Andy Burnham could be about to chicken out – and one group would pay a heavy price. The warning comes from Nick Ferrari, writing in his latest column.
Budget delay sparks speculation
Imagine taking over a business that was clearly in trouble and then deciding to put off all key financial and revenue decisions for over three months, which is more than a quarter of the year. No businessman or woman would entertain such a lunatic suggestion – yet that is precisely what we have with this new government, with the budget set for the end of October, still all but two months away.
As widely predicted, that has resulted in a summer of supposed budget leaks and a wide range of speculative stories, the most recent of which, frighteningly, comes straight out of the socialist playbook, so regrettably cannot be ruled out. It is the idea, put forward by the left-leaning Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), that wealthy pensioners should be targeted for tax hikes in October’s budget.
IPPR calls for pensioner tax hikes
Allied with increased taxes on what is called "property wealth", it is the usual dreary Labour mantra of "soak the rich" which has been around before the days of Harold Wilson. Currently in the UK, the richest 1% of the population pay a little over 30% of the entire tax take and the burden has never been so high – but for Labour to now decide to lump pensioners into higher tax brackets is economically illiterate.
The IPPR report says billions of pounds must be raised from pensioners as the system "has become too tilted in favour of age." It goes on: "Ageing is going to become by far the biggest source of pressure on the public finances." With language as stark as that, it is perhaps a blessing it falls short of suggesting widespread euthanasia, but it does suggest targeting around 9.6 million pensioners above the annual income tax threshold of £12,750.
Real pressures on public purse ignored
But what all this anti-wealth dogma chooses to ignore are the real sources of pressure on the public purse, which is that benefit payments are out of control and the system is way too easy to defraud. The entire welfare benefits bill in the UK is over £350 billion and while it must be acknowledged much of that goes on pension payments, the fastest growing area – by some margin – is out-of-work benefits and Personal Independence Payments, or PIPs.
Perhaps supporters of this attack on the elderly would care to explain why it is right that someone who has worked hard all their life, paid their taxes, perhaps saved enough to buy a house which has unsurprisingly risen in value during their lifetime and is looking forward to enjoying their retirement should now be financially penalised to ensure money is available to pay an ever-increasing number of people who have never done a day’s work in their life. Nor intend to.
But for chancellor John Healey or Andy Burnham to grasp that pricklish reality, it would mean staring down the hard core of their MPs who have worked out cutting benefits is, for Labour politicians, akin to turkeys voting for Christmas. They’ve tasted victory in this blood sport already, having easily defeated Sir Keir Starmer’s moderate attempts to trim these costs a couple of years back. That was the end of any power Starmer might once have had, and he was never to recover. Is Mr Burnham about to chicken out too? In two months, we will have our answer.
