Red Ed - Empty Head
VAT has gone up today.
Nobody likes this. None of us like paying taxes. No business enjoys the burden it imposes. It would be really nice if the previous government hadn't left behind a massive hole in the national finances - spending four pounds for every three coming in - which somehow has to be plugged.
Had the previous government - the previous Labour government - not doubled the national debt and left a deficit of a hundred and forty billion pounds a year, the present government might not have had to cut public spending and increase VAT.
Unfortunately, they did.
Brown and Balls wanted Labour to fight the last election on a platform of promising not to increase VAT. Alistair Darling won a battle to stop this, because he knew that if Labour had been re-elected they would probably have been unable to honour any such promise. No major party went into the election with a promise not to raise VAT, and Independent analysts predicted before the election that whichever party won it would have to implement such a rise.
I didn't know whether to laugh or cry when Labour leader "Red Ed" attacked that VAT increase. He was a senior member of the government which left behind the financial mess which made tax increases and spending cuts inevitable. He has produced no clear alternative.
I don't think I've ever seen a newspaper produce two leading articles on the same day where I agree as strongly with one and disagree as strongly with the other as The Sun has today. I cannot share their view about control orders (see previous post). But I certainly agree with their leader "Empty Edded" which castigates Mr Milibands's "vacuous snipings" and refers to the Labour narrative on cuts and tax rises as "naive rubbish."
And as they say, "The quicker Red Ed develops some humility, plus an actual policy to deal with the disaster he helped create, the better."
Nobody likes this. None of us like paying taxes. No business enjoys the burden it imposes. It would be really nice if the previous government hadn't left behind a massive hole in the national finances - spending four pounds for every three coming in - which somehow has to be plugged.
Had the previous government - the previous Labour government - not doubled the national debt and left a deficit of a hundred and forty billion pounds a year, the present government might not have had to cut public spending and increase VAT.
Unfortunately, they did.
Brown and Balls wanted Labour to fight the last election on a platform of promising not to increase VAT. Alistair Darling won a battle to stop this, because he knew that if Labour had been re-elected they would probably have been unable to honour any such promise. No major party went into the election with a promise not to raise VAT, and Independent analysts predicted before the election that whichever party won it would have to implement such a rise.
I didn't know whether to laugh or cry when Labour leader "Red Ed" attacked that VAT increase. He was a senior member of the government which left behind the financial mess which made tax increases and spending cuts inevitable. He has produced no clear alternative.
I don't think I've ever seen a newspaper produce two leading articles on the same day where I agree as strongly with one and disagree as strongly with the other as The Sun has today. I cannot share their view about control orders (see previous post). But I certainly agree with their leader "Empty Edded" which castigates Mr Milibands's "vacuous snipings" and refers to the Labour narrative on cuts and tax rises as "naive rubbish."
And as they say, "The quicker Red Ed develops some humility, plus an actual policy to deal with the disaster he helped create, the better."
Comments