Labour’s private school VAT raid to raise more than expected - "Nicholas Pietrek, headmaster at Stafford Grammar School, which raised fees by 20pc in January, told The Telegraph: “We were absolutely unable to absorb the VAT and passed it on in full. “To try and help our parents, we did not put fees up at all in September but the increase of National Insurance, minimum wage and business rates have had a huge impact on every school. “I don’t believe there is anyone in the independent sector who sees this as a tax grab but rather as an ideological move against independent schools.”"
Bridget Phillipson’s legacy won’t just be the destruction of schools, but of knowledge itself - "Unsurprisingly the cash influx to state education promised by the taxing of private schools failed to materialise because all Phillipson’s measure has done is squeeze people and schools. Making everyone poorer is an eternally alluring goal for the Left, but generate investment it does not... From September 2026 it’ll now be illegal for academies to hire staff without a formal qualification. So a Nobel Prize winner or an Olympic rower who hasn’t got the correct accreditation won’t be allowed teach... In her war on choice, quality, history and meaning, Phillipson is picking up a thread woven deep into the fabric of society by Labour’s Anthony Crosland. With his 1965 Circular 10/65, local authorities were urged to get rid of the tripartite system of selective education – including the 11 plus – and in so doing to end the sorting of pupils into grammars, comprehensives and technical colleges. The system of grammars, which sent thousands of working class boys to Oxbridge and thus offered a radical new social mobility, was fatally eroded. By the 1970s and 80s the rot was all but immovable – everything was about an egalitarianism akin to the pernicious woke concept of “equity”. It wasn’t that all children should have equality of opportunity, but that they should all be squashed down into an equality of outcome. Except, of course, for when that child was the politician’s – or the politician him or herself. Abolition of academic selection was the passionate commitment of SDP founder Shirley Williams, Labour education minister between 1976 and 1979. Odd, then, that she moved close as possible to selective school Godolphin and Latymer before it went private in 1977 so that her daughter could attend. Williams herself went to St Paul’s, Antony Crosland to Highgate School, Tony Benn to Westminster, and in more recent times, Corbyn’s cronies, like Seamus Milne, also went to public school (Winchester). Such an education is right and fine for them and their children, but not for other people’s. During his intermittent tenure as schools minister over ten years from 2010, Nick Gibb tried to row back the rot. He instilled phonics, which is how children actually learn to read, rather than this interpretative “look and see” approach. He also tried to instil a respect for knowledge, rather than only “skills”. As education minister, Michael Gove valiantly tried to empower schools to give a proper education while also mandating a solid curriculum of canonical texts, history and science. Exam results duly improved England. But it was an uphill battle: the culture of Leftism in the teaching unions has long been so extreme in trying to insist on standards, he became a hate figure. In that sense, Phillipson is preaching to the converted, and her legacy will be the ruination not just of education, but of knowledge itself."
Leading private school offers tax-free education to Britain’s fleeing parents - "A leading private school is opening campuses in Spain, Italy and Portugal to attract wealthy families fleeing high-tax Britain. Brighton College will open new schools in Madrid, Rome, and Lisbon from September 2027 for boys and girls aged three to 18, with the benefit of not having to pay VAT on fees."
Labour should want more children to go to private schools. It’s their voter base - "Labour’s vote, flagging as it is, is being propped up by the scions of our private schools. Parents pay for their children’s education for a variety of reasons: academic selectivity, comprehensive facilities, broader curriculums, family tradition, and so on. But in all the open days I attended – and from my own brief experience as a teacher in one of the country’s great nine boys’ schools – I can’t remember “sympathetic to socialism” as a top selling point... A overdose of noblesse oblige means spending a life cringing, apologising and rectifying. By contrast, the penchant for Reform and the Tories among those who attended grammar schools reflects the Right-tinged ethos of such institutions: a basic admittance that not all shall have prizes, that merit and hard work should be rewarded, and that some pupils, academically at least, are more equal than others. Having this drummed into you at a young age is unlikely to make you as sympathetic to the calls of open borders, climate posturing or gender woo-woo as your average private attendee."
Overtaxed and underperforming, Britain is stuck in a cycle of doom - "Megan Greene, a member of the Bank’s Monetary Policy Committee, recently described underlying activity in the economy as weak and warned of prolonged pressure on consumer spending. That hardly fits the narrative of an economy on the mend. Overall, the economy is underperforming its potential, largely because it’s being choked by policies that actively discourage growth. Rather than attacking unemployment head-on, the Government chose to raise employer National Insurance (NI) contributions in the last Budget – a move widely criticised by business groups as “anti-employment”. Higher employer NI disproportionately hurts entry level jobs and low-paid workers. Research from the Centre for Economics and Business Research showed that by December 2024, there were already 948,000 young people not in work, education or training – the highest level in a decade. Since then, companies have responded as predicted: announcing job cuts, freezing recruitment and scaling back hiring. Job vacancies hit a four-year low by September 2025. Calls for a phased implementation of the NI rise were ignored. In its attempt to raise revenue, the Government may have inadvertently shrunk the tax base – a textbook misstep in understanding the Laffer curve. The consequences are clear: higher costs for employers, fewer jobs and weaker growth. Housing was meant to be a centrepiece of the Government’s pro-growth strategy, with a target to build 1.5 million homes in England by 2029 — around 300,000 a year. The economic rationale is strong: new housing supports construction, job creation, mobility and investment. But the delivery has fallen flat. Between July 9 2024 and June 15 2025, EPC data show that approximately 186,600 new homes have been completed in England, well below the target. Meanwhile, housing affordability remains dire, and the construction sector – a key growth multiplier – continues to stall. The Government’s net zero ambitions have further complicated the economic outlook. The decision to halt new North Sea exploration may have been politically symbolic, but it has increased reliance on imported energy, raising costs for manufacturers and households alike. Combined with higher corporate taxes and regulatory uncertainty, this has eroded Britain’s global competitiveness. What was billed as a “Budget to rebuild Britain” increasingly looks like one that risks engineering a slow-motion recession. Despite the underwhelming results so far, proposals for further tax increases are being floated: higher capital gains rates, a possible wealth or mansion tax, and additional increases to income tax and National Insurance. But raising tax rates doesn’t guarantee more revenue. Following last year’s capital gains tax rise – from 10pc to 18pc for basic-rate taxpayers and 20pc to 24pc for higher-rate taxpayers – CGT receipts actually fell from £14.5 billion in 2023/24 to £13.1bn in 2024/25. The lesson is clear: tax increases that suppress economic activity end up delivering less, not more, to the Exchequer. Yet the Government seems determined to plug the fiscal black holes it has created with policies that further depress growth and employment. Britain has climbed to the top of the Laffer curve and is now sliding down the wrong side. Each new tax rise brings diminishing returns, yet the response is always more of the same. It’s a dangerous cycle: higher taxes to offset low growth, and low growth caused by higher taxes. Meanwhile, the UK’s debt burden is edging toward unsustainable levels. Debt interest payments for 2025/26 are forecast to reach £111bn – nearly double the defence budget and far more than the country spends on education. In the event of a black swan shock, the UK would enter any future crisis with its credit card already maxed out. Without stronger growth, rising debt interest will increasingly crowd out vital public investment. According to the Office for Budget Responsibility, the UK’s debt-to-GDP ratio could soar to nearly 300pc by 2070. The UK urgently needs a reset. Policy should be judged by whether it delivers productivity, investment, job creation, and sustained growth. But instead, we are being prepared for another round of tax rises. With no serious effort to contain or reform public spending, these increases now appear inevitable – and, with them, more economic stagnation. Britain cannot tax its way to prosperity."
Labour has no concept of economic growth - "The word “growth” appeared 49 times in Labour’s manifesto. From this, voters were entitled to conclude that “growth” might have been a priority for the party, and to cast their votes accordingly. Such an impression would not have survived beyond Labour’s first Budget. Between the barrage of tax rises and the accompanying rises in the rates of benefits and the National Minimum Wage, it became clear that, despite being elected to fix the economy, Sir Keir Starmer and his colleagues were more interested in redistribution. The consequences of this approach have been painfully apparent since, with hiring suppressed and inflation stubbornly high. Yet the Government appears to have learnt no lessons from this debacle, as briefing ahead of next month’s Budget is indicating more tax rises, particularly on savers, and little political will to cut spending on welfare. Alongside these fiscal weights, the march of redistribution through regulation continues. The Renters’ Rights Act is set to deal a devastating blow to the functioning of the housing market, while the Employment Rights Bill will further discourage hiring. The effect, in Labour’s eyes, is to build a fairer economy. This is disputable, but what is in no doubt whatsoever is that these measures are not ones that would be taken by a government truly set on growth. It is difficult to shake a suspicion that the reason for the focus on the division of surplus rather than the size of the pie is simply that the Government has realised it has no working theory of growth. The promised green jobs boom and glut of cut-price energy has failed to materialise. The idea that the state could command growth through investment has collided with the state of the public finances. Growth through a larger population has run into implacable electoral opposition. And with no Left-wing solutions on offer, there is little hope that Sir Keir and Chancellor Rachel Reeves will hold their noses and borrow from the Right. The result appears to be a Government trying desperately to play what few cards it has – appealing to egalitarian instincts, borrowing more, hoping that Britain might be dragged along in the tailwind of faster growing economies – with little plan for what might follow. It did not work last year. There is little reason to expect it to do so now. Madness, as they say, is doing the same thing over and over while expecting a different result."
Object Zero on X - "In the UK the take home minimum wage for working a full time job is: £20,660 The take home wage at the £100,000 tax cliff (only 4% of Brits earn above this) is: £68,600 This is a net income ratio of 3.3:1 Now let’s compare that to… oh I don’t know… how about 1960’s USSR? According to this 1977 study https://wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/media/documents/publication/op1_soviet_industrial_wage_structure_chapman_1977.pdf The ratio of average earnings between the top 10% of earnings and the bottom 10% of earnings in the Soviet Union was: 8:1 in 1956 5.8:1 in 1959 5:1 in 1968 This is the era of Sputnik and was the height of the Cold War Space Race. So the UK in 2025 is a far FAR flatter income distribution than the Soviet Union at the absolute height of the Cold War. Talk about gaslighting? We live in a communist dystopia that claims to be capitalism, meanwhile China lives in a capitalist utopia that claims to be communism. Open your eyes folks. Next should we look at censorship and state control of information? Should we look at the number of people in prison for wrongthink? Should we look at state seizure of private wealth? Enough already."
Britain is broken. Even our Left-leaning youngsters know it - "According to figures compiled by the National Centre for Social Research (NatCen), the majority of British adults now believe that our overly generous welfare system is stopping people from supporting themselves... it’s what the poll reveals about the changing attitudes of school leavers and Left-wing young adults that’s most fascinating. These are the Jellycat collectors. This is the duvet-day brigade. And when 28 per cent of this notably floppy demographic is “strongly agreeing” that people now need to be depending less on benefits and learning “to stand on their own two feet”, you know there’s a problem... these newly-hardened youthful attitudes are showing up not just around benefits claimants, but tax cuts (20 per cent now believe that we should reduce taxes and spend less on health, education and social benefits), as well as stricter sentencing for criminals (34 per cent strongly agree that people who break the law should be given stiffer sentences). Now, if all that mounting fury can somehow be harnessed and used in the right way, we might just be able to turn “broken Britain” around."
‘This is not a blip’: Markets punish Britain for losing its way - "“Emerging markets are generally countries which are moving forward,” says Jagjit Chadha, a professor of economics at Cambridge. “We are going the other way.” Chadha, who for years ran the respected National Institute of Economic and Social Research (Niesr) think tank, says the UK is more like a “submerging market”... Currently, the UK’s 10-year borrowing costs stand at 4.5pc, higher than America’s rate of 4pc. It is also almost two percentage points above Germany’s 2.6pc, and firmly above the 3.3pc that markets demand from crisis-stricken France. In fact, yields on UK bonds, otherwise known as gilts, are now closer to the 6pc rate paid by Indonesia than they are to German government debt... “There’s been a reaction of markets to a very steep increase in borrowing,” says one top international official. “If you compare the pace of debt increase in the UK compared to other countries, there is no doubt it has been faster.” James Athey, a fund manager at investment house Marlborough, says Labour’s inability to cut spending on welfare has particularly damaged Britain’s fiscal credibility... All of which means the illusion that debt was somehow free, a view which emerged after the financial crisis and took hold during the pandemic, has vanished... “The UK is on a sticky wicket. It is a combination of zero growth, relatively stubborn inflation, and the fact that there are quite a lot of linkers in the UK,” says Filippo Alloatti at Federated Hermes, referring to index-linked gilts, on which interest payments directly track inflation... Reeves has conceded that Britain risks slipping into a “doom-loop” in which weak growth forces further tax rises... While freezing prescription charges for another year or temporarily removing VAT on energy bills will help, it is also likely to draw the ire of the very institutions she claims to idolise. Hundreds of years of history will tell you that attempts by governments – often in developing economies – to influence prices have often gone badly wrong. As a paper published by the World Bank recently put it, price controls often have “good intentions, but bad outcomes”. While the Reeves playbook to bear down on prices is far from the extreme versions seen in countries like Venezuela, controls such as energy price caps have previously been called out by the IMF for distorting the economy. Huge government-mandated increases in the minimum wage have also stoked inflation... Britain has become dangerously reliant on public spending to fuel the economy... Productivity in the public sector is barely above levels seen in 1997, meaning that despite all the technological advances over the past few decades, for every £1 spent on schools, hospitals and teachers, it still gets about the same amount out. By contrast, output per hour in the private sector is about a third higher than its 1997 level. Chadha at Cambridge University warns that the bloated state is sending the wrong message to Britons: work doesn’t pay. “The fundamental problem is that the size of the state is too large,” he says. “Expenditure of 45pc of GDP is huge. That is the reason for the fiscal deficit. Expenditure is too large, the state is too large, but nobody is talking about it – all we are getting is more taxes thrown on us. “If we just tell people I’m going to tax you. If we just tell entrepreneurs I am going to levy big taxes on you, they are simply not going to work in the same way as if they are told they are going to reap all of the benefits.” Chadha warns that the UK’s role on the world stage has been diminished as a result. “We were the first industrial nation, the first country to industrialise and have sustained economic growth,” he says. “We were at the forefront of science, education, productivity, for most of the 20th century.” He adds that Britain’s decline has been rapid. “Just look at the post-war settlements, Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill. We would not expect to be seen today in the same way. Were they to redesign the UN, I don’t think the UK would be given a permanent seat on the council. That is how far we have submerged.” An ever-growing reliance on the state, combined with an inability to get things done, has serious implications for growth. Reeves may talk constantly about wanting to grow the economy, but unless she walks the walk on ripping up red tape and welfare reform, Britain is destined to remain in the slow lane. “It’s going to be very hard to tax your way to growth,” says Nuwan Goonetilleke, at Standard Life owner Phoenix, which has almost £300bn of assets under management. Moody’s, the ratings agency, warned this summer that UK policymakers may have lost the recipe for growth... Welfare reform is crucial to improving productivity and getting inflation down. Policymakers also blame Britain’s worklessness crisis for stoking inflation. There are currently 2.8 million people neither in work nor looking for a job. A smaller labour pool means bosses have to pay more for talent. “It’s one of the real challenges that we face,” says one top policymaker. “The UK has been a clear outlier in terms of inactivity,” says another."
‘I earn £71,000, yet people on benefits seem to have a better lifestyle than me’
North Sea giant blames windfall tax as it halves UK investment - "The scaling back of investment has already led to Harbour cutting 600 jobs since 2022... Harbour said the levy has left it facing an effective tax rate of 111pc in the UK, prompting its decision to wind down its domestic operations... Growing cost pressures and Ed Miliband’s decision to ban all new drilling in the North Sea have led many oil and gas operators to scale back investment. Trade body Offshore Energies UK has warned that 1,000 oil and gas jobs are being lost each month. Stephen Flynn, MP for Aberdeen South and the Scottish National Party’s Westminster leader, said: “The results from Harbour Energy are explicitly clear – the Labour Government is destroying jobs and the Budget must spell the end of Labour’s crippling tax on Scotland’s energy... Andrew Bowie, the shadow Scotland secretary, added that the decline of Scotland’s oil and gas industry was the “result of political decisions”. He said: “Energy Secretary Ed Miliband is hell-bent on destroying a world-class industry and supply chain.”"
Weird. Isn't the SNP committed to net zero? They also love taxes on "the rich"
The fiscal black hole nobody dares talk about - "We’ve heard a lot about “fiscal black holes” over the past year. Feigning anger and shock, Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor, claimed to have discovered a £22bn such black hole in the public finances after assuming power in July last year. Never mind that the bulk of it was accounted for by inflation-busting pay awards in the public sector that she herself was signing off on. Regardless, the shortfall was roundly blamed on the preceding Tory government and became the main excuse for one of the largest tax-raising budgets in decades. Not that it’s solved the problem. A year on, and the “black hole” – the amount that has to be raised from tax rises and spending cuts to enable the Chancellor to meet her fiscal rules – has grown even larger, with today’s shortfall variously estimated by economists at anywhere between £30bn and £50bn. The world has changed, the Chancellor insists by way of justification for what everyone agrees will be another shocker of a tax raising budget in less than two month’s time. Indeed it has, but mainly because of the Government’s own actions, which have undermined growth and dealt a hammer blow to business confidence. If Britain was “broken” when Labour came to power, it might seem even more so today after 15 months of ineptitude and shambolic policy reversals. To meet her fiscal rules – and to fund the Government’s growing list of spending commitments, to which scrapping the two-child benefit cap seems to have been added in the last few days – Reeves must raise taxes anew, even if by doing so she only further stifles growth. The Chancellor seems to have forgotten the first rule of holes: when in one, stop digging."
Labour's austerity is far worse than anything done by the Tories - "The Labour Government keeps on proudly assuring us that it will not impose “austerity”. There are all sorts of problems but Labour tells us that it has cleverly found a way to deal with them without resorting to something so awful. “Austerity”, in the minds of Labour MPs, is something that Tory governments impose. It is axiomatic that austerity is a particularly Tory thing. It is “Tory Austerity” – something nasty and unpleasant, as though the Tories have some kind of sadistic streak. That is never going to happen under kind, good-hearted Labour. It is true that Labour raised taxes in the last Budget and is going to raise taxes again in the coming Budget. These tax rises will – as tax rises must – make everybody poorer. But you must understand that this is not “austerity”. Labour has increased prices for all sorts of goods especially the prices in labour-intensive industries such as catering, restaurants, coffee shops and bars by increasing National Insurance. The cost of the National Insurance increase mostly went through to higher prices – higher prices and some reduced hiring of staff. As a result, we pay more for a coffee, more for a meal out, more for a drink in a pub and, come to that, more for all items in supermarkets. If we pay higher prices, it follows that we have less money left over. So, again, we are poorer. But, let’s be clear, that’s not called “austerity”, either. Oh no. The tax rises have, of course, led to lower economic growth. The economy has effectively been turned into a no-growth economy. There is barely a flicker of the candle, hardly any edging forward of progress or any perceptible moving of the needle. So, as a result, pay packets are not increasing as they would otherwise have done. We are less well-off than we would have been. But that, again, apparently is not “austerity”. Meanwhile, Labour has done nothing to tackle the amazing rise in the numbers of people of working age who are claiming welfare benefits. Labour backbenchers wouldn’t like to be responsible for doing anything about that. It would be against their principles. So we now have a vast army of people who, in old money, would simply be called “unemployed”. They are capable of working but instead they are leading lives which do not develop their abilities or give them self-respect. They are poor and without prospects of getting any richer. Once again, this is not Labour’s idea of “austerity”. To summarise, we have lower take-home pay because of taxes, we have higher prices in shops and restaurants, we have stingy economic growth so pay rises are meagre and we have a vast and growing army of people whose lives are unrewarding and impecunious. In short, we have reduced circumstances for everyone from the richest to the poorest. We are nearly all poorer. But we do not have what Labour would call “austerity”. So what, exactly, is austerity in the mind of a Labour minister? That is easy to answer: it is cutting the expenditure of the public sector... The only thing that counts is the public sector, the non-producing part of the economy and the part of the economy with the worst record of productivity growth. It is a misbegotten, self-serving idea of what austerity means. It is the favouring of one interest group and their trade unions over the interest of the great majority of the public. The national interest does not figure. It is the public sector interest that matters... Yes, it is different from Tory austerity. But Tory austerity was usually an attempt to right the ship. It might have been painful but at least it was trying to get us back on course. Labour austerity is just as painful but, instead of putting things right, it means increasing taxes and regulation in such a way that we are going even more off-course. Taxes are reaching such a level that growth becomes more difficult. Unemployment – real and hidden – will continue to rise. Our national debt will be harder to contain. Labour austerity is austerity without an exit."
Left wingers love tax rises, because they don't pay much tax
Labour is now officially the party of the benefits class - "Ever since Rachel Reeves first promised not to raise taxes for “working people”, we’ve all been wondering what precisely her intriguing term meant. Now, at long last, it seems we may have the answer. According to reports, the Chancellor is planning to hike taxes for those earning more than £45,000 a year. If true, this presumably means that those earning less than £45,000 a year are deemed to be “working people” – while those earning more than £45,000 are not. I find this notion fascinating – not least because among those earning more than £45,000 are an awful lot of plumbers, electricians, painters and decorators, and various other types of tradesmen, all of whom were traditionally regarded as members of the working class. As in, the group whose interests the Labour Party was originally founded to champion. In 2025, however, it appears that Labour no longer views these tradesmen – or, for that matter, train drivers, doctors and senior nurses, among others – as “working people”. Instead, I can only infer that it views them as rich, lazy, bourgeois parasites who deserve to be punished for their insatiable capitalist greed... Of course, the responsibility for this development does not lie with Ms Reeves alone. Earlier this year, she did make at least a token attempt to halt the rise in welfare spending. Labour’s MPs, however, put a sharp stop to that. Any cuts to benefits, they thundered, would cause incalculable “pain and difficulty” to claimants. (Curiously enough, they made no mention of any “pain and difficulty” endured by the taxpayers who are forced to fund these benefits.) All of which means that the following is what we can apparently expect from the Budget: working people, who are now classified as non-working people, will be made to pay more to support actual non-working people. On the face of it, such a plan may sound bemusing – not to mention economically ruinous. But, in purely electoral terms, perhaps there is a certain cynical cunning to it."
Labour’s broken tax pledge: It is the beginning of the end for both Reeves and Starmer’s Government - "The idea that we have had austerity is for the birds. As the Chancellor pointed out we have the highest debt in peacetime at close to 100 per cent of GDP and we spend £100bn a year just paying the interest on the borrowing. And why is that? Even during the so-called period of austerity under the coalition public spending rose. We are deeply in debt because we spend more than we earn as a nation, not because we are insufficiently taxed. Even as she was claiming to get a grip on the public finances Ms Reeves and her colleagues were happy to dole out pay rises to public sector unions without getting anything in the way of reform in return. Free stuff like breakfast clubs and nurseries, which did not exist until a few years ago, continue to be chucked around with gay abandon. An attempt to rein just some of this in by scrapping the winter fuel allowance for most pensioners was abandoned in the teeth of Labour backbench hostility. What we heard was an admission that any serious effort to reform either the welfare state or the NHS – the two biggest consumers of public money – has been abandoned... Ms Reeves said she wanted to be honest with the British public but she is being disingenuous to put it charitably. The apparent difficulties she faces – poor productivity, war in Ukraine, high energy prices, soaring debt – all these were known last October when her debut Budget whacked taxes onto the very people who create jobs and prosperity. Indeed, the promise not to raise taxes again was reaffirmed as recently as July by the Prime Minister. It is hardly surprising that trust in politicians, never particularly high among British voters, has collapsed. A recent study by the More in Common think-tank found that 87 per cent of people trust politicians not very much or not at all. This year’s British Social Attitudes Survey reported that “just 12 per cent trust governments to put the interests of the nation above those of their own party just about always or most of the time, a record low”. Taxation, the cost of living, immigration controls, small boats and the rest: voters feel that successive governments – of both stripes – have lied through their teeth about everything while trying to convince us that they are the victims of unexpected events rather than the perpetrators of our misfortunes"
Labour won last year’s election on a big lie - "If Britain’s growth potential is worse than previously thought, then Labour, which has been in power for little more than a year, can hardly be blamed for it. Instead, Reeves will cite 14 years of Tory austerity together with the damage done to trade by Brexit, also in her eyes a mistake for which Labour was in no way responsible. Yet for the roots of Britain’s fiscal predicament, you have to go all the way back to the end of the Second World War, and the foundation of today’s welfare state. This set in motion progressive real-term increases in social spending that further accelerated after the fall of the Berlin Wall – when the delusional belief that what used to be spent on defence could instead be diverted into welfare took hold – and then finally exploded out of control during the pandemic. Whatever the excuses, the fact is that last year’s election was won on a big lie. For any government not prepared to tackle welfare spending, a rise in income tax would always have been inevitable."
