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Budget Bombshell

Bad News For Most In Battle

A budget for millionaires

George Osborne’s budget is a disaster for most people struggling to make ends meet here in Battle Ward. The Tories have let the bankers keep their bonuses and rewarded their rich friends (including their dodgy donors) with a massive tax cut for millionaires paid for with a ‘Granny Tax’ which will rob 4.4 million pensioners of up to £323 a year.

Families trying to bring up children on incomes less than £20,000 a year lose £253 in working tax credits from April and the VAT rise is costing every household an average of £450. Car owners have been squeezed as fuel prices hit a record high under the Tories and the LibDems following the latest tax hike at the pumps. They’ve even slapped extra taxes on takeaway food and caravans and are increasing the price of a first class stamp to 60p as they prepare to privatise the Post Office.

Millions to pay more so millionaires can pay less
The millionaire Chancellor has certainly looked after his own with a budget that will see 14,000 of his fellow millionaires paying £40,000 a year less in tax and substantial tax cuts for other high earners pulling in wages of £150,000 or more. How can it be right to penalise pensioners who have paid taxes all their lives and increase the burden on hard working families just to make the super rich even richer ?
 

Pensioner groups slam budget ‘stealth tax’
Saga Director, Dr Ros Altmann, said: “This Budget contains an enormous stealth tax for older people. Over the next five years, pensioners with an income of between £10,500 and £24,000 will be paying an extra £3 billion in tax. “In short, this Budget is another shocking example of the Government’s attack on poorer and older people. It is dramatically unfair.”

Local people have been telling me how angry they are that the Conservatives and their LibDem allies seem to be more interested in rewarding the rich than in helping pensioners and hard working families on modest incomes to get through these tough times. Mr Cameron’s claim that, ‘we are all in this together,’ has turned out to be yet another empty promise.”

Labour – on your side in tough times
Labour’s alternative budget includes a plan for real growth with a tax on bankers’ bonuses to fund a real job guarantee for unemployed youngsters, tax breaks for small firms taking on new workers and a temporary cut in VAT to boost spending and get the economy moving. We will fight to reverse the ‘Granny Tax’ and the other unfair measures, all of which could be defeated if the LibDems stopped propping up the Tories in Parliament.