If I hear the word ‘tax’ again. It’s all that this Labour government can think about.
Rishi Sunak warned us in his last days as Tory leader.
Over the past few days, we’ve had a cash grab to help badly managed councils balance the books: a tourist tax.
So staycations to some of the country’s best-loved attractions could cost us all £300 or more.
It comes as mayors and local leaders across the country take advantage of a new power to impose tourist taxes on holidays at home.
This week alone, we’ve had Rachel Reeves apparently planning to introduce a 22 per cent charge on interest earned from cash held in a stocks and shares Isa under her new reforms next April.
Remember, they announced they would reduce your tax-free cash allowance to £12,000 for savers under 65, down from £ 20,000. Why would you do that, I hear you ask?
To push you into putting the remainder of your 20,000 allowance so £8,000 into a stocks and shares Isa, which they plan to tax. It all makes sense.
Now we hear of a £1billion stealth tax on flights to push up the cost of your holiday. HMRC is apparently drawing up plans as we speak to add 20 per cent VAT to the fees airports charge airlines to use their runways and terminals.
Of course, that will be passed on to us, the customers, in full. For example, at Heathrow, this could add almost a fiver to the current standard. A charge of around £24 may not sound like much, but once they start, there’s only one way up.
Potential leadership contender and former health secretary Wes Streeting has proposed introducing a wealth tax as part of his Labour leadership pitch, equalising capital gains tax with income tax.
But it has been suggested that his approach will kill the AI boom in its tracks and damage investment in Britain.
I mean, they can’t even leave our food alone, as Labour are expected to impose new taxes on steak and lamb chops in an attempt to dramatically reduce the UK’s emissions.
The public could also be asked to cut their dairy consumption by a fifth to meet net-zero targets. But of course, none of this has worked. Rachel Reeves’s tax rate on home buyers has backfired.
She lowered the threshold at which stamp duty was paid. The threshold was raised under Liz Truss. Rachel thought that this would mean that she would get more money.
Nope. But guess what? People changed their behaviour and stopped buying houses.
Like when savers were wrongly ordered to pay thousands of pounds in tax after HMRC was given the licence to monitor bank accounts.
I mean, on the outside, their official chatbot in their government app, launched this month, with their official plain-speaking AI chatbot designed to answer simple questions. Everyday questions like, ‘When should I get my passport renewed?’ It was actually caught.
The app was caught giving tax avoidance advice. I mean, you seriously couldn’t make this up. Record numbers of young Britons are fleeing, turning their backs on Sir Keir Starmer and Labour’s tax hikes. Who can blame them?
This government haven’t got a clue what it’s like to live in the world we inhabit, insulated from their own policy decisions, like the effect of the NI hike, which they promised not to raise.
The civil service is flooded with people who will never leave because of their gold-plated pensions. Good luck getting that lot in the office.
The Labour government are simply out of ideas, and the answer to everything is tax. It’s simply not good enough.