There is something very odd about the Labour Government’s 2024 budget. Usually, the media debate on a budget ends in days rather than months.
This is not the case with this budget as the debate continues. A new analysis from the CBI estimates that limiting tax relief for family-owned businesses could lead to a reduction in 125,000 jobs and that this would come with a significant reduction in economic activity.
This is a budget that just keeps on giving as companies come to realise the many negative impacts that it will have on their businesses. This is a highly unusual budget as it will destroy jobs across the economy. There is nothing positive to say about this budget.
This budget should also be placed in relation to the planned increase in workers’ rights, and combined these two policies will destroy many jobs.
The problem for this Labour Government is that they spent for too long stating that the last government had broken the UK and that the country was in crisis. With this Labour Government, there was going to be the start of a new dawn of economic growth and high-quality public service provision.
However, Labour fell into a policy prioritization trap. They claimed that there was a £22 billion blackhole that needed to be filled.
Reflect on this claim. There was no such blackhole and if such a blackhole exists, then this reflects Labour’s failure in opposition to hold the last Conservative Government to account.
To solve the £22billion blackhole, Labour decided to raise £40 billion by taxing job makers rather than job takers. The outcome is a budget that has undermined economic growth and is destroying jobs.
There is only one word to describe this approach – madness. However, this madness comes from Labour’s stupid promise not to raise taxes on people who go out to work. Thus, the budget protected job takers, but in doing so destroyed jobs.
Rachel Reeves and Keir Starmer continue to state that they had no alternative. There was an alternative. They should have had a budget that encouraged companies to invest and to create economic growth that then would have led to an increase in the government’s tax take.
However, remember that foolish election promise, not to tax that who go out to work. The outcome of this foolish promise is that we will all be much worse off under this government. I am not looking forward to the next five years and under this government the UK’s economy will underperform. One could even go as far as arguing that this is a government that is breaking Britain.
