I remember an old Private Eye cartoon where the Editor of a tabloid emerges from his office and announces to his staff: ‘’Bad news. We’ve reached the bottom of the barrel.’’
That was a gag, but shockingly for our nation’s economy, it’s only too true. We are literally on the edge of going bust, and yet the hapless Rachel Reeves is planning a massive tax increase in the Autumn to fund the SIDS (Skint Idle Dim Socialists) who have done so much to damage the UK.
Her every decision has been wrong. I mean every decision. And that’s after only ten months. I hesitate to think what state our nation would look like after five years of this nightmare.
Our national debt is £2.7trillion, meaning we pay £100billion a year in interest to generous strangers, and yet Labour is to restore the winter fuel allowance and the two-child benefit cap, costing a combined £5billion a year. Plus, giving every state worker a pay rise that a private firm could only dream about.
Has anybody told this idiot that we don’t have the damned money. And a major reason is that we have driven out of our country the people who actually know how to create wealth. They embrace sacrifice, so we don’t have to.
Reeves decided that we would be better off by scrapping the non-dom status for the super-rich. As with everything else, she was wrong. The incredibly wealth paid £8billion a year in taxes (I loved them being here) for money they had made in Britain. In return, we didn’t touch their overseas money or assets.
The Reeves effect is lurching Britain towards bankruptcy. But she is not alone in her madness - Kelvin MacKenzie
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Reeves forecast the Exchequer would be £3billion better off by forcing them to pay tax on everything they owned and earned. What happened in practice? A net of 10,800 millionaires left the country last year, meaning that the decision will now actually cost the public purse.
All those jobs, the gardeners, the dog walkers, the housekeepers, the chauffeurs and the nannies, disappeared. Not to mention the huge houses bought through estate agents and the flash restaurants, which were kept busy with their money. Thank you, Rachel.
Next came the huge NI increases for business. The first thing the finance guys did was freeze hiring, and it was the bottom of the pile that was hit first. Cafes, bars, pubs, and bakeries are no longer hiring if they can avoid it.
Firms are now offering fewer hours and trying to hire more under-21s as they pay less NI and less minimum wage. The Reeves effect? The British Chamber of Commerce say vacancies are down by two-fifths and graduate vacancies by a quarter. Thank you, Rachel.
The VAT on private schools has been a disaster. Reeves thought it would raise £1.5billion and employ 6,500 more teachers. But 13,000 pupils have left the private sector to enrol in state schools, far more than forecast, and the effect has been class sizes up and no sign of more teachers. Thank you, Rachel.
It’s not as though Reeves is alone in her madness. Angela Rayner, the Deputy Prime Minister (how desperate must Labour be to make her No.2?), has leaked a memo she sent to Reeves detailing how to squeeze another £4billion out of the middle classes to fund the lifestyle of her skint mates.
Our tax burden is already at a 75-year high. What kind of politician wants that to go higher? You know the answer to that. A Labour politician.
We are right on the edge of bankruptcy. At some stage, we will need to find a politician who will take an axe to benefits, pensions and all forms of state handouts. It will be painful, but as with cutting back plants in the autumn, ultimately, we will bloom.
I was hopeful the axeman was going to be Nigel Farage. Of late, the sound on his trumpet has changed a little, coming out in favour of more state giveaways.
Don’t do it Nigel. You are beginning to sound like Rachel Reeves. There can’t be a bigger insult than that. Nor a bigger disaster for our nation.
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