DAILY MAIL COMMENT: True Tories should end such taxing times
Glance at the colossal tax burden that Britain is labouring under and your first instinct might be to rub your eyes in disbelief. The second? To recoil in horror.
According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, the share of GDP extracted by the Government in tax has soared from 33 per cent in 2019 to a jaw-dropping 37 per cent.
It is equivalent to hitting every household with another bill for £3,500. This Parliament is set to hold the ignominious distinction of overseeing the steepest tax rise in history.
This alarming state of affairs might be understandable if Labour, which has never seen a tax hike it disliked, was in power.
That it has happened under a Tory government is especially depressing.
The Prime Minister insists he is at heart a tax-cutting Thatcherite. When might we expect him to prove it?
Successive prime ministers, including Rishi Sunak, have stated their belief in a small state and low taxes. Yet their appetite for delivering them has been roughly zero.
Yes, the Government is up to its eyeballs in debt, which is why the PM and his Chancellor are trying to balance the books.
But thanks to tax thresholds being frozen for years, stealth charges and punishing new levies on companies, property, capital gains and much more, the take has reached an unacceptable and unsustainable level.
Individuals, including those on modest incomes, are clobbered ever harder. For firms, the outlook is equally bleak as they’re hit with a huge corporation tax hike.
If our public services were top class, the Treasury’s relentless plundering might be palatable. But they’re shambolic. Which of us can look around and truly say they are getting value for money? The NHS, handed record funding, is collapsing. Police often don’t bother to investigate crime. Social care provision can be woeful.
The answer to these problems is reform, not throwing ever greater sums at them. Dispiritingly, that seems to now be the Tories’ default setting. It’s not unrelated that as taxes nudge a post-war high, economic growth is so feeble. Mr Sunak should be bold and take an axe to them.
Slashing taxes would not only ease households’ pain. It would incentivise ambition, hard work and entrepreneurialism and fuel job creation.
The Prime Minister insists he is at heart a tax-cutting Thatcherite. When might we expect him to prove it?
BBC’s botch of the day
The BBC review of its social media rules, triggered by Gary Lineker’s disgraceful post equating government policy with Nazism, was a chance to repair damaged trust in the corporation’s impartiality. To no one’s surprise, it has flunked it.
Instead of a blanket ban on presenters expressing political views, it has given those outside the news department carte blanche to carry on, so long as they don’t ‘endorse or attack a party’.
For those on so-called ‘non-flagship’ programmes, including eco-hysteric Chris Packham, even this footling restriction doesn’t apply. What a complete cop-out.
If Gary Lineker et al want to spout on about the issues of the day, why don’t they stop taking licence fee-payers’ money and stand for election?
The BBC is treating viewers – who expect presenters to be scrupulously neutral, not political motormouths – with disdain.
As for Lineker et al, if they want to spout on about the issues of the day, why don’t they stop taking licence fee-payers’ money and stand for election?
Khan’s crime cop-out
After 15-year-old Elianne Andam was stabbed to death on her way to school, the Mail asks: What is Sadiq Khan playing at?
As London’s Labour mayor, one of his key responsibilities is working with the police to tackle crime. Yet 16 teenagers have been killed in the capital already this year.
While he engages in stunts about decriminalising cannabis, virtue-signals with green schemes and bellyaches about statues from the distant past, a bloodbath is happening on his watch. His priorities are warped. London deserves better.
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