installed without an election anyway, is expected to raise taxes yet again.
This will be carried out in a budget laid out by Jeremy Hunt, also rejected by Tory members in a leadership election and also now at the top of the party regardless, next month.
The budget is expected to try to address the so-called “black hole” in the United Kingdom’s public finances, which rose to more than £50 billion in large part due to Sunak’s decision to pay people to stay home and businesses to remain shut during the Chinese coronavirus crisis when he was Boris Johnson’s Chancellor of the Exchequer.
Despite the Conservative Party’s ordinary members expressly rejecting Sunak’s plan to hike taxes during the summer leadership campaign to replace Johnson, the party establishment conducted a coup, or more accurately a counter-revolution, against Liz Truss and her plans to cut taxes by £45 billion to spur economic growth and ameliorate the cost of living crisis.
Therefore, Chancellor Jeremy Hunt, a pro-China globalist and opponent of Brexit from the David Cameron era, who was ushered in as de facto Prime Minister in days prior to the ousting of Truss, has been enabled by the party establishment to significantly raise taxes, starting with the immediate £32 billion he announced earlier this month.
According to a government source speaking to The Daily Mail, the globalist finance minister is allegedly looking to split the £50 billion shortfall half and half, meaning £25 billion in new taxes and £25 billion in spending cuts in his upcoming budget.
This will mean a total of of £57 billion in new taxes this year, which will put the United Kingdom on pace to see its tax burden rise to 36.6 per cent of GDP — the highest level since the wartime period of the 1940s, and up from 33.1 per cent last year, which was already a 70-year-high.
Chancellor Hunt is also reportedly looking to extend the four-year freeze on income tax brackets by two years, rather than raising them in line with inflation.
Experts have warned that doing this could result in millions of Britons being pulled into the 40 per cent tax bracket as a result of so-called fiscal drag.
Speaking at a hospital he was visiting in South London on Friday, Prime Minister Sunak said of the upcoming budget: “The Chancellor has already said difficult decisions are going to have to be made and I’m going to sit down and work through those with him.
“But what I want everyone to know is that we need to do these things so that we can get our borrowing and debt back on a sustainable path. That’s important because it means that we can get a grip of inflation if we do that. It means we can limit as best as possible the increase in interest rates, which is important.
“But as we do that, I want people to be reassured we will always do it with fairness at the heart, we will protect the most vulnerable and ensure that we can continue to grow the economy in the long run,” he claimed.
While Mr Sunak used the Conservative Party manifesto of 2019 — which pledged that the party would not raise taxes on the country — as justification for his being installed into Number 10 Downing Street without the support of his party’s ordinary members or the democratic mandate conferred by leading his party into an election, it appears he will follow the long tradition of Tory Party leaders failing to honour manifesto commitments.
Indeed, while they try to cast themselves as the party of small government, low taxes, and controlled immigration, during their 12 years in power, the Conservatives have raised taxes on over 1,000 occasions and presided over huge increases in both legal and illegal immigration.
Expressing doubt over the government’s austerity measures at a time of economic crisis, former government minister Sir John Redwood said: “The cruel paradox is this. Tightening too much now, whether by hiking taxes or cutting public services, could create a recession. In a recession, deficits rise and the state has to borrow more, not less.
“It would not be a good idea to follow the wrong response to current economic conditions in pursuit of a lower number for three years’ time which no one can accurately predict nor deliver,” Redwood added.
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