Rishi Sunak seems to have a New Year’s resolution: to claim that taxes are falling and say it so often that people start to believe him rather than their own lying payslip. He says that the last Budget was the biggest tax-cutting event since the 1980s, etc. He tells today’s Sunday Telegraph that more welfare reform will allow him to cut taxes even more. I was on the panel after he spoke on Laura Kuenssberg’s BBC1 show and said he is stretching the truth until the elastic snaps.

For every £1 cut by his National Insurance tax reductions (which have now come into effect) he is raising £4 by stealth taxes (taking four million more into income tax, three million more into the higher rate, 500,000 more into the top rate). Add taxes you pay indirectly and the picture looks like this: taxes rising, really rather quickly, to the highest they have been in UK peacetime history. It’s bizarre, even perverse, to claim to be cutting taxes when your own Budget documents confirm the below eye-watering rises:

Now to what he told Laura Kuenssberg this morning:

Claim:

The Chancellor has just announced £20 billion of tax cuts that came in this weekend.

QOSHE - Stretching truth / Fact-checking Rishi Sunak’s tax claims - Fraser Nelson
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Stretching truth / Fact-checking Rishi Sunak’s tax claims

5 1
07.01.2024

Rishi Sunak seems to have a New Year’s resolution: to claim that taxes are falling and say it so often that people start to believe him rather than their own lying payslip. He says that the last Budget was the biggest tax-cutting event since the 1980s, etc. He tells today’s Sunday........

© The Spectator


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