Gordon Brown has
been hard at work again. He has been working on even more schemes to take more
and more of your money.
Not content with controlling
your movements, stopping people travelling freely around the UK, sharing all
your personal secrets with an ever widening group of civil servants, companies
and other interested parties (such as genetics experiments), he now wants to
take whatever you have left when you are dead.
Unless we stop
this man now,
He has already
robbed the pension schemes, and put this country in hoc for public service
pensions to the tune of 56pct of
Now an awful
scheme is being hatched in the Treasury to punish anyone who has had the
temerity to live to 75. Given life expectancies, that may be you one day - or
even now - so take heed. It does not get worse than this - that some personal
pension funds could end up being taxed at 170% on death.
The
Here's what's on
the cards. If you get to 75 and have saved a few pounds that you may have
planned to leave to grieving widow/starving kids, etc, the Chancellor seems to
be intent on taking almost all of it off them.
The Treasury is
working on a plan which could land descendants of the elderly with a tax bill
that is greater than their inheritance.
Somebody there
has the curious idea that money a worker saved in what is called an
Alternatively Secured Pension is a way of avoiding tax. Anything saved does not
escape an inheritance tax of 44%, fair enough, but on top of that the Treasury
is planning to tax the remaining funds at the amazing rate of 70%.
That is not all.
James Forsyth and Fraser Nelson for The Business report on their research as
follows: "If the descendants are members of certain types of pension funds
- such as self-invested personal pensions - the overall tax charge could rise
to a crippling 170%." They add laconically that this "runs the risk
of landing descendants with a tax bill greater than their inheritance".
And how!
Richard Harwood,
of Grant Thornton, has shown how the bereaved could also be thus the
desperately deprived. Other calculations by John Pages at Technical
Connections, published in he Personal Finance Society's magazine, Financial
Solutions, suggests how easily the tax take could exceed 110%.
Gordon Brown is bankrupting
Britain, and
buying votes in the process, making everyone dependant on the state. Tricks like to start paying child benefit to unborn
infants from the 29th week of pregnancy.
The exploding costs of the private finance initiative (
The scam that
Brown uses is that this shifts debt off the public sector’s balance sheet; but
as a table buried in one of the
So, in only nine
months, costs of the
This hidden cost
comes as it becomes increasingly obvious just how bad a state the public
finances really are in. A recent forecast put the real level of government
debt at a staggering £1.34 trillion,
three times the Chancellor’s official figures, by taking into account the
Brown has now borrowed some £100bn more
than he announced he would in 2001.
Given that Brown
aspires to prime minister, the highest office of state, it is still worth
exposing his latest shenanigans; they tell us everything we need to know about
his integrity and suitability for
The Golden Rule
states the current budget (excluding capital spending) should be in surplus
over the economic cycle; the Sustainable Investment Rule that net borrowing
should never breach 40% of
Thanks to the
Chancellor’s creative accounting, constant manipulation of definitions
and relentless shifting of the goalposts, his rules have been utterly
discredited; whenever the Golden Rule was close to being broken, the Chancellor
simply lengthened the cycle or redefined spending.
This process was
taken one final and ludicrous step further last week.
First, Brown
increased the economy’s trend growth rate from 2.5% in the years ahead to
2.75%, allowing him to spend an additional £2bn-£3bn a year without breaching
his rules and cutting future current spending as a share of
Second, he has
now decided to shift the timing of the economic cycle yet again: it will end
early next year, two years earlier than his estimate at the time of the Budget
and ensuring that the economic cycle coincided perfectly with the political
cycle, starting in 1997 and finishing in 2007 when he becomes prime minister,
if he ever does.
Given Brown’s
predilection to fiddle and interfere with every nook and cranny of the economy,
it is no wonder that productivity growth in
The unemployment
rate has risen from 4.8% in the third quarter of 2004 to 5.7% in the third
quarter of this year, while 5.4m working-age Britons now rely on benefits.
History will be
less kind to Brown than contemporary notices: he will be remembered as the
Chancellor who undermined
A pity,
therefore, that a man clearly not fit to be
Unless we stop
this man now,
