Rishi Sunak and money: as the richest man in the UK, isn’t he keeping a little too much of his cash away from his own government’s Treasury?
Let me get this right: Rishi Sunak pays 45 per cent in income tax and 20 per cent in capital gains tax.
He made £1,970,992 in income and capital gains last year. We may take it as a rule of thumb that this was split between his prime ministerial salary of £164,951 and capital gains that presumably totalled £1,806,041.
His total tax payment was £432,493, which is less than he might be expected to pay, so we may also conclude that he did not claim his full salary.
Add to that his two per cent National Insurance of 3,299 and we get total deductions of £435,792 (or thereabouts, depending on how much of his salary he claimed).
That about 22 per cent of his total earnings. It’s as near to the percentage a person earning the lowest amount possible to still be paying tax – £12,570 – as makes no odds.
So, for example, a nurse earning the average wage for her profession (£35,000 per year) pays £7,814 in income tax and National Insurance. That is also about 22 per cent of their total earnings – but in fact is a little more than the percentage Sunak pays.
Doesn’t it seem a little strange that, in a country that has supposedly progressive tax rates, the richest man in the country pays only the same proportion as the average in a profession that has been on strike due to low pay?
If I were a nurse, I’d be up in arms about this.
Come to that, if I were a higher-earner who actually pays anything more than 22 per cent on my total earnings for the 2021-22 tax year, I’d be up in arms too. Wouldn’t you?
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The Institute for Fiscal Studies has warned that the richest taxpayers could gain £150 a month, with the poorest getting just 63p as a result of the tax cuts likely to be unveiled by Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng after this week.
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Tory leader candidate Liz Truss would divert £13 billion earmarked for the NHS to social care, to catch up on delayed Covid treatment there.
Is that a good idea? It’s certainly populist. But isn’t diverting funds away from the NHS when routine asymptomatic Covid testing is about to end – and the disease has this summer caused almost twice as many deaths as last summer – extremely foolhardy?
Nobody expects the ending of tests to last because a surge of new Covid cases is expected in the autumn. But the decision to end asymptomatic testing has alarmed health experts who have cautioned against dismantling the surveillance of Covid while cases remain high.
As it is, the chief executive of health think tank the King’s Fund has said handing the money to social care is “robbing Peter to pay Paul”.
Richard Murray said it was “not a sustainable solution to the health and care crisis”.
In any case, it is unlikely that the money will actually materialise.
It is supposed to come from increased National Insurance contributions announced under Boris Johnson last year – but Truss wants to scrap the rise and find the cash from the general tax take (which is a contradiction in terms; public funding and taxation doesn’t work like that).
So as the NHS faces its worst winter crisis yet, the front-runner to be the new prime minister wants to take the imaginary money that was going to help it, and let it do its nonexistent good in social care. LUNACY!
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Rishi Sunak: he knows he’s doing wrong but he’s doing it anyway.
With Parliament about to reconvene with a new legislative programme, Chancellor Rishi Sunak is being urged to (at last) address the cost-of-living crisis.
The British Chambers of Commerce have called for a three-point plan that would slash VAT on energy bills from 20 per cent to five per cent, offer free Covid tests for companies and the reversing of a recent National Insurance hike.
Sunak is making vague noises about tax cuts – which would be just as well, considering his government has inflicted more tax hikes on the UK’s population than any other in decades.
But he hasn’t actually done anything yet.
Instead, it seems, he’s taking billions from pensioners by freezing something called the Lifetime Allowance for five years.
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Money: Boris Johnson and the super-rich have it because they took it from you. It was their plan from the start – even before the financial crash of 2008. And they tricked you with lies into voting to impoverish yourself.
Somebody’s bound to call it a perfect storm; it is perfect as far as the Conservatives are concerned.
Let’s see if we can get our ducks in the right line…
First we had the financial crisis, caused by bankers who have since become Conservative MPs. The Conservative-led Coalition government that slithered into office by blaming this mess on Labour (despite the fact that Tory bankers caused it) then claimed austerity was the solution.
And what did austerity do? It squeezed money out of the poor and gave it to the rich.
A knock-on effect of the financial crash was that banks were told to cut interest rates, almost to nothing. This meant there was no point in saving money because the only people who could benefit from the interest on their savings were the super-rich.
Then the Tories foisted Brexit on us. People like Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg said leaving the EU would bring billions of pounds back into the UK, to be used on things the population really want, like investing in the National Health Service.
In fact, Brexit has cost the UK £800 million per week – and rising. It has tied the UK’s businesses up in red tape, despite that Tories having claimed that they were getting rid of burdensome bureaucracy.
And Brexit is a major contributor to the cost of living crisis. It has created huge pressures on the food supply chain (for example) due to high bureaucracy and a shortage of lorry drivers to bring goods into the country (this being worsened by the Tories’ hatred of foreign-born workers).
Food prices have, unsurprisingly, rocketed. Energy prices are also rocketing because of a shortage of supply. Both have been worsened by the war between Russia and Ukraine and decisions by western nations to boycott Russian gas and goods.
The Tories’ response to these pressures on ordinary families has been to cut wages wherever they can and to raise tax by increasing National Insurance. They have offered nothing to people on benefits or to pensioners, meaning the UK is facing the biggest cut in living standards since records began,
Their justification for the NI rise is that it will subsidise investment in the NHS and Social Care – a slap in the face for everybody who thought money saved by leaving the EU would do that. And the claim is a myth anyway:
And more of us are paying more tax already – because the Tories have frozen the thresholds at which people pay different rates of tax. Even though pay is rising below inflation, increases will push incomes above the levels at which they pay different tax rates, meaning the government will take more of your money in tax, just when you need to keep more in your pocket:
They say they’re going to introduce measures to ease the burden of the tax rises in July. Why not immediately?
And they say they’re going to cut Income Tax by one penny (to 19p in the pound) in time for the next general election. But is that really going to help people? How much money will it put backin the pockets of the poorly-paid when they’re already losing so much to inflated prices and higher taxes?
Put it all together and you can see that this was the plan all along: to multiply the incomes of the already-wealthy while restricting those of the working majority, then to increase prices and taxes to levels that won’t affect the rich but will plunge the vast majority into poverty.
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Rishi Sunak: His – and Boris Johnson’s – claim that a massive hike in National Insurance, announced last year, would go entirely to fund the National Health Service and social care… was not true. Were you fooled?
Boris Johnson’s claim that his – and Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s – National Insurance rise would sent £12bn to the NHS and social care was a lie, economic analysts have confirmed.
They pointed out that measures in the Chancellor’s Spring Statement have chopped that amount in half – but added that it was never intended to go to the NHS in the first place.
Here are BBC Business Editor Simon Jack and Paul Johnson of the Institute for Fiscal Studies to explain:
Were you fooled by the Tory liars?
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Michael Gove: this Tory has been part of the government for 10 of the last 11 years and says levelling-up is needed because poor communities have been undervalued for years. Wasn’t that his doing? He’s not providing enough. And he’s busily giving tax breaks to bankers while punching working people down with the biggest tax burden in decades.
Michael Gove’s “levelling up” project is already an embarrassment to the Tories and the UK – and he’s only just provided any details?
The plan is to close the gap between rich and poor areas by 2030 through improving services such as education, broadband and transport.
The Tories say they’ll provide £11 billion for projects between now and 2030, including:
£100m of new investment for innovation centres to boost research and development in Greater Manchester, the West Midlands and Glasgow
A £1.5bn fund to give loans to small and medium-sized house builders for new homes mostly outside London and the South-East
£5bn in bus services and active travel
£1.8bn invested in new housing infrastructure, turning brownfield land into projects across the country
£230m extra in grassroots football
£30m allocated to improving parks and urban green spaces
An extra £560m in activities for young people
An additional £150m in a safer streets fund
Does that seem generous? Not when compared with other countries, as critics have pointed out:
• Germany have just committed £1.5 trillion to levelling up regional economies in Germany over 20 years.
• The UK has committed £11 billion to levelling up England for the next 5 years.
Some have pointed out that Gove has been a poor choice to front this project:
Michael Gove, who’s been in Government for 10 out of the last 11 years, says people in northern England have been “overlooked and undervalued for years”.
But the biggest flaw in the Tory plan for “levelling up” is that party’s own ongoing project to overbalance the nation’s wealth in favour of people who are already super-rich.
On the same day as Gove announced this project, the Tory government pushed through a plan to cut taxes for rich bankers – by £1 billion per year. This is at the same time as they are inflicting a 10 per cent increase in National Insurance on working people, after cutting Universal Credit for the same workers by more than £1,000 per year.
Conservative MPs tonight voted to hand bankers a tax cut worth £1,000,000,000 each year.
This is while they're pushing ahead with their National Insurance tax hike on workers.
Don't believe their lies on "levelling up". They're busy punching down.
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What has he done? By the time Boris Johnson realises his error in taxing poor people to pay for the rich, it will probably be too late and an expression like this won’t save him.
Could this be Boris Johnson’s ‘poll tax’ moment?
Her disastrous miscalculation that the UK’s electorate would tolerate a hugely-regressive flat-rate tax that treated the poorest wage slave the same as the richest billionaire led to Margaret Thatcher’s ejection from office in 1990.
Now, with his plan to charge working people for care services that will also serve rich people who won’t have to pay for it, it seems Boris Johnson has made the same critical blunder.
That’s why message like this are starting to appear:
Welcome to the UK where Parliament just voted by 335 to 243 to get a nurse who has to use a foodbank to pay for social care while a retired billionaire doesn’t have to.
And this one, referencing Priti Patel’s threat to force refugees to jump into the English Channel – potentially drowning themselves – rather than allow them onto UK soil:
Welcome to Britain where we drown refugees so we can "take care of our own" and then we give "our own" a tax increase to help out rich people
Already the Tories have plummeted by five points in the latest YouGov opinion poll, putting them one point behind Labour because of Boris Johnson, not Keir Starmer…
When did people start to believe polls??? 😳
The only reason for this latest poll, is to warn Spaffer not to go down the taxation road … 😒
… and while some may believe the situation will return to normal as soon as something else takes people’s attention from the fact that Boris Johnson is subjecting them to an ongoing, perpetual daylight robbery, others believe the situation is more serious:
Adam Boulton – Is this tax rise going to do lasting damage to the Tories appeal to the electorate?
The trouble is, Keir Starmer doesn’t want a National Care Service and has ditched former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s plan for one.
And here’s another suggestion that is vetoed by Starmer’s behaviour:
Why aren't Labour calling for an end to the National Insurance exemption that allows very high earners to pay much lower NI rates than ordinary workers?
Perhaps it's something to do with Keir Starmer courting £millionaire party political donors like a cat in heat?
Perhaps Starmer thinks voters don’t have anywhere else to go. He’s mistaken about that.
As for the Tories: if Boris Johnson insists on ramming this unfair tax down the throats of the poor, he’ll be toast.
Tories won’t tolerate a threat to their power and if the poll dip turns into a trough – or indeed a trench – then he’ll face a strong challenge to his leadership. And he isn’t enough of a leader to face it down.
And then, history suggests, the Tories will backtrack and we’ll get a sticking-plaster tax that may even be slightly more fair – and a sticking-plaster PM who’ll be a lot worse than John Major was, back in the 1990s.
And he was dire.
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This Site predicted the suspension of the pensions triple lock, so it’s no surprise here.
The problem with the commitment to increase pensions every year by the highest of pensions, earnings or 2.5 per cent is that it did not anticipate a huge fall in earnings like that caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, followed by a similarly whopping rise when everybody went back to work and pay packets re-balanced.
It meant the highest of the three benchmarks – this year – is a massive eight per cent increase. And the Tories don’t want to pay it.
Back in July, I suggested the Tories were making a big fuss about nothing because they could impose a stop-gap increase that reflects the increase in the cost of living (which is what the triple lock is supposed to do).
It turns out that the Tories are doing something similar. Work and Pensions Secretary Therese Coffey said that – for this year only – pensions would rise by inflation or 2.5 per cent, whichever is higher. The earnings increase will be restored to the calculation next year.
The decision has caused bitter resentment in some quarters, because people are upset that the Tories have broken a manifesto promise.
But this misses the point completely.
The point is that the UK state pension is one of the worst pension deals in the whole world.
On retirement, our pensioners will receive, on average, 29 per cent of their former earnings. This compares with an increase of 0.6 per cent in the Netherlands, more than 90 per cent of former earnings in Portugal, Italy and Austria, and an OECD (Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development) nations’ average of nearly 63 per cent.
In fact, the UK’s pensions deal comes in at slightly worse than that provided in… Mexico.
This was a chance to level up the UK pension with some of our closest neighbours – but the Tories didn’t want to. That’s why people should be angry.
According to this she said "Pensioners must not benefit from a statistical anomaly" with a state pension lower than Mexico this slob makes such an announcement. pic.twitter.com/Qba1XiMls7
Of course, with the national insurance increase that the Tories say will pay for social care (eventually), pensioners will be worse off than ever – because pensioners who are still earning an income will pay towards it.
And there’s another aspect to this.
It is the rivalry between the old and the young over state benefits, the perception that pensioners get more than their fair share, and that they should lose some in order to correct a perceived imbalance.
We can and should spend more on social security for young and old people alike.
To believe that a Conservative government would invest what it saves by removing the triple lock on today’s young people requires some magical thinking.
In practice, by reducing the state pension accrual rate (the entitlements we build up in return for paying national insurance), scrapping the triple lock would effectively amount to a significant tax hike on young people.
That’s because the tax they pay now would entitle them to a lower income in retirement than previously anticipated.
So it is ridiculous to suggest that we need to cut pension increases in order to help the young. It simply won’t happen.
Let’s face it – it simply hasn’t happened.
The (alleged) social care-related increase to National Insurance will affect young people and pensioners alike.
Because that’s what Tories are like.
They don’t take away from one group that needs help, in order to give to another.
They take from both, in order to give to themselves – as you can see with Boris Johnson’s National Insurance hike.
My only question is, do we believe them when they say they’re going to bring the triple lock back?
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“I’m going to apply the pincers and drag every last penny out of the poor”: Boris Johnson explains how he’ll make sure rich people don’t have to pay a penny towards their social care, so they can pass their millionaire mansions to their kids [no, he didn’t really say that. But it is what he intends to do].
Boris Johnson’s announcement of a rise in National Insurance, claiming it will pay for social care, was expected. It seeks to camouflage a new catalogue of his lies and hide the fact that he is making the poorest pay for the care of the richest.
Basically… the Tories want to fund care by making every British worker pay an extra £260 tax per year.. so that billionaires and big businesses don't have to.
Quote of the day from an anonymous Tory MP, speaking to the FT about Boris Johnson’s plan to increase National Insurance: “We are asking people on low incomes to pay more tax so that privileged kids can inherit expensive houses.”
Firstly, Johnson was lying in 2019 when he said he had a plan to overhaul social care. It is clear now that he didn’t. His current proposals are to fund the existing – predominantly privately-owned and poorly-functioning – system rather than replace it with one that actually works.
In 2019 – pre-pandemic – Boris Johnson said he had a ‘clear plan’ to fix the crisis in social care. We know his ‘plan’ did not involve a massive hike in NI because he pledged not to increase it. So what was the plan? Was he just lying, again? pic.twitter.com/LACJjlHyWi
Yes indeed: he is imposing a 10.42 per cent increase on National Insurance contributions that are paid by people earning between £9,500 and £50,000 per year. People earning more will pay nothing extra.
National Insurance drops from 12% to 2% if you earn over £50,268/year. Raising it, while taking up to £1,000 off of those on Universal Credit – 40% of whom are in work – instead of taxing wealth, mansions, or high incomes is a choice to redistribute from the poor to the wealthy.
Do not be confused: this is a 1.25 percentage point increase – NI contributions will rise from 12 per cent of earnings to 13.25 per cent – but this represents a rise of more than 10 per cent in the contributions themselves.
National insurance contributions will go from 12% to 13.5% for those earning between 9.5k – 50k a year, after which it drops to 3.5%.
This is policy written by a government who have a vested interest in protecting the richest in society (in case you had any doubt)
He is also imposing a 10.42 per cent increase on profits from shares in companies, saying that this means rich people will pay a significant amount towards the cost of social care. This is a lie. Shareholders will merely pass the cost onto employees by denying them wage increases. It means the de facto increase in payments for people earning between £9,000 and £50,000 is 20.83 per cent (the slightly lower-than-double figure is due to roundings-up and -down).
The changes are expected to raise around £12 billion a year – a paltry pittance in comparison to the amount that would have been raised by former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who had proposed a tax on the UK’s wealthiest people.
Johnson has said that none of the money raised will go towards social care for three years after the NI increase is imposed in April 2022. Instead, it will be used to ease the backlog of NHS treatments that has been caused because Johnson’s Tory government had weakened the health service so badly that it could not cope with Covid-19 and continue to carry out these procedures at the same time.
Johnson has not said how much of the annual £12 billion will eventually be diverted to social care. Nor has his health secretary, Sajid Javid.
It’ll all be given to private companies owned by Tory donors. As usual.
Crucial response from that press conference for me was Sajid Javid admitting he can't say how much money social care will actually get and when, because it all depends on how NHS gets on with clearing the backlog. NHS bosses say it could take ten years…
After April 2023, this extra payment will become a separate tax – called the Health and Social Care Levy – on earned income. It will show up separately on payslips.
Unlike NI, people who work beyond retirement age will also pay this Health and Social Care Levy, meaning Johnson’s already-broken promise to keep the pensions ‘triple lock’ is smashed to smithereens and pensioners will be punished hard.
The government says people earning £20,000 a year will pay £130 to the new levy. Those on £30,000 will pay £255; those on £50,000 – £505. It provides figures for people on £80,000 (£880) and £100,000 (£1,130) but these must be notional amounts as their NI payments will be unchanged. People with shares that provide those amounts in dividends (as already noted) will merely pass the burden onto employees.
Johnson has said the increased payments will fund changes meaning that, from October 2023, nobody will pay more than £86,000 for care costs (excluding accommodation) in their lifetime. Is that a permanent commitment? So even as inflation means £86,000 is worth less and less as years pass, people will still have to pay no more than that amount? This Writer doesn’t think so. I reckon Johnson was lying again.
Once people have paid this amount, their ongoing costs will be paid by local authorities. Those with between £20,000 and £100,000 in assets will get means-tested help from their council; those will less than £20,000 won’t have to pay from their assets but might have to contribute from their income – an additional burden for low-earners.
It means people are still likely to have to sell their houses to pay for care – unless they are rich.
As far as I can see, the exception if spouses still live in the family home still applies.
That’s a lot to take in. It is likely that Johnson is hoping ordinary people will not recognise the enormity of the impact his plan will have on poor and working people.
Fortunately, we have clever people available who are able to work out the facts.
Here’s the headline:
You can’t fund social care by making the poor pay for the rich.
The rise in National Insurance means graduates earning over £27,295 will now pay a marginal tax rate of 42.25% once student loan repayments are included.
So such a graduate would take home slightly less than £16,000 a year.
And do you remember that measly three per cent pay rise for NHS workers? It is now, once again, a pay cut:
The so called 3% "pay rise" for NHS staff will be wiped out by the National Insurance rise. Ironically to pay for the underfunded NHS & Social Care. What a disgrace. Pay NHS staff the 15% they deserve. Tax the wealthy NOT the poor. #NHSPay15#WealthTax
And people employed in the social care system – such as it is – will now pay more towards it than their bosses, who profit from it:
How can it be right that a low-paid social care worker pays a bigger proportion of her income to fund social care than the private equity magnate who profits from asset-stripping care homes?
It's time for a tax on wealth to fund social care.
so confirmed now that national insurance contributions going from 12% to 13.5% for earnings between 9.5k – 50k, after which it drops by 10%. hard to think of a more regressive tax, which is what it is. make that £328.39 worse off annually for the average (median) earner.
… and if you earn less than the average, you get hit by the Universal Credit cut as well…
By my calculations, 2.5 million working households will be affected by BOTH the cut to Universal Credit and increase in national insurance. On average, they will lose out by £1290 in 2022/23. 2.5 million working families on low incomes losing £1290 – not a progressive solution.
Johnson has tried to justify this new attack on low earners by claiming that the Covid-19 crisis has cost the nation billions of pounds. That could not have been foreseen when he promised no tax increases in the run-up to the 2019 election, and that is the reason this measure is necessary. He was – of course – lying.
The government created new money to pay for the Covid crisis; there was no cost to the nation at all. So the situation now is exactly what it was in 2019, as far as tax increases are concerned.
And there is the issue of what Johnson did with all the money that was created to handle Covid – like blowing £37 billion – more than three times what he expects to raise every year with his NI increase – on Dido Harding’s ‘test and trace’ service that did not work at all.
The PM argues that breaking his promise re NatIns is justified by Covid being an unexpected burden on the public purse. It’s worth pointing out the billions he bunged to Tory friends like Dido Harding would have paid for social care several times over.@BorisJohnson
Back in 2016, Johnson campaigned for the UK to leave the EU, in a big red bus emblazoned with the message, “We send the EU £350 million a week. Let’s fund the NHS instead”. The UK has now left the EU and not a single penny of that so-called “Brexit bonus” has reached the National Health Service. Instead, Johnson is taxing the poor on the pretext that they will pay for it.
Johnson’s apologists have leapt up to praise him for doing something about the social care crisis in the UK – but they haven’t been able to hide the fact: what he has done is worse than nothing.
Laura Kuennsberg on News at 10 “Boris Johnson has decided it’s better to take an imperfect action than do nothing at all.”
I’m not convinced those are the only two options..
I've lost count of how many times political reporters have repeated the obviously Downing Street-briefed line that 'Johnson is a PM who's prepared to take tough decisions'.
On what planet is it a tough decision to put the greatest burden on those with the least wealth and power?
Not a single highly qualified, well paid, very experienced Daily Express journalist asked the PM about the £350M promised in blood and written in stone…
it is almost funny that Boris Johnson rejected a junk food tax and a fuel duty rise, because they would be taxes on "working people" – but wants to increase national insurance, which is literally a tax *only* on working people.
The failure of the mainstream, mass media to hold Johnson and his government to account has been monumental – if expected. That doesn’t mean it should be accepted:
At the risk of sounding hopelessly naive, it is a national scandal that, as the Tories condemn millions of people to lifetimes of hardship, and secure the inordinate wealth of their class for generations to come, self-professed progressive journalists are sitting on their hands.
… but Labour’s philosophy has always been that tax is fine, as long as it has a purpose and is fair. Johnson’s plan for social care demonstrates neither of those traits but Starmer couldn’t – or wouldn’t – see it.
He has become a sick joke, as critics have been quick to point out:
Worse, Labour had solid plans for a well-funded National Care Service – along NHS lines – under former leader Jeremy Corbyn – as he, and some Labour MPs, remember:
The crisis in social care can't be fixed by the Tories unfair proposals.
We need a National Care Service for all, funded by progressive taxation, including a wealth tax.
I can guarantee you social care would have been funded more efficiently and fairly had Jeremy Corbyn been elected PM. #socialcare
— John Smith (son of Harry Leslie Smith) (@Harryslaststand) September 7, 2021
Do you know how much a wealth tax would bring in? See for yourself:
A Robin Hood tax- a financial tax of 0.05% on the wealth sales of shares, bonds, derivatives & dividends. Estimated to raise £250bl a year. And the Tories are imposing NI tax rises. How the wealthy elite must be laughing at us.
But Starmer has thrown Corbyn’s plans away because they would lift people out of poverty – and he seems uninterested in helping poor or working people (a strange stance for a Labour leader).
Starmer's doing an excellent job…of containing and neutralizing Labour as a political force. He's really earned his bonus from the establishment, and his replacement will do exactly the same
Another Twitter user, @aconda_an, added – referring to Corbyn: “They had someone with solutions and meaningful policies. They didn’t want it. Shame on them.”
And shame on everybody who voted Conservative in 2019 because they believed Johnson’s lie that he wouldn’t tax them. He’s a Conservative – it is his nature to lie.
You only have yourselves to blame, and you have dragged the rest of us down with you.
Have YOU donated to my crowdfunding appeal, raising funds to fight false libel claims by TV celebrities who should know better? These court cases cost a lot of money so every penny will help ensure that wealth doesn’t beat justice.
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