The big breaking political news this morning is that Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor, have indicated that after weeks of preparing the ground, they will not, after all, cut income tax,. It seems as though a massive backlash against breaking manifesto promises was becoming increasingly evident and, had they gone ahead with their intended measures, then a ‘putsch’ might have been organised against the two of them. But the money has to be raised from somewhere and, as an astute French statesman concerned with his nation’s finances observed centuries ago ‘the art of taxation is to extract the most amount of feathers from the goose with the least amount of hissing’ One way to raise money, albeit more slowly, is not to raise income tax thresholds so that more and more people get sucked into paying tax – the so-called ‘stealth tax’ And I suspect there may be some tinkering around with the interaction between National Insurance and tax rates. The ‘triple lock’ is, I thought doomed and could well be recast as a ‘double lock’ i.e. the second highest of 2.5%, the inflation rate and the rise in wage rates. Pensioners have been protected by Conservative governments for electoral advantages for some time now but their position, vis-a-vis the rest of the working population has improved markedly over the years. I think there is a strong case for a new tax which would absorb a lot of National Insurance, to be labelled as an ‘NHS tax’ and the population as a whole may feel disinclined to argue with this. But as I write, the announcement is relatively only a few hours old so no doubt both political pundits and tax experts will be piling in within the next few hours to speculate where the money will be found as the budget is now only about two weeks away.
Yesterday was the day when we had arranged to have a get together of former colleagues from the University of Winchester (calling ourselves the ‘Old Fogies’) and we had a lunch booked at Rick Stein’s restaurant in Winchester. The journey started off early at 8.03 from Bromsgrove but I negotiated the intricacies of the station car parking machines (one out of order and one only half working!) The journey down to Winchester was uneventful and only about 5-10 minutes delayed as the huge storm was passing overhead. I had printed out some route maps but found the restaurant easily, arriving before anybody else. In the event there were 8 of us all together and I made contact with erstwhile colleagues some of whom I had not seen for years. One had lost his wife (one of my closest colleagues, as it happened) and another had got divorced but had a new partner who lived some streets away from him. I was particularly glad to see a former professor of history and archeology who was very good to me when I first moved to Winchester but had successfully survived a very serious illness in the intervening years. So after we all had some excellent food we circulated around the table so that we could meet up with everyone as it were and we stayed in the restaurant for most of the afternoon. Then I walked back to the station with a former colleagues who was catching the London train that stopped at Fareham whilst I waited for the delayed train to Manchester Piccadilly. The train was delayed by abut 25 minutes when it arrived in Winchester and the train was full to bursting. There is a very prestigious college called Peter Symonds and many of the weekly boarders were going to Basingstoke which is the next town down the line. The female students were sitting on each other’s laps and the passageways were jammed full of standing male passengers – naturally, the food trolley service could not operate nor could tickets be checked as no one could move up and down the train. Meanwhile, I was subjected to a torrent of crudely swearing male students in the seats behind me whilst the heating system blew cold instead of warm air over us. One of the little known laws of physics is that whenever I board public transport, there is a howling infant, whose howls increase with intensity, within a couple of metres of me. The train finished up about 40 minutes late and even took about 25 minutes to do the 5-8 miles from Birmingham International to Birmingham New Street (BNS) and I missed my planned connection by several minutes. But then my luck changed and there was a train scheduled for Bromsgrove in only 8 minutes time. When I alighted at Bromsgrove, there was only myself and one other passenger whom the train conveyed to the end of the line and I was relieved to get home. I exchanged texts with my Droitwich friend and we exchanged news our experiences (generally bad) throughout the day and so we commiserated with each other. But at the end of the day, I was delighted to make contact with my former colleagues again – although I had seen some of them at Meg’s funeral, the others I had not seen for several years and we vowed to meet again as soon as we good, probably in the late Spring.
The latest volte-face in the shape of the forthcoming budget is being labelled by all of the Opposition parties as a complete government shambles. The Treasury is leaking information that suggests that the black hole in the government finances may be nearer to £20bn rather than the predicted £40bn but one always suspects some sleight of hand afoot here. Many of the newly elected Labour MPs may be relieved that a manifesto pledge is not being broken but no doubt there are a lot of other ways, principally through stealth taxes, for money to be raised. So the whole of the British political system is rather a febrile state at the moment as the government appeared to be signalling an imminent rise in income tax only for this to be abandoned at almost the last moment. We are shortly to be exposed to a huge shake up of our immigration system where it may be that we are going to follow the fairly draconian policies adopted by the Danish government. But cultural borrowing from another society may be difficult and there will be opposition to draconian immigration laws that may well fall foul of Human Rights legislation as well as opposition from the House of Lords. But the whole debate here is being promulgated by the Reform party (with a deal of popular support) whilst the Tory and Labour parties scramble to keep up.