Since Labour came to power in 1997 and installed the Tartan Taxman as Chancellor amid claims that everyone would be better off under New Labour, the tax burden has increased significantly and we now work well over half the year solely for the benefit of the Treasury.

Income Tax has now increased to 23.6p in the pound which is 6.7% more than it was last year.  This doesn’t include national insurance which is currently 11p in the pound if you earn up to £645 per week and 1p in the pound for anything over the £645.  Income Tax is charged at 40p in the pound for anything you earn over £32,400 (rising to £33,300 next year).

Let’s use an example of someone earning £33,800 per year, an average wage for middle management in middle England.

Salary: £33,800 (£650 per week)
Allowance: £5,035
Taxable Pay: £28,765

Despite having a tax-free allowance of £5,035 per year the whole salary is used to calculate your tax bill so the 40% tax threshold will be met.

Standard Rate Income Tax: £7,646
Higher Rate Income Tax: £560
Standard Rate National Insurance: £4,025
Lower Rate National Insurance: £3

Gross Tax Bill: £12,234
Net Tax Bill (Gross Tax Bill – Allowance): £7,199

So, for someone earning a salary of £33,800 they can expect to hand almost 22% of that straight over to the Treasury before they see a penny of it.

But that’s not all the Tartan Taxman takes off you.  When you pay for your gas and electricity (and even coal) you pay 5% VAT.  When you buy pretty much anything – good or services – you will pay 17.5% VAT on it.  Then there’s tax on petrol, diesel and LPG – 13.4% VAT and around 42% duty on petrol.  You pay tax if a relative dies and leaves you a decent inheritance.  You pay tax if you buy a house for more than £120k.  You pay tax when you sell a house.  You pay tax if you give your children or grandchildren a gift of more than £100 in a year.  You pay tax if you save money in the bank.  You pay tax if you pay into a pension.  You pay tax if you claim a pension.

What does Labour have to say about this ever-increasing tax burden?  They say that every person will be £1,000 better off next year on average thanks to the tax credits system.  The tax credits system is so complicated that even the people who work for HMRC can’t tell you how it works and it requires 10’s of thousands of staff and millions of pounds just to keep it ticking over.  Where is the sense in taking a quarter of someone’s salary and then paying thousands of people to administer a system to give most of it back?  A large proportion of people on tax credits receive more than in tax credits than they pay in tax making the system even more pointlessly expensive – for people in this situation, why not just not tax them in the first place?

One thing is for sure, New Labour may have abandoned pretty much every socialist ideal they may have had but they’ve kept the important one – everyone should be as poor and heavily burdened by the state as everyone else.

Edit:
Comments are closed due to excessive spam

Traitor Blair was questioned by the police yesterday over the cash for peerages investigation.

A spokesperson for Bliar’s office said it was only natural that the police would want to question him as their investigation is drawing to a close.

Why?  Is it because they’ve turned up evidence during the investigation?  If he’s done nothing wrong and the police have questioned half the cabinet then it would surely be natural that the police wouldn’t need to interview him.  Or am I missing something here?

Good news!  Labour lost the Dawley Magna By-election yesterday to Telford & Wrekin People’s Association which means they now tenuously cling on to Telford & Wrekin Council without a majority.

The leader of Telford & Wrekin Conservatives and the Lib Dums are both keen to form an alliance and the independents are likely to join up with them to get Labour out.

Adrian Williams of Telford & Wrekin People’s Association took 649 votes, followed by the Labour candidate Santokho Sekham with 476 and the Tory candidate Harvey Unwin with 446.

Labour took a serious beating at the last round of local elections and are probably going to suffer the same fate again at next years local elections.

The resignation of a Labour councillor in the Dawley Magna parish in Telford has triggered an election which could see the balance of power tip out of Labour’s favour.

Telford & Wrekin was split into two separate constituencies to provide Labour with a safe seat.  The Telford constituency – where Dawley Magna lies – contains all the housing estates and is a traditional Labour heartland.  The Wrekin constituency consists of the old towns and rural parts of the borough which is traditionally a Conservative area.

Telford & Wrekin Council is run by a cabinet which is dominated by Labour councillors but indications are that Labour will lose the seat, possibly to a residents association candidate.  If they do lose the seat, Labour will only control 26 of the 54 seats meaning that a coalition of opposition councillors could oust the ruling Labour cabinet – who are doing a pretty crap job incidently – and lose Labour yet another English council.

Labour flunky, Matthew Taylor, has criticised bloggers for a crisis in politics by exposing shitty politicians, government stupidity and making unreasonable demands.

Taylor says that politics and the internet aren’t necessarily a bad partnership of course, citing Traitor Blair’s recent online interview and David Milliband (the cretinous minister in charge of DEFRA that has overseen mass bankruptcy of English farmers because of the incompetence of his department in paying farm subsidies) who has his own propaganda blog.

Political bloggers, Taylor says, are responsible for a “shrill discourse of demands” that dominates politics and specifically criticises those bloggers that see it as their job to expose venal, stupid and mendacious politicans.

It’s people like Matthew Taylor who spout this self-serving, holier-than-thou bullshit that convinces me that politicians are increasingly in need of a damn good virtual thrashing at every opportunity.  We elect politicians to run the country for us.  For us, not for them.  Why shouldn’t I, or any other citizen, be allowed to expose incompetence, corruption, ineptitude or any other inappropriate behaviour by a public servant?  Why shouldn’t I be allowed to question their motives and actions or demand that they act in the interests of me and my country rather than themselves or their party?

Taylor said “We have a citizenry which can be caricatured as being increasingly unwilling to be governed but not yet capable of self-government”.  This attitude is what gave rise to the illiberal ID card scheme which will have the state tracking our every move because we can’t be trusted.  It gives rise to undemocratic legislation that deprives us of our right to privacy, free speech, free assembly and many other rights and priveleges that we have had for centuries because we can’t be trusted.

We are all sick to death of being like Matthew Taylor telling us that we can’t be trusted to make our own decisions and that it’s wrong to criticise the government.  A million people – 1/60th of the entire population of the UK – decended on London to tell the British government not to invade Iraq and they did it anyway.  Over 400,000 people marched on Parliamen in protest at the hunting ban.  Tens of thousands of people have signed petition after petition calling on the British government to take us out of the European Federation, to end health apartheid and change countless illiberal and undemocratic policies but do they listen?  Do they buggery.  Government knows best.

Blogging isn’t new – it’s merely a new way of doing something that’s been done for hundreds of years.  Until recently, those of us who wanted to publically voice our opposition to the government would write in a newspaper or try and get on the radio or TV.  The internet has provided a way – via blogs – to get your point across to an audience of millions.

Instead of slagging us off, people like Taylor should be looking to bloggers of all leanings for examples of what real people are thinking and what real people want.  Labour’s precious pressure groups like the Muslim Council of Britain and the Countryside Alliance don’t reflect the views of the public, they exist only to perpetuate their own existence.  Rather than seeing political bloggers as a threat, the British government should see them as a means of engaging with the public.

It’s not easy trying to describe just how contemptuous people like Taylor are without resorting to traditional Anglo-Saxon words so I’ll leave it to the expert.

The police have interviewed 5 cabinet ministers over the cash for peerages investigation, including the Ignorant Jock and Fat Turd.  It is believed that most, if not all, cabinet ministers have received letters from the police regarding the investigation.  Except Traitor Blair who, it would appear, is above the law.

The ministers interviewed so far include:

• Gordon “Ignorant Jock” Brown
• John “Fat Turd” Prescott
• Patricia Hewitt
• Alan Milburn
• Jack “Demon Headmaster” Straw
• John Reid
• David Milliband
• Alan Johnson
• Peter “Bigot” Hain
• Ruth Kelly

The question on everyone’s lips must surely be, how many ministers are involved in this fraudulent abuse of office?  Is the cabinet rotten to the core or simply a bit mouldy around the edges?

It is an accepted fact that if Princess Tony can get away with it, the Ignorant Jock will be simply crowned as leader of the party and Prime Minister of the country.  This isn’t democratic of course but then neither is the Labour Party so it’s to be expected.

The Labour Party constitution says there has to be a leadership contest but no serious contenders have so far stepped forward.  A couple of Blairite North British MP’s have indicated they might stand but only one has confirmed that he will stand and it is thought that he is unlikely to get enough nominations to even stand.

Welsh and Northern Irish Secretary, Peter “I am committed to devolution as long as it’s not in England” Hain, has publicly announced that the Tartan Taxman will simply be elevated to the leadership without a contest.

It’s undemocratic and morally repulsive but what else would you expect from such a reprehensible bunch of crooks and tin-pot dictators?

Clare Short has resigned from the Labour Stazi and will spend remain as an independent MP until the next election when she will stand down.

She was reprimanded recently for saying she hoped there would be a hung parliament after the next election and for criticising the party and Traitor Blair.

Full story: BBC News

Clare Short has been reprimanded by the Labour Stazi for saying that she is embarassed of the party and she will be campaigning for a hung parliament in the next election.

The Labour Stazi constitution demands respect for fellow MP’s, an article which is interpreted as meaning “the party is good, the party is great, surrender your will as of this date”.

Dr Crawford Gribben, a lecturer at the University of Manchester, has written an article for the Dutch newspaper Reformatorisch Dagblad (Reformational Newspaper).

The article is a pretty good explanation of what is wrong with the Labour Stazi and the Ignorant Jock becoming Prime Minister but is spoilt by it’s conclusion that it has given rise to petty English nationalism.

This week, the UK’s governing Labour party has been meeting in Manchester for its annual conference. I am writing this column on Monday, before the main debates test the cabinet’s resolution to focus on policies, not personalities, amid ongoing rows over the timing of Tony Blair’s departure from office and the choice of his successor. One thing, however, is clear. The path to the premiership demands different qualities now than it did when New Labour won their landslide victory in 1997.

Nine years and three general elections later, the United Kingdom has made significant progress in realising the constitutional revolution imagined by New Labour. The Bank of England has enjoyed over a decade of autonomous decision-making. The House of Lords has been substantially reformed. Most crucially of all, Wales, Scotland and, intermittently, Northern Ireland have been granted regional parliaments. England is now the only part of the United Kingdom to lack a regional parliament – and English resentment is growing.

Ironically, that resentment may be most troubling to the party that has done most to support these constitutional changes. The old Labour party, solidly of the left, depended for much of its support on the strongly working-class industrial areas of Scotland and Wales. This trend underscored the democratic deficit at the end of Margaret Thatcher’s premiership. Scottish voters opted overwhelmingly for a Labour government, but ended up being ruled by Conservatives, who had successfully mobilised their southern base. Labour has always depended upon that Scottish support, even as it appealed to swing voters and disillusioned Conservatives in the run-up to the 1997 election. The ’Scottishness’ of Labour support was a mainstay of that Labour victory. Nine years later, the ’Scottishness’ of front-bench politicians has become a major electoral problem.

Middle England’s suspicion of ’Scottishness’ has been illustrated in several recent polls about the suitability of the Chancellor, Gordon Brown, to become the next Prime Minister. Brown has impeccable credentials. As the son of a Scottish Presbyterian minister, he entered the University of Edinburgh at the age of 16 and left several years later with a PhD in History and a network of useful political contacts. His early politics were clearly leftist, combining the Scottish labour movement’s class instincts with its traditionally Christian concerns. These early convictions have evolved. Brown has moved with New Labour towards the political centre. But he may now become the victim of English nationalist sentiments stirred up by his government’s preference for devolution.

The last few months have seen the collapse of the famed discipline of New Labour. Brownites and Blairites have briefed and counter-briefed. Old friends and enemies have released statements that seem designed to feed the controversy rather than move toward its resolution. But across New Labour’s political spectrum, activists agree that this is not the political landscape they inherited from Margaret Thatcher. Too much has changed. Scottish devolution has released the genie of England’s petty nationalisms.

The author is lecturer in Renaissance literature and culture at the University of Manchester, United Kingdom.