Don’t be fooled by Labour taking the British public for mugs

Do the bad stuff early, and the good stuff later – so its memory is fresher before the eventual reckoning is as old as representative democracy itself. 

There is also a golden rule of public relations that if you wish to convince an audience about the benefits of taking a particular course of action then you must first deploy a narrative that justifies the said action, making it seem an entirely acceptable decision, even if a while ago nobody saw it as necessary. 

In politics that means justifying future decisions by creating a demand for action; one people can be comfortable with, even if they never previously wanted it; even if it means fabricating myths, twisting statistics and shouting “fire, fire” – when it only happened to be someone lighting a cigarette in a beer garden. 

These two golden rules, brothers-in-arms we might say, are related to the evergreen observation of American satirist H.L. Mencken about politician’s siren calls, stating “the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.” 

I preface today’s column with these two golden rules and exposure of political mendacity to remind dear readers that while democracy has its virtues (being better than the alternatives, as W.S. Churchill put it) it is also apt to the self-serving manipulation of power-craving politicians.  

Today we are witnessing such media management and manipulation of the British people by the new Labour Government, not just so it gets its way with a minimum of public opposition, but so it retains power to do even more damage in a second term. 

The first golden rule of taking the most damaging decisions early is the forthcoming budget on 30th October.

We can expect there to be significant tax increases, possibly sweetened by a few give-aways that might appeal to a broad low-income base, but there undoubtedly will be pain.

Obvious targets, partly because it affects “only” those with assets, is raising Capital Gains Tax, Stamp Duty and Inheritance Tax.  

Other taxes that are a strong candidates for increases are National Insurance and forcing higher Council Taxes.

So called “sin taxes” on tobacco, alcohol and various foods are likely to be hiked above inflation and will most likely be joined by a large rise in fuel duty – for driving your car is nowadays a sin, even if it is a vital part of your work. 

Other pejoratively framed “unearned incomes” from pensions, savings and renting of properties might also attract National Insurance or see tax liabilities introduced or changed for the worse. 

We have been told, quite brazenly, by Chancellor Rachel Reeves that she is going to break her repeated promises not to raise taxes on working people and just last week Prime Minister Kier Starmer gave warning we can expect things to be harder before they might get better.  

There might be a degree of expectation management happening here – Labour telling us how bad an announcement will be so we are greatly relieved when it is not quite as bad as we were led to believe – but that will not remove the fact the budget will change the basic use of taxes from raising government revenues towards punishing success in the pursuit of levelling down. 

Such is the zealotry amongst many Labour politicians for wealth taxes as a moral imperative –  cheered on by an activist base who have marched further left with each electoral defeat in 2010, 2015, 2017 and 2019 – that these fiscal punishment beatings will only be evaded by leaving the country.  

Research by Henley & Partners predicts some 9,500 millionaires will leave the UK this year while UBS predicts 500,000 will leave by 2028.

Those figures were estimated before the budget is announced and means a lot of tax revenue lost forever that everybody who stays will have to pay for instead. 

That’s why as soon as she sat down in 11 Downing Street Rachel Reeves suddenly discovered a black hole of £22 billion.

It’s the Golden rule of creating a narrative to support an action. Her discovery was contrary to the fully transparent public finances deemed to be reliable and balanced by the Institute for Fiscal Studies and Office for Budget Responsibility. She even contributed to the calamity by agreeing to inflation pay awards.

No shock then to find the OBR has been tasked by the Labour Government with rewriting its estimates in advance of the Budget to help justify painful tax increases.

No surprise to find the IFS now changing its tune and stating the finances are in a worse position than it previously said.  

Also last week, Net Zero Energy Secretary Ed Miliband wrote to the National Grid to ask how he could achieve Net Zero by 2030.

This is another playbook move to control the narrative to justify further draconian interventions of energy levies and taxes. 

Meanwhile, with knife crime rampant, our Prime Minister calls upon Mencken’s law of extinguishing imaginary hobgoblins by suggesting he needs to ban smoking in beer gardens. He means it, but its timing is a deflection on stilts. 

The Labour government is taking the British public for mugs. Starmer and Reeves think no one will suspect they always intended these tax rises. Of course they did. 

They also knew if they had said what they wanted to do in advance of an election even Rishi Sunak’s government stood a chance of holding on. 

Brian Monteith is a former member of the Scottish and European parliaments and senior advisor to the Tax Reform Council.