Budget 2025

Before the last election, Keir Starmer promised that his party’s relationship with the countryside would be ‘based on respect, on genuine partnership’. But, 16 months into his premiership, the government is shedding rural votes after Rachel Reeves’s changes to inheritance tax. Protesters wearing flat caps and riding tractors have become a familiar sight in Westminster, such is the outrage about the effect on family farms. At the most recent protests, Labour MPs in rural seats were reduced to begging the Treasury to pause the changes ahead of the Budget. ‘So many of my farmers are pleading with me,’ admitted Samantha Niblett, MP for South Derbyshire. In the words of Ribble

Helping her country ski ever more steeply down the wrong side of the Laffer curve, Rachel Reeves may be preparing to violate Labour’s manifesto and raise income tax – perhaps a suitable juncture at which to examine just how wacko the UK tax code is already. Start with the duplicity of ‘national insurance’. This unhypothecated add-on simply pours into the Treasury’s coffers as plain taxes. Yet much of the populace still believes that NI specifically funds the NHS. This is misunderstanding by design. The sly mislabelling is a resentment blocker. In truth, the employee basic tax rate is a straight-up 28 per cent, not 20 as advertised. The mooted Reeves