Over the weekend leading economists warned Rachel Reeves that her high-spending, high-taxing and high-borrowing stewardship of the economy would plunge the UK into a Denis Healey-style 1970s economic crash. What they didn’t say, so I will, is that Reeves-onomics – along with Keir Starmer’s least-ever business-minded Labour Cabinet – has created, in record time, a booming black economy here in the UK. It seems that only Reeves and her delusional treasury advisers are oblivious to the monumental mistakes they are making.
They’re under the misapprehension that they can keep raising taxes without consequences – and have another £50 billion in store for us in autumn. Everyone else in the country knows the reality that if you push taxes too high some businesses go bust, others go abroad, and some move to the black market where they operate a cash-in-hand system to bypass handing over their hard-earned money to the Treasury. Whichever it is the Exchequer loses out.
Recently a friend told me he asked his builder if he could pay him by cheque, to which the builder replied: “That’ll do nicely, I need some to go through the books.”
We’ve no doubt all heard something similar, but in the last year these occasional anecdotes have become much more common.
A hairdresser, who’d closed her shop on the high street as she could no longer afford the increased business rates, rent, wage bills, National Insurance contributions (NIC) and energy bills, told me she could earn more going solo and going mobile.
It’s cheaper for the client as well, and everyone walks away happy. Everyone that is apart from UK plc which this government is systematically destroying.
Unfortunately, Reeves hasn’t got a clue. Take the benefit claimant figures, the extra million claims since Labour took office will without doubt contain a growing number of “double dippers” – people both claiming and working.
Jobcentre staff tell of claimants arriving by van, wearing overalls, signing on and then going back to work. We’re also seeing people coming off payrolls and going into self-employment.
Some take this option to save on tax, while some businesses have lost staff to ensure they have fewer people on their books after the NIC hike and before “Three Pads” Rayner introduces her workers’ rights bill.
Add to these figures the growing number of illegal migrants working in the black market and no wonder the UK economy is heading for a collapse. The latest data shows a 30% increase on last year’s figures of civil penalties issued for illegal working.
And with illegal immigration up 40% since Labour got into power there’s an ever-growing workforce ready to work cash-in-hand in car washes, social care, construction, food processing and nail bars, as compiled by illegal working watchdog The Gangmasters and Labour Abuse Authority.
It is so apparent those in government have never run anything commercially that everyone is now running rings around them. What a bunch of clueless idiots we have in charge – they are not so much running the country as running the country into the ground.
I’m afraid it is going to get a lot worse before any of us have the chance to make it better.
