For one moment I was concerned I might not make the deadline for this latest, Labour budget-themed instalment of Swindon’s Sunday Sermon. You can just imagine the queues out there, now a pint of San Miguel only costs a bargain £6.49, rather than an extortionate £6.50.
What an offer. Buy 649 pints of beer and get your 650th pint for free! By the time you’ve made your way through that lot you’ll be too shitfaced to realise you are three-and-a-half grand poorer and searching for a liver transplant on the dark web.
I kind of get the increase in tobacco price. If you need to sell a fucking lung to buy a pack of ciggies, you may as well give up.
Labour: a £2.50 tax hike every time Reeves said ‘working people’
The first Labour economic statement since 2010 was the Budget that saw the second largest increase in taxes in UK history.
The surprise ‘£22 billion black hole’, which Keir Starmer once thought was a new ride at Alton Towers for him to try on yet another freebie family day out, has been stuffed to its very core with around £40 billion worth of tax hikes.
Interestingly enough, the £40 billion figure worked out at around £2.50 for each time chancellor Rachel Reeves and one of her virtually unknown colleagues blurted out the words “working people”, over the space of an eight-hour news cycle. Roughly.
Why on earth are these freeloading red stains on the fabric of society given the opportunity to define what a working person is or isn’t?
May I remind you, they are millionaires, multi-millionaires, landlords, non-executive directors, bankers, and economists dictating to you what an honest day’s work should look like.
Thoroughly dishonest
Thoroughly dishonest Reeves is never backwards in coming forwards when it comes to talking about her time, coining-it-in as an economist.
Following three junior positions with the Bank of England — where one of her former colleagues described her as “fucking useless”, according to some malignant right-wing gossipy blog site — Reeves claims she moved to the Bank of Scotland to work as an economist.
But this claim was untrue. Reeves worked in some “mundane support department”, so say more than one of her former HBOS colleagues.
So let me get this right. A “fucking useless” liar that’s spent a career predicting the state of the economy as accurately as I tend to predict the calories in a slice of chocolate cake, wants you to trust her with your money because she helped Dave in IT get Windows 2005 installed on his PC?
Despite the promise of “change”, this was a typical capitalist economy budget.
Why does this Labour Party government expect small businesses to pick up an eye-watering £25 billion tab, while not having anything to say about Google and Amazon picking and choosing what they do or don’t pay in tax?
I’ll tell you exactly why Labour backtracked on hiking the Digital Services tax, introduced in 2020, from 2% to 10%.
Sound the freebie klaxon
Now is a very good time to sound the freebie claxon.
Let’s go back to August last year when then-shadow secretary of state Jonathan Reynolds and Rachel Reeves called for an increase in the tax to 10%, claiming the extra income would be used to fund a tax cut for small businesses.
Actually, sound the freebie claxon now.
Google’s charm offensive was just too much for the gluttonous Labour Party. Reynolds, his senior parliamentary assistant — also known as his wife — and Starmer’s political director all attended the Glastonbury festival as esteemed guests of the streaming platform YouTube, which is owned by Google. This generous little ‘no strings attached’ package, which included accommodation and ‘hospitality’, was worth £3,377.
And you thought Oasis ticket prices were a bit steep? Who even is Reynolds? The bloke looks like a haunted pencil, not a secretary of state.
Anyway, the Glastonbury festival came to an end, and within just one day reports emerged of Labour’s Digital Services tax hike being scrapped.
Reynolds wasn’t the only beneficiary of Google’s blatant bribery.
Keir Starmer himself was treated to a £380 dinner at the World Economic Forum gathering, and Lucy Powell’s political adviser, Labour’s executive director of policy, and the party’s head of domestic policy all accepted tickets and transport to, and ‘hospitality’ at, the Brit Awards, which Powell put through the register of members interests at £1,170.
Not in the service of us
In total, openDemocracy estimated the Labour Party pocketed around £10,000 worth of freebies in exchange for the axing of a policy that was worth around £3 billion to the British public.
The Labour Party isn’t “at the service of working people”, it is a puppet of the corporate elite that refuses to take on vested interests, such as the big tech corporations which have already had it ridiculously easy under successive Tory administrations.
Tax them Starmer. For the love of god, just fucking tax them.
Funnily enough, that £3 billion loss to the British public might even be enough to give the country with a bit of a Nazi problem and the stand-up comedian president that “£3 billion a year, as long as it takes”, that chancellor Reeves announced during her economic statement.
Incredible isn’t it? Reeves demands nearly all government departments slash their budgets by 2% next year, while throwing at least £15 billion over the next parliament into a proxy war that even the most dimwitted of Starmerites realise is an obscene and unnecessary waste of your cash.
In keeping with Tory tradition, Britain’s first woman chancellor confirmed that Labour WILL introduce the Tory changes to the disgraceful and demeaning Work Capability Assessment, making disabled people the primary target for her attempt to slash the welfare bill by £3.4 billion.
I mean, why bother hassling Bezos for a bit more tax when you can force sick and disabled British people into unsuitable, low paid work, which can and will have devastating consequences on their physical and mental health?
Labour: steal £3bn from disabled people to send to Ukraine
The Labour manifesto, as unambitious and ambiguous as it was, made absolutely no mention whatsoever of stealing £3 billion from some of Britain’s most vulnerable people and sending it to Ukraine to fight someone else’s war.
The only foreign aid budget that needs slashing is the kind of aid that not only kills and maims human beings, but also leaves Britain entirely complicit in a foreign state’s aggression. This is not a brush that a majority of us wish to be tarred by.
This first budget from the Labour government in fourteen years could be thrown in with a majority of the previous fourteen budgets and barely anyone would blink an eye, because while the name of the party in charge of the country may well be different, the rancid and corrupt neoliberal ideology remains the same.
And that just isn’t good enough.
Featured image via Rachel Swindon
This post was originally published on Canary.