Team Burnham briefed Bloomberg and the FT last night that Andy is “being advised” by ex-OBR chairman Richard Hughes, former Bank of England chief economist Andy Haldane, former Goldman Sachs chief economist Jim O’Neill, and Carys Roberts, the former executive director at the IPPR think tank. This was meant to calm the gilt market…
Co-conspirators may remember Roberts, who spent some time in the No10 policy unit before exiting last year. Her personal mission is to increase taxes on employees and on wealth. She co-wrote a report which advocated for a radical proposal to combine employee NICs and income tax, apply them to all incomes on an annual basis, and apply a gradually rising marginal tax rate as income rises. A massive radical increase on “working people”…
Roberts’ passion is taxation of savers through the abolition of capital gains and dividend taxes in order to tax them as highly as income. Her report also called for the replacement of inheritance tax with a whole-life gift tax with a lifetime allowance of around £125,000 – effectively a gargantuan enlargement of confiscation of family inheritance. She personally supported John McDonnell’s plans to hike wealth taxes as well as to mandatorily reduce working hours. Here are some other policies she supports:
Zoe Billingham, the chair of IPPR North, is also advising Burnham – they all have the same ideas. Roberts additionally supports replacing business rates with a land value tax on all non-residential land, taxed on optimum use rather than current use. Burnham is a big fan of land value taxes which will hit the economy very hard – here’s an explainer…
Ex-minister Miatta Fahnbulleh led the capitalism-sceptic New Economics Foundation and is designing Burnham’s policies too. Any of these radical tax hikes will fail and Burnham will have to borrow more to fund his inflated spending commitments. Gilty as charged…
Speaking at his speech on how to achieve “progressive capitalism” Wes Streeting fired a dig and Andy Burnham:
“Bond markets are not bond villains and fiscal rules matter.”