By Breitbart News Network | Created at 2024-10-30 17:56:36 | Updated at 2024-10-31 01:28:20
9 hours ago
The announcement of big tax, borrow, and spend budget met with groans of shock from opposition benches in the UK Parliament as the fledgling Labour government reveals its financial plans for the next year.
Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves presented the new government’s annual budget — written beneath the watchful gaze of a newly-installed portrait of a co-founder of the British Communist Party and lifelong Marxist ‘Red’ Ellen Wilkinson inside Downing Street — to Parliament on Wednesday. Much of its contents had already been briefed to press in the past few months to the great anger of Parliamentary authorities, who remind the government that elected representatives should hear the government’s plans before the press, but there were still a few nasty surprises tucked away.
Members of the house groaned and exclaimed with apparent shock or outrage as some of the measures were announced, including the scale of changes to an employer’s tax which is both being applied to more earning and at a higher rate. Along with other grabs like more inheritance tax, the government says it will be raising £40 billion ($52bn) extra in taxes, more even than the previously discussed £35 billion figure.
British conservative broadsheet The Daily Telegraph says in its analysis of the budget that it is “the biggest set of tax increases in modern history”. Sky News’ Ed Conway says the tax burden is now forecast not just to be the highest since the Second World War, but to be the highest “since comparable records began”.
In addition to hiking taxes, Reeves is also changing fiscal rules to allow the government to borrow considerably more money, which she says will be used to pay for investment over the life of this parliament. Reuters states forecasts show the government is due to borrow “almost 142 billion pounds more” over the next five years.
As things stand, the UK government deficit is already £120 billion a year over tax receipts of £1,096 billion (£1.1 trillion, $1.4tn) or around four per cent of GDP. That this is little if ever discussed was flagged by Brexit’s Nigel Farage last week, who said: “the first thing we’re not addressing is the true state we’re in… there’s a £2.7 trillion black hole, our national debt is exploding. Exploding in actual terms, in percentage terms, in terms of interest repayments we have every year. There’s never any honest conversation with the British public about that.”
The former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said as well as raising tax “to record levels” Reeves was letting borrowing soar to fund their projects. He told the chamber ion response to the budget: “…today the Chancellor has launched an enormous borrowing spree, saddling our children and grandchildren with billions upon billions of pounds more debt, pushing up interest rates, leaving our economy more exposed to future shocks and leading the OBR today to now forecast higher inflation in every year of the forecast.
“Her decision to let borrowing rip make a total nonsense of her claims on the state of the public finance because if they truly were in such a dire strait as she has said, what we should have seen today is a significant reduction in borrowing to repair them, not the splurge she has just unleashed.”
