Social care needs ground-up renewal but the PM's party can't hammer workers

Folly on tax

HOW casual the Tories seem to be about torching their historic reputation for low taxes.

Covid has left the finances in disarray. But why does the party under Boris Johnson consider the only answer to be hammering workers?

Where is the talk of reform? Of streamlining Government? Of turbo-charging growth with LOWER taxes?

Why are all the Tory solutions now near identical to those of big-spending, economy-trashing Labour? If there’s ­little to choose between them, voters may just opt for the real thing.

Social care does need ground-up reinvention. We accept there are no easy solutions. But is the fair way to try to fund that through a tax hike, or “National Insurance rise”, which only hits earners below pension age?
The Government would be pilfering skint young workers’ pay to spare older folk, many with nice houses and flourishing investments, having to sell up to fund their own care.

A diminishing minority of younger people vote Tory. Singling them out for a tax raid seems unwise.

At the same time, pensioners will supposedly lose their understandably cherished “triple lock” guarantee — but will still get a rise at least equal to inflation. That might well be sensible given the state of the finances, but we doubt most OAPs will consider it a win. So the Tories will alienate young and old alike.

These are arguments. But there are also certainties: Any tax increase will be permanent and irreversible. It will damage the economy and kill jobs, as tax rises do.

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It is unlikely to solve the social care crisis, or even benefit that sector at all, if the billions raised go at first to the NHS. It will never give them up. And the money may be soaked up anyway by pay rises, as when Gordon Brown pulled the same trick in 2002.

Then what? Another penny on tax? The final certainty is that a party which breaks manifesto pledges which won it a majority two years ago will struggle to offer up new ones with any credibility.

The Tories may go into the next election with a chequered Covid record, a “levelling-up” agenda without tangible results and broken promises on taxes.

What saves them is that Labour would do the same and worse. That and the sheer feebleness of Keir Starmer and a party more interested in woke Twitter groupthink than voters’ concerns.

Without that, the Tories would surely not even consider picking our pockets.

Race own-goal

HOW can Fifa possibly claim it has zero tolerance for racism?

Hungary were already banned for two matches by Uefa. But Fifa let their neanderthal hardcore in to abuse England’s black players because the match was not a Uefa game. What a farce.

Ban Hungary from Fifa matches too. Prove you genuinely care.

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