DAILY MAIL COMMENT: Prepare to pay the tab for Labour lies
As the old political adage goes: If you’re going to lie, make it a big one.
In a speech full of piety and faux indignation yesterday, Chancellor Rachel Reeves treated the nation to a whopper.
The wicked Tories had created a surprise £22billion black hole in Britain’s finances, she insisted, which was ‘unforgivable’.
How could they possibly have concealed this catastrophic shortfall from her, the OBR, IFS and just about every Treasury official?
The answer, of course, is that they didn’t. The nation’s books are open to inspection and fully transparent.
Chancellor Rachel Reeves speaks at the House of Commons on Monday
Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer holds a press conference following his first cabinet meeting at Downing Street on July 6, 2024
However, if Labour is going to renege on its manifesto commitments soon after taking power, it will need a fall guy.
There can now be little doubt that the party had a fully-formed plan for raising taxes long before the election.
But rather than share this secret with voters, they concealed it. It’s hard to see this as anything other than a cynical deception on the British public. And Middle England will soon pay a heavy price.
To begin plugging the funding gap, Ms Reeves announced a raft of cost-saving measures. These included scrapping vital infrastructure projects, including building hospitals, road upgrades and plans to reopen old railway lines.
For a Government hell-bent on growth, this is a serious economic error.
The Chancellor punished pensioners by stripping winter fuel payments and ditched a scheme to make social care more affordable. More threateningly, though, she said these cuts were only ‘the beginning, not the end’.
Make no mistake, tax hikes are on their way in the Budget on October 30. With savers, drivers, property owners and investors in her sights, a new age of austerity is on the way – for the private sector.
Junior doctors take part in a rally outside Downing Street on June 27
Chancellor Rachel Reeves speaks during a press conference following her statement to the House of Commons on the findings of the Treasury audit into the state of the public finances on July 29
For public sector workers, by contrast, it’s boom-time. Even as Ms Reeves upbraided the Tories for emptying the piggy bank, she found billions to offer junior doctors an eye-watering 22 per cent increase to end their strikes. Teachers, NHS staff and others were also handed inflation-busting pay rises.
If our economy genuinely is in the appalling state Ms Reeves says, isn’t this just recklessness? But it seems to be a decision by a Chancellor eager to reward Labour’s union paymasters. And the rest of us will have to suffer to pick up the tab.
She says paying up will ultimately save money because the economy will no longer be hammered by walkouts. But the unions won’t stay quiet for long now they know the chequebook will be opened so readily.
The reality is, splashing the cash on the already bloated public sector while squeezing the private sector has never been a recipe for prosperity.
Nor do we have much faith in the merit of the latest quango the Government has said it will establish to curb wasteful spending.
More taxpayers’ millions will inevitably be splurged on setting up and running the new Office of Value for Money. And how will ‘value for money’ be defined? You can bet it will be tailored to support Labour’s own agenda.
The quangocracy is about to enter a golden age with new semi-official bodies created to meddle in every aspect of public life.
There was a time when governments made decisions for themselves. Now they contract them out to functionaries (invariably Leftists) to avoid taking responsibility.
With a colossal Commons majority, Sir Keir Starmer is sitting pretty politically. But imposing tax rises after denying he would will begin to cause him problems.
It will add to his reputation for reneging on any promise he’s ever made. And a reputation like that will be increasingly hard to shift.
