Are you ready to pay more tax?
There are now big questions over whether Labour were honest with us about tax rises during the election campaign.
We all remember Sir Keir Starmer saying he will not raise tax on working people, no tax rises for income tax and for National Insurance.
But Rishi Sunak was adamant that that wasn’t true, and that they would put up everyone’s taxes by £2,000.
Patrick Christys delivers his verdict on Labour’s possible tax rises
GB News
So last week, an independent pay review body said wages for NHS workers and teachers should go up by 5.5 per cent.
Well, the Institute for Fiscal Studies estimated that a 5.5 per cent increase across all public sector professions would cost us about £10billion, and Chancellor Rachel Reeves is hinting that she will do this.
Reeves said: “We are looking at those pay review body recommendations, doing the analysis, and we will work with public sector workers on that.
“But we also know that there is a cost to not settling a cost of further industrial action, a cost in terms of the challenge that we face in recruiting and retaining doctors and nurses and teachers as well.”
But this idea that Labour didn’t know what financial position the country was in, or that the Tories have left us in the worst state since the war, are being rubbished now by ex-chancellor Jeremy Hunt.
Hunt said: “What is absolute nonsense is this business of the worst economic inheritance since the Second World War. I mean, you only need to look at the last time a government changed hands between parties in 2010.
“Compared to then, inflation is nearly half what it was we have then we had markets collapsing. Now we have the fastest growth in the G7. It’s a very transformed picture, and I think the reason that she’s doing this is that she wants to lay the ground for tax rises.”
People called this, didn’t they?
They thought, okay, maybe Labour will get in there, have a look at the books and say and it’s worse than we thought, and taxes will go up.
So the question is are this, did Labour lie to us about tax hikes, and do you want to pay more tax to give public sector workers a pay rise?