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Budgets – and let’s make no bones about it, today’s Spring Statement was significant enough to qualify as a budget – tend to follow a time-honoured pattern.
The chancellor unveils his measures, makes a big noise about them in the House of Commons, and then – sometimes over a few hours, sometimes over a few weeks – the reality behind those promises and claims comes into focus. So it has been today.
Rishi Sunak made a lot of noise about cutting taxes.
He raised the national insurance threshold (a move which will delight workers and economists alike, since not only does it lessen the impact of the coming rate increase, it also simplifies the tax system).
He announced a cut in the basic rate of income tax; it won’t come into place until 2024 but such things are nonetheless totemic – especially in the Conservative party.
He even went so far as publishing his own neatly-branded “Tax Plan” which as far as I can make out contains nothing that isn’t in the official Spring Statement documentation aside from Rishi Sunak’s signature. Make of that what you will.
But the real story on taxes, the one the chancellor wasn’t so keen to talk about, was buried deep inside the Office for Budget Responsibility’s (OBR) documents: here you discover that even after Mr Sunak’s “Tax Plan” has been enacted, total taxes as a percentage of gross domestic product – that most comprehensive measure of the tax burden – will be at the highest level since 1949.
But one might ask a bigger question: in the face of the biggest standards-of-living crisis in living memory, is a vague tax plan really the remedy the British public are crying out for?
This brings us to the other contrast between statement and reality from today’s statement.
The chancellor pledged to do as much as possible to mitigate the impact of rising prices. He announced a cut in fuel duty and…
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Source : skynews
