Anyway, hands up who’s looking forward to a big pay cut from this month? No one, I suspect, but most people in the public sector and some in the private sector are going to get one and George Osborne is hoping that none of us will notice. George Osborne thinks he is good at this sort of thing. It’s like his regular budgets. Behind the favourable headlines in the gutter press there are always sly little cuts to public spending, or hidden tax increases. Welcome to another one of the latter.
National Insurance is going up next month by 1.4 percentage points. I don’t mean by 1.4% because that would be a minuscule increase. It’s the percentage figure that’s going up. For many people, it will be as much as £37 a month.
“I didn’t notice that in the budget”, you might be thinking and unless you have a memory of budgets going back to 2013, you probably didn’t. It’s all to do with changing the current pension scheme, something that was bounced through parliament three years ago. Osborne thought by announcing it many years ago, we’d not notice. To all intents and purposes, he HAS got away with it. This is how the people who are supposed to represent us treat us.
Much as I loathe Osborne, the sheer brass neck of former Lib Dem MP and pensions expert Steve ‘Win With’ Webb takes the biscuit: “I think the chancellor had hoped that no one would notice this rather large tax increase smuggled out in advance as it was some years ago.” In which case, I would ask Webb, why did you fucking vote for it, then? Blame the chancellor, by all means, but Webb must have been thinking exactly the same thing. If we can announce this years in advance, people will forget about it. Sadly, Mr Webb, some of us did notice what happened in 2013, we knew this was coming and, worst of all for you, we knew you, as a minister in the last Tory government, were responsible for allowing it to happen. Don’t get all holier than now.
Perhaps Osborne will look upon this whole sordid episode as a template for the future. If he had not trailed cuts to working tax credits and disability benefits, he might have got away with them. If they’d been scheduled for a few years hence, we’d forget. “Those wretched poor people on the minimum wage and those feckless skivers with terminal illnesses wouldn’t have even noticed,” thought Osborne.
George Osborne is the sneakiest, most cynical, short term tactician in politics. His eyes are on the succession to Cameron. If he gets there, the British electorate won’t know what’s hit them. Not for a couple of years anyway.
