TORY CHANCELLOR Jeremy Hunt has unveiled the contents of this year’s Budget in the House of Commons. It is the last scheduled Budget before the next general election, which is expected to take place later this year.
He announced on National Insurance a payroll tax, cut by 2p in the pound for employees and the self-employed.
The non-dom tax regime, for UK residents whose permanent home is overseas, is to be replaced with new rules from April 2025.
Amongst the paupers’ measures announced, there is to be a longer repayment period for people on benefits taking out emergency budgeting loans from the government.
The £90 fee to obtain a debt relief order is scrapped.
A Government fund for people struggling with cost of living pressures is to continue for another six months.
The freeze on alcohol duty, which had been due to end in August, is to continue until February 2025.
A new tax on vaping products is to start in October 2026, following a consultation.
The existing tax on tobacco to increase, to maintain the ‘financial incentive to choose vaping over smoking’.
Fuel duty is frozen again, with the 5p cut in fuel duty on petrol and diesel, due to end later this month, kept for another year.
There is to be £160m deal for UK government to purchase the site of the planned Wylfa nuclear site in north Wales.
A ‘Windfall’ tax on the profits of energy firms, which had been scheduled to end in March 2028, is extended until 2029.
Air passenger duty, the tax paid on flights, is to go up for business class tickets!
The Office for Budget Responsibility predicts the UK economy to grow by 0.8% this year and 1.9% next year.
Growth of 2% is predicted for 2026, with 1.8% in 2027 and 1.7% in 2028.
UK’s inflation rate forecast is predicted to fall below 2% target ‘in just a few months time’.
The underlying debt, excluding Bank of England debt, is forecast to be 91.7% of GDP this year, rising to 92.8% next year.
There is nothing in this budget for the working class of the UK at all! It is the budget of a bankrupt regime that has already gone bust, and only exists because the TUC refuses to put it out of its misery.
In fact what has been revealed is that British capitalism has nothing to offer the UK working class at all except a paupers’ existence, working for slave wages, while being policed by, and subjected to, the most vicious anti-trade union legislation.
The mass of the working class will not only not accept this paupers’ existence, it will rise up to overthrow such a backward capitalist system.
The UK trade unions and the TUC General Council must be made to react to the Sunak government’s slave labour plans. Workers must react to this government of bankrupts by defending the basic rights and the basic living standards of the working class.
The TUC must be made to call a Special Congress to call a general strike to bring down the Tories and bring in a Workers Government and socialism!
A Workers Government will nationalise the banks and the major industries under workers’ control and management, and bring in a socialist planned economy. Capitalism is poised for a major economic crash. It is economically and politically bankrupt. It must be swept away by socialist revolutions in all of the major capitalist countries.
Now is the time to build sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International in all of the major capitalist countries, to mobilise the working class of the world for the great leap forward to socialism. Capitalism is in its death agony, and its crisis is driving it forward to make war on the working class and to seek to restore capitalism in Russia and China.
Now is the time for the working class of the world, from Gaza and the Middle East to Europe and the USA, to build sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International, to go forward to the victory of the of the world socialist revolution!
