Category Archives: Budget

Tax cuts? The Tory tax take is RISING after Hunt’s autumn statement

Jeremy Hunt: he announced tax cuts but we’ll be paying more. No wonder he’s looking less than sane.

What a swindle.

Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt announced tax cuts in his autumn statement yesterday, sure.

But he has frozen the thresholds at which people start paying taxes at particular rates. With pay rises taking place, this means more people will pay more tax.

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Here’s Money Saving Expert Martin Lewis to explain it far better than This Writer can:


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As Jeremy Hunt prepares his autumn budget, are his own finances what they should be?

Jeremy Hunt: he seems to be looking after himself very well. What about the rest of us?

Jeremy Hunt, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, is preparing to announce his autumn budget for we mere mortals on Wednesday, curious information is emerging about his own financial affairs.

Treat this with caution as even the author says Hunt could provide information that invalidates it… but take a look at this:

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The part about the inflationary increases on his flats certainly suggests foul play by the Chancellor.

And we’ll await with baited breath his information on charity donations.

Something to bear in mind while listening to him tell us how the government is going to affect our own savings and spending?


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As the DUP digs in its heels, is Northern Ireland facing hard times?

Stormont: still locked as the DUP’s representatives dig in their heels over post-Brexit trade.

Rishi Sunak has managed to avoid humiliation in the vote on the ‘Stormont Brake’ aspect of his ‘Windsor Framework’ deal with the EU over trade in Northern Ireland. Instead the shame was hung on the Democratic Unionists and Tories in the European Research Group faction.

MPs voted by 515 to 29 to support the deal agreed by Rishi Sunak.

But the defeat means the DUP has vowed to continue its boycott of the Northern Ireland Assembly at Stormont – with possibly serious consequences for the province.

Spokespeople for the other Northern Irish political parties have begged the DUP to come back, according to the BBC:

Sinn Féin vice-president Michelle O’Neill said the DUP had to “stop their boycott” of Stormont so that executive ministers could take control of the budget.

Ministers had to be in post to make the case to the Treasury for extra funding for Northern Ireland, Ms O’Neill added.

“This budget is about to cause catastrophic damage to public services,” she said.

“So the DUP need to get around the table with the rest of us, make politics work.”

Alliance Party MP Stephen Farry said Northern Ireland was “bleeding at present”, with problems piling up and public services in real crisis.

He said his party had asked the UK government to consider providing a financial package and it appeared “the door is open to that”.

“This will require the parties in Northern Ireland to work together and to make a very persuasive case… to the Treasury,” he said.

“So it reinforces the impetus on the DUP to join the rest of us in ensuring we have proper governance here.”

Ulster Unionist assembly member Robbie Butler said the level of budget cuts “on that cliff edge at the moment actually is quite alarming”.

He urged the DUP to accept the “difficulties” with the Windsor Framework and “put the people of Northern Ireland first”.

Social Democratic and Labour Party leader Colum Eastwood said the DUP had to accept that it could not get everything it wanted from the new Brexit deal.

“We have a huge opportunity with this [deal] to trade into both [UK and EU] markets unencumbered,” said the Foyle MP.

“People in Britain would give their right arm to have that opportunity.”

But DUP leader Sir Jeffrey Donaldson said the ‘Windsor Framework’ would not deliver the long-term stability and prosperity that Northern Ireland needs.

Adding insult to injury, he adopted the rhetoric of Labour’s Keir Starmer, saying there was “an element of the sticking plaster” about Rishi Sunak’s new deal with the European Union, and it would not work.

He went on to say he is “not a quitter” and will continue trying to get the deal changed – a tall order, considering the joint UK-EU body that is overseeing Brexit will meet o ratify the legal changes brought about by the Windsor Framework – tomorrow (Friday, March 24, 2023).

Northern Ireland Secretary Chris Heaton-Harris has met the five main Stormont parties at Hillsborough to discuss the new Brexit deal as well as Northern Ireland’s public finances, which he said were not in a good state.

He said he would have to set Northern Ireland’s budget for the coming year within the next few weeks if the executive was not up and running soon – and there would be some “tough decisions” if that happened.

It seems a very thinly-veiled threat, not just to the DUP but to all of the Northern Irish politicians: “get back to normal or suffer”.

But nobody in NI will be in any doubt about where responsibility will lie if the Tories in Westminster penalise them with Budget restrictions, and there may be knock-on consequences at the ballot box.

Is the DUP really willing to court electoral wipeout for the sake of what many see as not just a lost cause, but also a pointless one?


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Oliver Dowden says tax cut for wealthy rewards hard work. Whose?

Oliver Dowden: he doesn’t know anything about hard work.

Cabinet Office Secretary Oliver Dowden has defended a decision to cut taxes for the wealthiest in society while offering nothing to poverty-stricken public sector workers, saying they reward hard work.

What an insult!

The policy is intended to keep high-earners like top doctors from leaving the workforce once their pension pot hits £1 million (the previous ceiling for contributions).

He said: “We’ll have more senior public sector workers working in the public sector, helping deliver on our core priorities, whether that’s cutting the waiting list, because we’ll have more consultants, whether that’s getting crime under control.”

But these are usually specialists who are called on only in specific situations; it is the rank-and-file workers who will bring down waiting lists or tackle the bulk of criminal behaviour.

He added: “I think it’s a basic, decent principle that if people work hard, they should be able to save money and invest for their retirement.”

How does he know these rich people work hard? It is more likely that a junior doctor works a much longer, much harder week than a top-level surgeon or consultant; why shouldn’t that person be rewarded for what they do?

But of course junior doctors have had their pay cut by 26 per cent – more than a quarter – since Dowden’s party took office in 2010.

They don’t have extra money to invest in pension schemes, do they?

And attacking them weakens the National Health Service that Dowden’s gang are busy selling off to private companies anyway.

So this policy is not rewarding “hard work”; it is part of a co-ordinated attack on healthcare in the UK.

Source: Oliver Dowden says tax cut for wealthy rewards hard work – Left Foot Forward: Leading the UK’s progressive debate


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Watch Martin Lewis’s appraisal of Jeremy Hunt’s Budget

He was name-checked by Jeremy Hunt in his Budget statement on Wednesday, and Martin Lewis went on to provide an instant response to it after the Chancellor sat down.

Here it is:

For me – and for Mr Lewis, it seems – the interesting aspect was one that Hunt didn’t mention in his speech. MoneySavingExpert.com discusses it as follows:

The maximum annual tax-free amount you can save into a pension once you’ve taken money out of it will rise from £4,000 to £10,000 from 6 April. Meanwhile, the amount you can save into your pension tax-free each year is also set to rise, as is the amount you can save into pensions over a lifetime.

You can find out more about that in the MoneySavingExpert article.


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Something for the weekend: Newsnight jokers link Budget with drug song

Someone was having a laugh – but it was well-targeted.

At the top of March 15’s BBC Newsnight programme, somebody mixed Jeremy Hunt’s Budget speech with the song ‘Sorted for E’s and Wizz’ by Pulp.

The relevance was Hunt’s motif of four ‘pillars’ of the economy – each represented by the letter ‘E’.

But the clip ended with the immortal line, “In the middle of the night it feels all right but then tomorrow morning… ooh, then you come down” – which is almost certainly how we all felt after subjecting Hunt’s speech to a bit of analysis.


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Tory crumbles under cross examination over Budget

John Glen, Tory Chief Secretary to the Treasury, got badly mauled when he tried to dissemble about the Budget in an interview with Victoria Derbyshire on the BBC’s Newsnight.

He couldn’t explain why it was a “Budget for growth” when medium-term growth forecasts have been downgraded.

And on the effects of Brexit, challenged to admit that it has made the UK poorer, he could not provide an alternative explanation for what has happened since the country left the European Union.

He crumbled under scrutiny.

Watch this car crash interview and understand why Tory leadership has taken the UK nowhere.


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Was Hunt’s Budget really ‘upbeat’? Living standards remain worst since records began

 Jeremy Hunt: is his smile just another example of ‘Duper’s Delight’ – the grin politicians wear when they know they’re lying to us, as exemplified so often by Boris Johnson?

Living standards in the UK are still facing their biggest fall since records began in the 1950s – after Jeremy Hunt’s supposedly upbeat Budget.

Amid lower growth predictions than in November when we were facing recession, the Office for Budget Responsibility has said damage caused by rising energy prices and the Covid-19 pandemic could take years to reverse.

House prices will fall an estimated ten per cent by 2025, as rising bills and taxes take a toll on people’s incomes. That is expected to trigger a 20 per cent slump in property transactions, said the OBR.

The tax burden is predicted to hit a post-war high of almost 38 per cent of GDP by 2027/28. And households’ disposable income will fall six per cent over two years.

That is below the seven per cent forecast in November, but represents the largest plunge since records began in 1956-57.

This is no different from the prediction made by the Institute for Fiscal Studies boss Paul Johnson after the then-designated Spring Statement of exactly a year ago. Check out the video for the proof:

So there you have it.

The best that can be said about Hunt’s Budget is that even if it does help the economy, it will help only the very rich.

The rest of us won’t be any better-off at all.

Source: UK faces biggest fall in living standards since the 1950s


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A couple of comments to add perspective to Jeremy Hunt’s Budget

Jeremy Hunt: this image is from his financial statement last autumn but the suit is the same, apparently.

This is just to provide a little depth to the Budget coverage yesterday:

Does that give you a clearer picture? There will probably be more of this over the next few days, weeks and months.


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Jeremy Hunt’s Budget – just the main points [VIDEO]

My word, that man can waffle!

I’ve tried to distil the main points in Jeremy Hunt’s Budget statement, and it’s still 40 minutes long!

Nevertheless, if you’re looking for anything in particular, you should be able to find it more quickly than by watching the whole thing.

I was live-tweeting on Twitter at the time and those messages may provide extra information to explain what he meant:


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