Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer is laying the groundwork for a series of tax hikes and service cuts in the name of fighting inflation.
Chancellor Jeremy Hunt, the failed 2019 Conservative Party leadership election contender who serves as finance minister to Rishi Sunak, the failed September 2022 Conservative Party leadership election contender — now Prime Minister anyway — will announce a budget on November 17th, in the wake of Office for National Statistics (ONS) figures suggesting the British economy contracted in the third quarter of 2022.
“I am under no illusion that there is a tough road ahead – one which will require extremely difficult decisions to restore confidence and economic stability,” he said — code for letting people know he will be hiking taxes, not cutting them, and slashing spending on public services.
“[T]o achieve long-term, sustainable growth, we need to grip inflation, balance the books, and get debt falling. There is no other way,” insisted Hunt, whose personal net worth has been estimated in excess of £14 million (~$16.48m), in comments quoted by The Telegraph.
“While the world economy faces extreme turbulence, the fundamental resilience of the British economy is cause for optimism in the long run,” he added, somewhat meaninglessly.
Hunt, a China-linked anti-Brexiteer who advocated communist-style lockdown measures during the Wuhan virus pandemic, is reportedly working on a programme of £21 billion in tax rises and £33 billion in spending cuts to 2027-28, assisted by a £35 billion stealth tax on income achieved by a six-year freeze on tax bands — a move which will promote significant fiscal drag.
A former Health Secretary — indeed, Britain’s longest-serving Health Secretary — Hunt will be trying to impose this regime as the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) urges its members to execute their first strike in over a hundred years in an effort to secure a 17 per cent pay rise.
This is five per cent higher than the Retail Price Index (RPI) inflation rate — currently at over 12 per cent — but the RCN argues that the request is justified by London Economics research which suggests there has been a real terms pay cut on the order of 20 per cent for experienced nurses since 2010-11 thanks to inflation and public sector pay freezes.
“Expecting nursing staff to work one day a week for free is totally unacceptable,” said RCN general secretary Pat Cullen after the research was publicised, warning that RCN members have “had enough”.
Hunt appeared to acknowledge their plight, telling Sky News he has “a great deal of sympathy for” nurses and acknowledging that “inflation is more than 10 per cent and that is eating away at everyone’s earnings and making everyone worry about the cost of the weekly shop.”
He insisted, however, that the “best thing that I can do as Chancellor is produce a plan that brings down inflation, brings down the upward pressure on interest rates.”
This suggests that, unlike Liz Truss, the Sunak administration will not attempt to defy the dogma of the Bank of England, the country’s central bank — led by an extremely well-paid governor who has gone so far as to argue workers should not ask for pay rises in the name of controlling inflation, heedless of the impact this would have on individual lives.
Given Hunt’s impressive wealth and the even more impressive wealth of the Prime Minister — Sunak and his wife are estimated to have a net worth on the order of £730 million (~$844 million), dwarfing that of even the likes of the King — the government’s austere fiscal programme may prove optically problematic for the Conservative Party, especially with a general election looming no later than the start of 2025.
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