The UK does have a special relationship – but it’s with Europe | William Keegan
Share:
The government is only deceiving itself by trying to ‘make Brexit work’ and forlornly pursuing a trade deal with Trump. Walter Scott knew a thing or two: “Oh what a tangled web we weave/When first we practise to deceive.”. In many ways, however, Keir Starmer, Rachel Reeves and their colleagues were deceiving themselves when apparently deceiving the electorate on the subject of taxation.
![[William Keegan]](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/uploads/2017/10/09/William-Keegan,-L.png?width=180&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none)
Just as the great mistake made by Harold Wilson, one of Starmer’s heroes, in 1964 was to rule out a policy move that his advisers knew was necessary to achieve his other ambitions – the move being devaluation of the pound to a less uncompetitive rate for overseas trade – so Starmer and co made the mistake of brushing aside advice from the estimable Institute for Fiscal Studies that the success of his “mission” (to fix the foundations, etc) would require substantial increases in the principal rates of tax. Principal because, instead of frolicking around the margins of the unpopular taxes raised in the recent budget, the chancellor should have resorted to the obvious sources, namely income tax and VAT.
All this fuss about the so-called “black hole” was, sadly, misplaced. The fuss should have been about the physical harm that more than a decade of austerity had wreaked on the British economy and its public services, and the increases in taxation that would be necessary to repair the damage. Unlike the period of austerity under the 1945-51 Attlee government, forced by the devastation of the 1939-45 war, the austerity imposed by the Cameron-Osborne government from 2010 was a cynical political choice.
