LABOUR Chancellor Rachel Reeves announced National Insurance (NI) and income tax thresholds will be frozen for an extra three years beyond 2028 in her Budget yesterday.
The freeze means that millions more low-paid workers will be forced onto a higher tax rate year by year, as inflation eats away at the value of their wages.
She admitted: ‘I know that maintaining these thresholds is a decision that will affect working people,’ but she did it anyway.
She announced that net UK debt stands at £2.6 trillion, or 83% of GDP, meaning that one in every £10 of government spending goes on debt interest payments to the banks and international money markets.
Turning her fire on refugees, Reeves claimed: ‘The public rightly expect that we stamp out fraud, error and waste and put that money to good use in our schools and hospitals and other front line services.
‘The Home Secretary has already announced that she will claw back excess profits from the use of hotels to house asylum seekers as we phase out the use of those hotels entirely.
‘And we will control and reform the access of those with indefinite leave to remain to taxpayer funded benefits. The introduction of digital ID will break the link between illegal migration and illegal working.
‘And the HMRC and the Fair Work Agency will crack down on illicit businesses that blight our high streets and undercut legitimate firms, enforcing the minimum wage, investigating dodgy businesses and increasing scrutiny of the gig economy.’
She went on to threaten those forced to try to survive on benefits, declaring: ‘I am building on our successful use of targetted checks on welfare claims to root out fraud and error and prevent public money being paid to people who are not entitled to it.’
Finally, she announced the scrapping of the hated two child benefit cap from next April, a Labour 2014 manifesto pledge that she had broken for nearly two years.
House of Commons Budget Day strike
Many of the 350 security staff at the Houses of Parliament were outside striking for pay and against increasing hours and pension cuts on Budget Day yesterday.
Speaking on the PCS picket line outside Parliament, Scarlet Moore told News Line: ‘Everything inside this building is a complete shambles. How can you pass laws in a place that does not even function properly to start with?
‘They only think about themselves and not the working class, and every day it is getting worse and worse for everyone.
‘We are all struggling. The rent has gone through the roof, the price of food is so high. Workers should stick together and absolutely bring them down and there should be a proper revolution, like the French.’
PCS union Branch Organiser Gary Harvey said: ‘We represent the security officers who are currently out on strike due to mismanagement of their funds for years and years and the removable of six days annual leave.
‘During Covid we transferred from an eight hour shift to a 12 hour shift, out of goodwill, because it would mean less people in the building and we could still do our job effectively.
‘At the end of Covid the management kept us on a twelve hour roster, even though we were promised to go back to eight hour, and then they decided to recalculate our annual leave to the point where we lost six days. So everyone is now struggling and we don’t have any annual leave left.
‘Starmer and co are not listening to the working people I’d love it if there was a general strike, I really would.’
SCRAP FAMILY FARM TAX!
OVER 1,800 farmers along with scores of very large tractors bedecked with angry signs demanding: ‘Scrap the Family Farm Tax!’ descended on Parliament yesterday.
Defying an announcement by the government on Tuesday afternoon that they were banned from bringing their tractors to Parliament, they parked up around the corner, keeping up a deafening cacophony of musical horn blowing, loud enough to be heard in the House of Commons as Chancellor Reeves delivered her Budget.
The farmers gathered on Budget Day to oppose the imposition of the Inheritance Tax on family farms which will destroy British farming and lead to food shortages.
Oxfordshire farmer, Andrew Hutt said: ‘We are here to protect our heritage and to carry on producing food for the British people, AFFORDABLE FOOD,’ he emphasised.
‘Food will get very expensive if we cannot produce it here in this country. They can bring in cheaper import food from other countries that don’t have to abide by all the regulations we have to farm under, so it is food that is not grown to a standard like we grow it.
‘What the government don’t seem to realise is that if everybody can have affordable food, then that would help the National Health Service. The NHS is under pressure because people cannot afford food these days.
‘lnheritance tax is a big issue with us because where I farm it’s only a 200 acre farm and I am still going to be hit for £700,000 when I die. And for my children to pay that they would have to sell probably 70 or 80 acres of land, which would then make the farm unviable.
‘We don’t want a lot out of the job. I love the job. I’m addicted to farming.’