vivweb01blog

  As a follow-up to the budget, and my recent pre-budget blog on the likelihood of Income Tax rises, I’ve tried to answer the simple question in the title i.e. Did Labour break their manifesto promises by raising the rate of one of the 3 main taxes – i.e. Income Tax, NI or VAT ? Yesterday’s budget was a complex affair, and seemed almost to be designed to confuse. It was widely anticipated by industry and the general population as a "death by a thousand taxes", and certainly lived up to the prediction. Much was made of sticking to manifesto promises, almost to the point of obsession by the Party, in the weeks before the budget, to the extent that Reeves was eventually forced to 'chicken out' of her planned 2p rises in all 3 rates of income tax in order to head off a widely anticipated rebellion by her 'unruly' back-benchers.  The resulting ‘hotch potch’ of miscellaneous taxes hastily put together to make up the shortfall and provide extra budgetary headro...

In short – it stifles incentive and enterprise, thus reducing our nation's productivity and its capacity to generate wealth..... Let me try to explain.... The Covid pandemic, Brexit, and more recently the worldwide ‘cost of living crisis’ have undoubtedly put a huge strain on many western economies since the start of the decade, and the UK is no exception.  The many billions gobbled up by pandemic costs and the UK's furlough scheme in particular were but one example of the financial challenges we faced, and the debt incurred will still have to be paid for somehow.  Raising taxes was a logical response during the first years of the pandemic in an attempt to pay down some of our mounting debt. Maintenance of ultra-low interest rates and effectively ‘printing money’ via quantitative easing was another means adopted to try and soften the immediate economic blow in the late 2010s, but unfortunately had the effect of making the economy appear far more robust than it actually was...

I first published this blog in November 2022 and revised it in December 2024. I've revisited it now (Nov '25) to coincide with the surprisingly radical reforms suggested by the new Home Secretary and provided some comments on prospects of sucess. ***** This is a particularly controversial topic, and has been foremost in our minds in UK since Putin’s Ukraine invasion and its migratory aftermath.  There are no hard and fast solutions to what is now effectively a global problem, but I'll attempt to provide some suggestions, and will focus primarily on our own issues with controlling illegal migration to the UK. The many crises and disasters occurring in other parts of the world are continuing to drive further migration ‘waves’ and will continue to do so over the coming years as resources become exhausted in some areas of the world and our species' population continues to increase unabated. This is a worldwise phenomenon, driven by the stark inequalities between 1st and ...