Now there’s an old Irish joke, I think I’m allowed to do it as I am a Dolan. A man is lost and asks an Irishman called Paddy for directions. The Irishman replies, ‘well, if I were you, I wouldn’t start from here’.
Paddy is right. After our wild two-and-a-half-year experiment in communism, in which we shut down the country and the economy in a failed bid to stop a nasty but mild for-most respiratory virus, Britain is broke. Worth noting that Starmer and Reeves, in opposition, called for more of those ruinous Covid measures.
So yes, this Government has inherited a Tory mess. But in some ways, they co-own this nightmare as well.
The one great truth about this country that Rachel Reeves is unlikely to acknowledge at the end of the month, is that Britain lives beyond its means, with public spending now representing almost half of our national income when it was 35 per cent two decades ago.
Mark Dolan shared his views on Labour tax hikes
GB News
More money is going into public services with worse outcomes, whether it’s policing the NHS or education. So the right approach would be a drastic reduction in the size of the state, wage restraint and unprecedented spending cuts, perhaps upwards of £35billion.
Instead, the Chancellor is said to be considering extra taxes of £35billion. Why? Well, because the cuts Britain needs are politically impossible for a party that has promised the public sector a huge cash bonanza. Or to use that snake oil word that they love so much ‘investment’.
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What we need is not just unprecedented cuts, but a vast reduction in taxes to boost national income, to pay for great public services and to reduce the debt, the interest of which alone is currently costing us £100billion a year.
Now, the Chancellor may fiddle with the fiscal rules in order to borrow further billions. What’s that going to do? Saddle future generations with an even bigger bill. Whilst they promised that taxes on working Britons would not go up, a predicted £12billion hike in National Insurance contributions from businesses is exactly that.
The very impressive. Tina McKenzie, from the Federation of Small Businesses, said hiking small firms tax is a recipe for cuts to pay hours and jobs. Meanwhile, the Institute for Fiscal Studies says raising employer national insurance contributions is effectively a tax on the earnings of working people.
A feared £5billion hike in fuel duty is another tax rise on working people. Ask anyone with a van or folk who have to drive to work or take their kids to school, and it will hurt small businesses in particular who are already struggling.
Rachel Reeves will deliver the Budget on October 30 PA
Six hundred thousand firms are currently said to be on the verge of collapse. The Adam Smith Institute now fear that the tax rate on the non-doms, disgracefully introduced by the Tories, may cost the country £6.5billion over the next decade in lost jobs, growth and investment, rather than raising anything.
And a record 10,000 millionaires are expected to leave the country this year alone. How rich people with all their spending power leaving Britain helps the poor is anyone’s guess.
And so much for Rachel Reeves’s imaginary £22billion black hole, which is proving as elusive as the Loch Ness Monster. It was fishy from the start.
First of all, we know that contested figure could be almost halved if she hadn’t forked out £9billion for inflation-busting pay rises for the likes of junior doctors and train drivers.
Mark Dolan said that it will be an “utter horror show”
GB News
Now there’s talk of boosting spending by a further £40billion altogether. Now some of that will be for infrastructure, and that is a good thing.
But billions will be there to fund Ed Miliband’s wild net zero experiment, which involves betting the House on flaky renewables, not to mention a cash splurge on an already failing and bloated public sector.
Now, there have been times when we have needed a Labour Government, but with the country crying out for low taxes, fiscal restraint and business-led growth, now is not one of them.
I don’t know about you, but I am dreading the October Halloween budget. It will be tricks and treats and an utter horror show.