Following the Pre-Budget Report UK PLC is facing a £ 1 trillion national debt and £ 40 billion tax hike for all British families. It’s a £20 billion temporary tax giveaway with almost £40 billion of announced permanent tax rises – that’s almost £1,500 for every family. Buried in the small print is another £100 billion of unspecified tax rises to come. The Chancellor, in one move, has doubled the national debt to more than £1 trillion, and borrowed more than at any time in our history. We now know that Britain will be paying off Gordon Brown’s debt for decades to come. With this Budget, Gordon Brown has mortgaged the country’s future to try and safeguard his own.
The permanent tax rises that we face include £20 billion on National Insurance, £10 billion on income tax, £5 billion on alcohol and cigarettes and £2 billion on pensions. By 2012/13, anyone earning more than £20,000 will be paying more tax. So the majority of earners will be permanently worse off by April 2011, even before the alcohol and tobacco tax rises. By claiming to hit the rich he will in fact hit most teachers, journalists, social workers, police officers, paramedics, firemen, office managers and professionals. The rich will in turn either migrate or redefine their income as capital gains and easily circumnavigate Brown’s clumsy attempts to capture revenue and headlines.
What wasn’t mentioned in the report was that borrowing next year will be the highest as a proportion of GDP on record and that the Government’s growth forecasts are much more optimistic than those of independent forecasters. If the recession is in line with external forecasters, and therefore worse than the Treasury forecasts, borrowing will be catastrophically high. The Government is borrowing more than the entire debt it inherited from all previous Governments put together. To put this in perspective £295 billion more borrowing than was forecast just eight months ago – more than £11,000 per family. What’s more, buried in the small-print is a £100 billion black hole in tax receipts over the next Parliament whilst the Chancellor has also cut the NHS budget by £1.4 billion in 2010/11. Finally in terms of businesses in Wolverhampton and throughout the West Midlands we face a £2.8 billion tax rise though the NIC tax increases.
There is an old Indian saying - that any dream is possible and any ambition easy to fulfil when you use another person’s money. Gordon Brown has taken a huge gamble to secure his tenure at number 10 and has used our money as collateral for the wager.
Paul
