REVEALED: Chancellor’s Preferred Tax Hikes for Budgets to Come
Rachel Reeves has refused to rule out further tax rises in later budgets. If she keeps to her rule of one fiscal event per year, we’ve got four more of these until the next election…
The IFS strongly predicts that departments will exceed the spending forecasts laid out in the budget. Reeves will have to get more money from somewhere – the first ideas she’s likely to draw on are her own. The Chancellor’s major report, called “The Everyday Economy,” was published only six years ago, after she had held several Shadow Cabinet positions. Two years later she would be ensconced in Starmer’s Shadow Cabinet. It outlines in detail her blueprint for the economy…
With four more Halloween budgets to come, here are some of the spookiest headline measures that Reeves recommended:
- Cap ISAs with a lifetime limit and reduce the annual cap to £15,000.
- Replace inheritance tax with a lifetime Gift tax.
- Hike capital gains tax to income tax rates.
- Halve the annual capital gains tax allowance.
- Overhaul council tax and replace it with a property tax that directly impacts property owners.
- Introduce a global wealth tax.
- Introduce a land tax.
- Give “English cities, towns and counties” the ability to raise taxes. Not to lower them…
- Set up municipal energy production and pension schemes.
- Limit higher-rate pension contribution reliefs and require that 20% of all contributions be invested in job-creating opportunities.
- Raise taxes on savings and investments of high earners.
- Force companies to report their pay ratios and the “differential between their highest and lower paid workers” in order to link this to the level of corporation tax they pay. Bye bye companies…
Ask Labour and they’ll probably say: “That was ages ago and old ideas of Rachel’s.” Not true – she explicitly referenced the report multiple times in her “landmark” Mais Lecture this year…
Reeves has installed a portrait of her “leading light” – the communist and Soviet asset Ellen Wilkinson – in No 11 before hiking taxes by £40 billion. Safe to say she’s already spelled out her strategy for subsequent spooky budgets. Something wicked this way comes…
