Margaret Thatcher is growing on me.
I must have been too young at the time to appreciate her.
Here is a genius quote of hers about matters of concern to us today:
A man’s right to work as he will, to spend what he earns, to own property, to have the state as servant and not as master, they are the essence of a free economy, and on that freedom all our other freedoms depend.
On Wednesday, March 22, Rishi Sunak, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, will be delivering a Spring Statement in the House of Commons.
One dreads to think what he will say. Our taxes are going up, up, up.
He has imposed the most tax increases since Labour’s Gordon Brown, who was Chancellor for ten years (1997-2007). Rishi’s only been in for two!
As Guido Fawkes points out, Thatcher’s Nigel Lawson was the last Chancellor to cut taxes. He was in office between 1983 and 1989.
No one under the age of 40 will have experienced a cut to the overall tax burden:
Two readers of Guido’s post put a mock letter to taxpayers together:
Dear common people, you must understand that our policy of massive QE to deflate your earnings and savings whilst massively enriching the globalist banks and corporations, the mass uncontrolled relentless 3rd world immigration (not forgetting the VIP illegals), the massive state support of anti-democratic and anti-conservative quangos and NGOs to champion progressive socialism, the destruction of energy security and the lunacy of net zero, the massive tax hikes with nothing in return but more state control, the Covid lockdowns built on deliberately manipulated bad data – they are all necessary if we and the rest of Westminster and Whitehall are to meet our WEF Great Reset targets. Thanks.
P.S.: I’m a multi millionaire and I can still claim my expenses including my energy bills, TV licence and everything else that I buy, so I don’t really care.
That doesn’t half cut to the bone.
Rishi told Sophie Ridge from Sky News that the other Chancellors did not have pandemics with which to deal. He thought that the chart should have gone back to the Second World War for a truer picture of borrowing and high taxes:
He assured her that taxes will be going down.
This was the front page of the Mail on Sunday from March 20:
Better than slashing fuel duty would be to cut the green levy, which is even greater.
Look at the third column, though (emphases mine):
… the Chancellor has asked Treasury officials to establish a new cost-of-living unit which would scrutinise all new policies for their impact on household finances. He will also chair a new Cabinet committee on financial waste which will aim to prune nearly £6billion from public spending.
I must be naïve. I was always under the impression that the Treasury’s civil servants looked at (‘scrutinise’ is too strong a word) the impact of their policies on household finances. The same goes for financial waste.
Why do we need more civil servants doing nothing?
They cannot even be bothered to go into the office. They’ve been working from home since the first coronavirus lockdown, the second anniversary of which is Wednesday, March 23 — the same day as Rishi’s Spring Statement.
The tax situation never gets better, does it?
Churchmouse Campanologist 
2 comments
March 23, 2022 at 7:05 pm
dearieme
“The tax situation never gets better, does it?” Actually it did in 1816 when income tax was abolished after the end of the Napoleonic Wars. So that generation of politicians had kept their promise that income tax was a temporary expedient. Hurray!
For what happened next under different generations I recommend the sections “Under Peel” and “Gladstone and Disraeli” here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_taxation_in_the_United_Kingdom#Income_tax
It’s quite amusing in its way.
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March 25, 2022 at 12:22 pm
churchmouse
Thank you for the link. Interesting reading, to be sure.
The last sentence is worth noting:
‘It could have been ended, but at the rate at which it was applied (less than 1%) and with most of the population exempt, it was not a priority. With worsening trade conditions, including the decline of agriculture as a result of poor harvests and North American imports, the opportunity never arose again.[14]’
It was not a priority, as it pertained to less than 1% of the population, events intervened (as they always will; that’s life) and — no surprise — a mention of repeal never came up again.
Sad!
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