Oh dear, Keir I had few hopes for Keir Starmer’s speech at Labour Party conference, and he managed to match none of them. That is how bad it was. Let me run through some of his failings…..
Rachel Reeves' budget speech was a vacuous re-presentation of what she had said during the general election campaign, mixed with arrogant smugness, meaningless rhetoric and a total absence of narrative or ideas. I wish there was something good to note in all this, but before she celebrates being the first woman Chancellor of the Exchequer, shouldn't she prove she is up to the job?
HM Revenue & Customs is a massively underperforming organisation. It fails to collect at least £40 billion of tax owing a year. Spending just £1 billion extra a year on it could massively increase the tax yield in the UK, but it seems that Rachel Reeves is only interested in small changes over many years to come. Why is she, like so many of her predecessors, uninterested in closing the tax gap?
