New Labour Tax Rip Off

Darling wants your money to pay-off his rich friends

AS low paid workers open their wage packets and wage slips at the end of this month they are in for a big surprise.month they are in for a big surprise.
For anyone on an annual salary of under £17,000 per year they will actually receive less take home pay than they did at the end of the previous month.
That’s all down to robber Brown’s last budget which abolished the 10p rate of tax, reduced the basic rate of tax from 22p in the pound to 20p in the pound and raised the tax thresholds for all levels of salaries in favour of the better off.
The net result a shift in the tax burden from middle and high earners to the lowest paid workers in society as the table below shows.
This was the parting gift of former iron chancellor Brown to the poorest sections of society.
This comes on top of his initial gift in 1997 of abolishing the tax credits on the dividends of pensioner’s investments.
It is estimated that the net effect of this move was to reduce the value of a pension by about 30 per cent over average person’s lifetime.
New Labour has reversed the policy of progressive taxation where tax rates are increased the more a person earns.
Instead they have pandered to the needs of trying to maintain consumer demand as their neo-liberal economic project hits the buffers by boosting the spending power of middle and higher earners.
This is at time when inflation is running rampant again with daily increases in food prices, rocketing utility prices and soaring petrol prices.
This together with increase in housing costs, as lenders hit the poorest and least able to pay sections of society, means that inflation is running far above the government’s official figures of 2.5 per cent.
These costs of basic goods and services are what the lowest paid spend the overwhelming part of their income on. They will be badly hit by this callous premeditated move.
It is not as if there is not enough money to help the poorest sections of society.
The government have spent £110billion on nationalising Northern Rock to stop a collapse of the global financial markets, billions of pounds on illegal wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and to the unwanted nuclear replacement for Trident.
The Scottish Socialist Party is for a progressive taxation system where people pay tax according to the levels of their income to help pay for hospitals, schools, free prescriptions, free school meals and a free public transport system - projects that will benefit the whole of society and enrich the lives of its poorest members.
If Labour MPs have an ounce of compassion and social conscience they should oppose this vicious anti-working class tax change.