Elizabeth Turpin

This is more of a scandal than most realise. The Chancellor’s tax rises on all of us weren’t for a black hole. They were for welfare. Political choices to squeeze productive people dry. She’s pretending more tax was necessary. But it’s only because she *chose* to hike spending.

This will be a tough weekend for the Chancellor. She knew almost six weeks before the Budget from the OBR there was no ‘black hole’. Yet she and the Treasury still stoked up the idea that there was — and it would take big tax rises to fill it. By Oct 31 she knew from the OBR there was actually £4bn headroom rather than a black hole. Yet still on Nov 5th she commandeered breakfast media to roll the pitch for big tax rises. Even by mid-November she was telling the BBC if Labour stuck to its manifesto commitments (ie no income tax rises) she’d need deep cuts to capital investment. None of what she said in the run up to the Budget was true. The Treasury select committee needs to ask her why she so misled the Parliament, the markets and the British people. She raised taxes to give herself some more headroom and to pay for yet another increase in (largely welfare) spending. The tax burden is going to all-time record level for a simple reason: the Labour manifesto said public spending would be around £10bn higher than Tory plans by 2028/29. In reality on the latest projections it will be £179bn higher!!! Nothing to do with filling in black holes.

Labour and the Tories have united to rig the rules against Reform on the council. Reform will not be prevented from speaking up for local people. The Reform UK group will now seek confirmation of the independent legal opinion from a specialist barrister to proceed with a legal challenge.

Cancelling elections or rigging the rule book to silence councillors is anti-democratic. It is not how we do things in 🇬🇧