Both the governing Conservatives and likely governing-in-waiting Labour party are talking up more tax rises, even as the United Kingdom suffers the highest peace-time tax surge ever.
The government cannot rule out more tax rises to come, a Conservative minister said on Friday, even as a new study finds the British people have suffered the single largest increase of the tax burden in a single Parliament outside of wartime ever.
But voters can’t hope for a way out of the punishment by changing their allegiance to the other of the nation’s two major parties either, as the Labour Party announces it intends to launch punitive raids on what it perceives to be pockets of affluence, including schools and farmers. Potential third party Reform — formerly Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party — says the convergence of views between the two forces shows the Conservatives have become nothing more than blue socialists, but nevertheless polling suggests many voters remain wedded to the legacy parties that have dominated Westminster for the past century.
Treasury minister Andrew Griffith spoke out Friday against calls for tax cuts to relieve pressure on the public, saying it would not be “responsible” to say there would be no more tax rises. His remarks were in response to a report by the Institute of Fiscal Studies which found the tax burden is on course to rise to 37 per cent of GDP by next year, up from 33 per cent at the last general election.
This is the highest level since the Second World War and, the IFS says, this Parliament is due to be the highest period of rises since records began. Indeed, going by government receipts, this parliament is not far off the tax rises British people and businesses sustained after the First World War to pay for that conflict and its consequences.
Even if the Conservatives announced vote-grabbing tax cuts just before the next election, likely to be in Winter 2024, these would be essentially meaningless the IFS said. Taxes had risen so considerably in recent years, it is inconceivable any pre-election giveaway could come close to overturning the damage done.
A spokesman for the body said: “This is not, for the most part, a direct consequence of the pandemic. Rather, it reflects decisions to increase government spending, in part driven by demographic change… It is likely that this parliament will mark a decisive and permanent shift to a higher-tax economy.”
While the Conservative Party has broadly shown itself unequal to the task of responsible spending and reversed a century of reputation-building as a party that generally cuts taxes, not increase them, Labour meanwhile openly promotes the politics of covetousness and promises new taxes to punish what they perceive as socially undesirable behaviour.
As reported today by the Daily Telegraph, the Labour Party is said to be planning to kill off inheritance tax allowances meant to protect family farms and family businesses from being broken up in order to pay inheritance tax bills. A spokesman for the National Farmers’ Union Mutual Insurance Society told the paper proceeding with this plan could be “devastating for the UK’s traditional family farms”.
Piling taxes on family businesses and farms would disincentivise long-term investment, they said.
This move to further burden the already difficult and unpleasant process of the death of a family member with additional taxes comes as Labour announced this week their intention, should they form the next government, to restructure the way the charity sector works, creating two tiers of charity. Those that conform to the government’s goals and world views would be able to keep their tax breaks, while others — private schools being first in the firing line, as a long-term object of hatred for the left — would have them removed.
This convergence of views — that high taxation is the only conceivable future for the nation — has led Richard Tice, leader of the Reform UK Party to observe the Conservatives are now better thought of as “Con-socialists”. They have become “the party of high tax, high regulation, nanny state – and all of that leads to low growth”, he told Breitbart London on Friday.
Expressing frustration at the failure of the Conservatives to make any progress at all with the potential offered by the chance of Brexit, Tice said: “We didn’t do Brexit to become a highly taxed, highly regulated nation, we did it to become a dynamic, bold, ambitious, low-tax nation.”
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