Budget Blues

After the recent Budget farmers on tractors drove to Downing Street to protest. Where were pensioners on Zimmer frames?

I happen to believe it is not a sin to make tax efficient plans; it is a sin of omission not to; or so your heirs will say. To slightly digress, a sin of commission is doing something wrong,  whether morally or legally. And we want to stand before our God, don’t we?

In my lifetime taxation on voters, today called “working people”, has fallen for those at the top of the scale and ‘em at the bottom. The juicy middle has been squeezed. Because of our aging demographic the treatment of pensioners has been different. There are fewer middle/high income pensioners. The majority are low income voters. Hence the triple lock that sounds like something Giant Haystacks and Big Daddy did so theatrically. High income pensioners have been shafted by Conservative and Labour governments mouthing platitudes about the importance of saving when what they mean is taking – aka taxing. Governments are like coarse fishermen. They lay down ground bait and then change the rules, suddenly ensnaring the hapless tax planner in their net. It is unproductive to rant about this. However, I will offer advice. Save money on expensive tax experts and hedge your bets. If a tax break is too good to be true it will surely be abolished.

I have got to Lloyd George’s “people’s budget” of 1909 in the Roy Jenkins biography of Churchill. It is remarkable not least because it was not delivered under duress but to emanate a belief in liberalism and equality. Obviously not for women who had to wait until 1918 to vote.

“David Lloyd George’s first task as Chancellor was to bring to the house Asquith’s Pensions Bill in 1908, but it was Lloyd George’s name that would be associated with it in the public mind. In the Budget of 1909, “The People’s Budget”, we see his own mind and values at work. So controversial were some of the measures that the civil servants of the Exchequer refused to cooperate with him.

As he delivered his speech he said that it was a war budget, designed to raise money to fight against poverty and squalor. The money would be raised by higher taxes for the rich upper class: this led to other battles, the battle to pass the Budget and the battle to reform the House of Lords. It took seventy two parliamentary days to discuss the measure in the Commons, there were 554 divisions and the Summer Recess was done away with. In the end, it was rejected by the Lords which led to an immediate general election, after which the Budget of 1909 was passed in April 1910.

After the Budget of 1909 David Lloyd George did not rest, and in 1911 he brought his National Insurance Bill before the House. It was a measure intended to establish compulsory health and unemployment insurance schemes. It attracted much opposition from those with vested interests, from some on the left, and especially from the right.” (library.wales)

The Resolution Foundation more prosaically summarises the UK October 2024 Budget as “more spending, more tax, more borrowing”.