Dear friends,
The chancellor’s been sat down for about half an hour now having delivered her devastating budget. While our team is still busily crunching the numbers, I wanted to give you my first reaction to Rachel Reeves’ measures and to ask for your help in fighting back.
Reeves spoke for just over an hour and every minute of it was a blow for taxpayers across the country. Debt is up. Borrowing is up. Taxes are up. Growth is down. Here are some of the key takeaways every hard-working household and tireless business owner needs to know:
- Frozen tax thresholds mean an additional 1.7 million people will either start paying income tax or pay a higher rate on top of the 10.6 million already affected
- Freezing employer’s national insurance threshold combined with national minimum wage increases are set to cripple the labour market
- Higher taxes on dividends
- Fuel duty to rise from September
- Pay-per-mile for electric car drivers
- Cutting the Cash ISA savings limit
- A new tourist tax for staying in hotels
- New gaming duties for those having a weekend flutter on the footie
- Capping salary sacrifice pension contributions
- A milkshake tax (yes, really)
- Tax hikes on landlords
All told, £26.1 billion of tax rises. It’s not a pretty picture.
This government’s failure to curtail spending is burdening us all with a mountain of debt and tax levels at their highest since records began.
Which is why I’m asking for your help.
The chancellor's decision to attack families, business owners, pensioners, savers, workers, pubs, restaurants, hotels, holidaymakers, motorists, cabbies, and even the humble milkshake with her vicious, vindictive array of levies are a desperate attempt to fill the black hole in the nation’s finances of her own creation.
But budgets aren’t written in stone.
We all remember the omnishambles budget of 2012 and the infamous pasty tax. The litany of tinkering tax changes Rachel Reeves has just announced is remarkably similar.
And the aftermath of George Osborne’s third budget proves an announcement at the despatch box is not the end of the story.
We’re going to fight this disastrous, tax-hiking, debt-fueling budget tooth-and-nail. But we can’t do it alone. We need to raise £50,000 for a budget fighting-fund to take this reckless government head on. We want to reach more towns, high streets, businesses, and hard-working taxpayers than ever before with our first-class research, unparalleled communications, and signature ground campaigning.
It’s vitally important we stand together and make the voice of taxpayers heard loud and clear from Pembroke to Parliament, Truro to the Treasury, and Dunbar to Downing Street. Any amount you can chip in will help.
Don’t leave it to someone else, back the TPA today and tell this rotten government ‘NO!’
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With best wishes
John O’Connell, chief executive
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