More than three months have passed since Halloween, but the British Economy Minister, Jeremy Hunt, dressed up as a guardian fairy yesterday to – with the election looming – sell the British people a tax cut that looks like a mirage, and to pretend that they look the other way before the extension of an austerity that has turned the welfare state into a real skeleton.
However, the problem is that the costume does not favor him very much – a masochistic punisher would fit better in the context – and at the moment the voters seem not to listen so much to what the exhausted conservatives have to say after 14 consecutive years in power. To regain the lost trust they would no longer need a magic wand, but a box of Borràs magic games.
Hunt, who stabilized the UK economy after Liz Truss’s disastrous libertarian experiment, has presented a budget – the last before the election – with a further two-point reduction in Social Security rates (from 10 % to 8%) and the elimination of the non dom (non-domiciled) status for foreigners who prefer to pay a fixed annual sum in taxes instead of contributing on all global income. A hook in the face of elections still without a date (in all likelihood, January 2025, but probably much earlier).
But only Cinderella’s guardian fairy is able to turn a pumpkin into a carriage and mice into horses. It’s another thing for the Tories to sell tax cuts when in reality they are the highest (according to the Office for Fiscal Responsibility) in eighty years, and to present as healthy a low-growth economy (the forecast is 0, 8% this year and 1.9% next year), low productivity and low investment. And also a low unemployment rate, if only because almost ten million people of working age do not have or are looking for work, six and a half million receive social benefits and two and a half million are on permanent leave due to physical or mental health problems.
Minister Hunt assures that every British worker will save around a thousand euros in taxes with the reduction in Social Security rates. But the voters are not stupid, and they see that what the Government gives them on the one hand, it takes more than enough on the other. And, since they have frozen the minimum income from which you enter the band that pays the highest contribution on income, more and more are falling into the net. In this way, salaries rise due to inflation, but almost everything is taken by the Treasury.
Aware that the trick of pulling a rabbit out of a top hat does not work very well for him, the Minister of Economy has stolen from Labor the promise to remove the non dom status for the foreigners who take refuge there, he has extended the taxes extraordinary to the profits of the energy companies and has increased the rates on plane tickets in premium and business class. In this way he says he gets some money by financing the reduction in Social Security charges, and at the same time leaves the opposition out of the game. If the first thing Labor leader Keir Starmer did was to raise the tax burden, the right-wing press wouldn’t take a second to label him wasteful and irresponsible, feeding into an already existing prejudice among voters.
In an attempt to put the best possible face on the storm, Hunt predicted that inflation will be below 2% before the end of the year, and the country is on track to achieve the goal of starting to reduce here five years the public debt (currently around 120,000 million euros per year) as a percentage of GDP. But the price of all this is the continuation of austerity and the cut of the budgets of all ministries, except for Health and Defence, with special punishment for Justice and Local Affairs, despite the fact that many councils are bankrupt, the prisons are saturated and the trials suffer more and more delays.
Conservatives don’t need to be the protective fairy, but the Pop Wizard to make people think they see something other than the harsh reality. And neither Huntni nor Prime Minister Sunak fanel paper.
