Even Keir Starmer’s government wouldn’t be able to get out of this one. Even Labour couldn’t pretend it wasn’t a broken manifesto promise of blatant, grotesque proportions. Even this hapless, hopeless, deceitful government would find no plausible excuse. Because if reports are to be believed, Rachel Reeves is planning on abandoning a key election promise, a guarantee even, not to raise income tax. And if she goes ahead and raises the basic rate of income tax, it would be the first such raise for half a century. Guess who was responsible for that one? Yup. Got it in one. Labour.
Now, okay, breaking promises, or finding obfuscatory, weasel words to excuse them, comes naturally to this government. Smash the gangs? How’s that one going, then? Reduce energy bills? Ditto. No rise in national insurance? What a whopper. Govern in the national, not party, interest? Stop sniggering please.
But a rise in income tax would, if it goes ahead, be the biggest broken promise of the lot. And what will Reeves and Starmer say? They’ll blame Brexit. Strange that they didn’t do that before the election, isn’t it?
Strange that they didn’t say to us before the election, with all those “change” posters behind Keir Starmer, “well, we’d like to keep taxes where they are, but sadly Brexit makes that impossible”.
Of course, they said no such thing. Because they were hellbent on power at any costs, no matter how many millions of people they deceived in the process. They didn’t care how much they over-promised by a country mile.
And we all know why Reeves is now having to think the unthinkable and consider income tax rises, despite explicitly promising not to. It’s because of this government’s horrendous decisions since it came to power: to spend and borrow billions more; to create a massive black hole while blaming it on the Tories; and then to wonder why the economy has ground to a halt, why inflation has shot up and to ask who on earth is going to pay for it all.
Rachel Reeves should rightly be proud to be the first female Chancellor of the Exchequer. It really is no mean feat. But she now has almost exactly a month before her budget to salvage her reputation and to stop herself going down in history as one of, if not the, worst chancellors ever.
She has a month to finally take an axe to Britain’s ballooning public expenditure, to cut the grotesque welfare bill, to slash the inexcusable rise in the number of public-sector officials, all paid for by the taxpayer, to face down public-sector strikers and to say enough is enough.
But she will do none of those things. Because, even if she knows deep down that she should, that she must, her own party won’t let her. Her party believes not just in big government, but gigantic government. It believes that the state, not parents, should feed kids breakfast. It believes that millions upon millions of people should be paid by the rest of us to stay at home because of the normal stresses of life. It believes that the public sector can never do enough.
But that’s the government we elected, folks. That’s democracy. We can do nothing about it now, except one thing: to make sure we never make the same mistake again.