Spike the hike – and tax energy giants instead
THE Chancellor faces a historic moment on Wednesday. Inflation is soaring, and is set to get worse; energy bills are at record levels; it’s more expensive than ever to fill up the car; and the weekly shop is rising.
As he makes his Spring Statement, this is the time for Rishi Sunak to grasp the seriousness of the situation.
It is certainly not the time for an unfair tax hike on working people, which is set to hit pay packets next month. The ill-timed National Insurance rise is even more misguided when you look at how much extra tax revenue he is raking in from soaring prices, which gives him billions of pounds of wriggle room.
At a moment like this, it’s just not common sense to press ahead with a tax hike.
Mr Sunak claims he wants to be a ‘low-tax Chancellor’, but actions speak louder than his words. In the past two years, he’s put up taxes more than any Chancellor in the past 50 years, with 15 increases so far.
Britain is the only major economy choosing to hike taxes as the cost of living crisis bites. Of course things need to be paid for. But the Tories are having to raise taxes because they have become the party of low growth.
If you’re not growing our economy, then you have to find the money from somewhere, and the Chancellor dives straight into the pockets of working people.
The Conservatives will say this money is needed for our NHS – and of course we’ve got to clear the backlogs. But the truth is, it wouldn’t be necessary if the Government treated taxpayers’ money with the respect it deserves.
Instead, we have a £12billion black hole of wasted cash: billions of pounds of unusable PPE, billions more lost to criminals and fraudsters.
It’s time to stop pretending this tax rise will be anything but a bigger squeeze on living standards at the worst possible time, only coming in to fill a hole caused by waste and fraud. What we need instead is a one-off windfall tax on the booming profits of oil and gas producers. BP’s boss said they have ‘more cash than we know what to do with’. When you see the numbers shooting up at the petrol pump, you can understand why.
LABOUR’S plan for a one-off windfall tax on these profits would mean we could cut VAT on gas and electricity, giving almost all households £200 off their bills – and let us expand and increase the Warm Home Discount to nine million of the hardest pressed and the squeezed middle, so they could get £600 off their bills.
And under Labour, National Insurance wouldn’t go up either. If Mr Sunak presses on with that hike, there is no way he can call himself a tax-cutting Chancellor. On Wednesday, he has a choice: face the enormity of this moment – or show that he’s a Chancellor who has lost his way.