The boss of a leading economic think tank has said that the “black hole” in the UK’s public finances is equivalent to the Conservative Party’s pre-election National Insurance cuts.
Former chancellor Jeremy Hunt cut National Insurance by 2p in the last spring budget before the election, after making the exact same cut in the autumn statement last year.
The combined cuts were expected to save the average earner £900 a year.
At the time, Hunt argued that it would make the tax system fairer and help revive the economy.
In order to pay for the tax reductions, the former government insisted it was looking at further public spending cuts, to be introduced if the Conservatives had won the recent election.
Paul Johnson, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, said on Monday that it was “striking” that £20 billion “black hole” is of the same scale as Hunt’s NI cuts.
Johnson told BBC Breakfast: “It is very striking that if this problem is about £20 billion big that is exactly the scale of the National Insurance cuts implemented by Jeremy Hunt just before the election.
“Now, if those cuts were implemented in the knowledge that there was this kind of hole that is not good policy to put it mildly.”
Stealing from the poor, adding to the tab, paid for by inflation by us and our grandchildren’s grandchildren. Same playbook in the USA.
Fuck these financial terrorists
Cant wait for the current government to get the country back on balance, and then the idiotic public voting these thieving tories back in immediately, and wonder why the country ends up going to shit again.
The cycle of economic illiteracy continues.
It is the political illiteracy that is the issue - only once people stop believing in the fairy tale of democracy we’ve all been told, and understand that all of what you described is a feature of the system rather than a bug, will we be able to start tackling it.
Neoliberal Labour aren’t there to make things better for you, or the country, they are a placeholder there to serve the establishment and make sure everything stays comfortable for the rich while the far right gets its shit together before continuing to make it even better for them at the expense of the rest of us.
oh dear. who are “the establishment”, to you, in your own words
I tend to believe you shouldn’t ascribe to malice what can be better explained by incompetence (and the Tories were incompetent) but that is clearly the Tories knowing they were going to lose and sneaking unfunded tax cuts onto the books as a trap for the incoming Labour government.
Being off by a couple of billion might be incompetence. This is an order of magnitude greater.
Well it’s simple then. Reverse the cuts and we’re back to where we started before the cuts. Good job 👍.
That’s the trap though - it gives the Tories ammunition in future elections to say “Labour promised no tax rises and the first they did in power was raise taxes”.
It’s dirty business - the Tories are essentially using people’s lives in a game of political oneupmanship.
Its also precisely why they refused to guarantee increasing spending on day one.
It was hard work defending this position because we knew there was going to be some pretty bad cockroaches crawling out from the accounting books, but there was a large portion who seemed to feel that anything less than giving them everything was proof they were Tories.
This new Labour Government are beyond playing games. They’ll do what’s best for the country and not their political image… right?
They’re saying on the news that this will be investigated by the OBR and could backfire on the Tories if they find out they have been diddling the books.
This new Labour Government are beyond playing games. They’ll do what’s best for the country and not their political image… right?
You’d hope, as Starmer seems to be pretty committed to public service but the temptation for political point-scoring is a strong one.
They’re saying on the news that this will be investigated by the OBR and could backfire on the Tories if they find out they have been diddling the books.
I’d love to see them hauled over the coals for this one - pushing through massive tax cuts with a promise to balance the books if they won seems like a really dirty move.
That cut, and all the others inflicted on the working class, was made to enable the continuation of the rich avoiding and evading their taxes, which creates the actual black hole, which is over 4 times bigger than what is being discussed, and which Neoliberal Labour have no intention of plugging (so far all I’ve seen is more talk of cuts, continuing the Tories plan for UC and other benefits, and increasing tax, which, without closing the existing loopholes, which they won’t, will only impact those already paying it, allowing those who don’t, to continue avoiding and evading it).
We all know the Tories royally fucked the taxpayer, don’t be distracted or so easily placated by someone simply pointing that out, while not offering any real/different solutions.
What a coincidence.
