MILIBAND TO RAISE TAXES IN TRUE LABOUR STYLE.

Ed Miliband, the alleged leader of the labour Party, has told us his solution to our economic woes - increase taxes on what he terms the rich and give the money to all those 'hard working families' who he thinks are more likley to vote for him come the next general election.

 

No doubt, there will be many people who fall for this nonsense despite the fact that Labour always tries the same thing and always creates major problems for us. The high tax and high spend policies of the Wilson governments of the 1960s and 1970s resulted in us going cap-in-hand to the IMF; the result of the Blair-Brown years was the worst financial mess since the 1930s, when we'd also had far too much socialist intervention in our economy.

 

Miliband has indicated that if Labour is elected in 2015, he would hope to be able to reintroduce the 10% starting rate for income tax, though only for basic rate taxpayers, and that he would pay for this handout by introducing a new tax on high value property. Thus, he plans to bring back one policy that the previous Labour government abandoned and introduce another which he's stolen from the Liberal Democrats. So much for forward thinking radicalism.

 

Fiddling with tax rates is nothing other than window dressing; the financial benefit would be minimal and could be achieved far more effectively by simply raising the personal allowance, the policy being followed by the current government. Bringing in a new so-called 'mansion tax' which would be levied on any home valued at more than £2m would be another assault on those very many people who have accumulated a relatively small amount of wealth, added to all the other raids on their income and capital that already exist. Miliband has very deliberatel and disingenuously used the term 'mansion', knowing that many of his audience will automatically think of large country estates while having no idea that many relatively modest homes in London and the south-east would be caught even though their owners may be of relatively limited means; exactly how the tax would be structured and assessed has not been explained.

 

Miliband's approach will, of course, find favour with those who see anyone who has anything as being undeserving. Anyone with any intelligence will see it as nothing more than a piece of electioneering. It would be nice to think that the second group will outweigh the first, but I have my doubts.