The Conservatives offer a credible alternative to Starmer and Reeves’s incessant yo-yoing
If you want to know what Rachel Reeves is going to do with taxes at the Budget, save yourself the trouble of reading the latest briefing from the Treasury. Instead, try tarot cards or astrology. They’ll give you just as much insight into her strategy.
In a harried press conference last week, she told us the fiscal situation was so dire that everything was in play when it came to upcoming tax rises. In an interview this week, the Chancellor was adamant that she needed to raise income tax or we could forget about new infrastructure and housing. Yet on Thursday night, an income tax rise was suddenly taken off the table.
I’ve decided that this incessant yo-yoing can only be coming from her horoscope. Thursday morning Mystic Meg told Rachel (an Aquarius): “It’s not easy for you to examine your emotions and try to make a change – but if you can manage this, you’ll soon feel the benefits.”
Yesterday, she was ripping up the manifesto. Today, there’s no chance. Tomorrow, who knows?
Some think that this latest U-turn must be some clever expectation-management game. It isn’t. There is no complex double bluff. The truth is far simpler and far more worrying. We are witnessing government by guesswork. Labour has no plan, no strategy, no grip. Every new economic release sends it spinning in a different direction, blowing around like a plastic bag in the wind.
But the consequences are real. Businesses are holding back investment, families are putting off decisions and the confidence of domestic and international investors has evaporated. That is what happens when a Chancellor cannot give the country a straight answer on our most basic taxes. Labour are not running the Government, they are reacting to events.
No wonder so much wealth has already fled the country. No wonder so many are reconsidering whether Britain is the right place for them and their children. The latest reports suggest Reeves might introduce a mansion tax payable on death – another unjustified raid on pensioners who have done the right thing and worked hard their whole lives. It is measures like this that don’t just kill growth, but kill the forces of aspiration and hard work that help build our economy.
Even if Reeves doesn’t touch the basic rate of income tax, she is very clearly preparing to freeze or even lower income tax thresholds. Yet, last year she said that “extending the threshold freeze would hurt working people” and “take money out of their payslips”. She even promised thresholds would rise with inflation from 2028, and claimed last year’s punishing tax rises were “one and done”. Now she is coming back for more.
Starmer and Reeves should be honest about what they’re doing. Freezing income thresholds is a tax rise. It drags more and more people into higher bands of tax. It hits aspiration and punishes work. It is a tax increase by stealth, and Reeves’ own words prove she knows this.
And this stealth raid won’t just stop at income tax – reports suggest that she may target the personal savings allowance in order to drag more and more people into her tax doom loop by the back door.
When thresholds were frozen under successive Conservative governments, we should have been more honest that we were raising tax. I have already acknowledged that the overall tax burden grew too high under the Conservatives. I did not agree with those tax rises at the time, but we at least had the excuse of the debt to pay after Covid.
Reeves doesn’t have that excuse. She is doubling down on Conservative mistakes and with far less honesty, at a time when families and businesses are already on the brink as a result of her last disastrous Budget.
I saw this first-hand just this week. On Friday I visited a small, family-run business terrified of what’s coming later this month. They’re already being hit by the new family business taxes, clobbered by the Jobs Tax, dreading the Employment Rights Bill and struggling with soaring energy costs. Their suppliers are going out of business, investment has dried up and they simply cannot take another tax raid.
Reeves will blame everything: Brexit, Conservatives, Trump’s tariffs – but the fiscal hole she is facing she created all by herself. Her first Budget killed investment, raised taxes on jobs and drove confidence into the ground. The result is flatlining growth (in September our economy actually contracted), rising unemployment and a deficit that will more than double over the next five years. Markets reacted badly to her latest tax U-turn and were already charging Britain more to borrow than at any point in the last 27 years. We are paying more than Italy and Greece to service our debt.
There is a responsible way out of this mess: cutting government spending. Not as an ideological pursuit, but because it is the only serious alternative to hammering working people with these endless tax rises.
The Conservatives have identified £47bn of savings, including £23bn from welfare reforms. Labour repeatedly dismisses that figure, because they do not want to admit that savings are possible. But our sums add up and are credible.
And I am prepared to work with the Government on this. There is no election for four years. This is about the national interest, not party advantage. I do not want to walk into office in 2029 and find an even bigger disaster waiting to be cleaned up. I want to limit the damage to our country now, not exploit it for political gain.
So, while Labour blow backwards and forwards with every new statistic, we are setting out a clear and credible alternative. My Golden Economic Rule means every pound saved will be split between cutting the deficit and cutting taxes or funding key priorities like abolishing stamp duty. It is honest, disciplined and rooted in simple Conservative principles: spend less, tax less, reward work, restore stability.
There is a better path than the tax doom cycle Reeves is dragging us into. There is a better future than watching a Government guess its way through decisions that shape every family’s finances. Britain deserves leadership, not horoscopes. And when Labour finally puts down the tarot cards, excuses and U-turns, it will once again fall to the Conservatives to rebuild the economy Starmer and Reeves have contrived to wreck in record time.
This article was originally published in The Telegraph
