Nevermind non-doms, entrepreneurs and six-figure earners, it’s the working class who now really ought to be worried about Labour’s calamitous efforts to balance the books.
Housing secretary Angela Rayner is in talks to rip up Margaret Thatcher’s Right to Buy flagship policy – the very scheme she used herself to buy a council home and sell it for £48,500 more than she paid.
But now, it seems, she is considering pulling up the property ladder behind her, with Labour considering slashing discounts for tenants and banning the scheme on newly built council homes.
Local authorities say the policy is too expensive and want to end it outright. Yet Right to Buy has got more than two million people on to the property ladder, helping them to build wealth and take responsibility for their financial futures. It’s arguably a priceless policy that sparks aspiration and can do wonders for social mobility.
Critics say not enough council homes are built to replace properties sold through Right to Buy, but why punish tenants for their local authority’s bad money management? What is really needed is a drive to build more council homes.
The true cost of Rachel Reeves’s winter fuel raid is now emerging, with analysis this week suggesting that five out of six pensioners living below the poverty line will lose out.
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This a policy that will hit voters in colder, more deprived northern Labour heartlands hard. Has Labour really thought this through?
But the betrayal of the working class does not stop there. Retired miners now fear that Labour will renege on its election promise to fix a long-running injustice over their pensions.
A private school in Stoke-on-Trent this week announced it had no option to close, with the school director blaming Labour’s VAT tax raid for pricing out working class parents.
It’s worrying that the first meaningful acts of the Government were to reward the shameful striking junior doctors and train drivers with pay rises, whilst stripping away vital payments from the nation’s elderly.
Other mooted policies do not bode well either. Analysts have warned that increasing capital gains tax to match income tax rates will cost the Treasury £2bn.
Meanwhile, the crackdown on non-doms is now expected to backfire and land the Government with a £1bn bill.
Perhaps Labour will soon realise that it cannot tax its way out of the economic mess it insists the Tories left it in. The ultra-wealthy will just take their business and growth elsewhere.
Sir Keir Starmer insists his government is about “service”, and so his party has a duty to root out inefficiencies in the public sector – rather than handing out inflation-busting pay rises willy-nilly and needlessly punishing voters to save pennies.
It also has a duty to drive growth, which involves keeping taxes down and encouraging aspiration. So far, Labour has failed to inspire any kind of confidence.
We can only hope that Ms Reeves heeds what the markets are warning, and comes up with a Budget that won’t drag Britain down.
Source Agencies
