Will tax cuts win over UK voters?
The UK finance minister Jeremy Hunt presented the updated budget on Wednesday and announced significant tax cuts. National insurance contributions are to be reduced by two percentage points. Press commentary on this move focuses on the forthcoming general election likely to be held in the autumn.
A good budget that will sell well
The Tory government has understood the financial needs of the population, applauds The Times:
“Some 28,000 thousand small businesses will benefit, also. They will no longer be liable to pay VAT as the threshold for that tax rises. Another year of frozen fuel duty will ease financial pressure on commuters and country dwellers. This was Mr Hunt's budget at its best: a strivers' charter that showed this government understands the challenges faced by working Britain. That, of course, is the story Mr Sunak would like to tell voters at the general election.”
An act of desperation before deselection
The Guardian is critical of the new budget:
“Most people now rightly judge that their wellbeing is influenced by more than just their level of taxation. It's determined just as much by whether they and their family can get treated if sick or have the operation they need, or secure the care for their elderly relatives, or there are enough teachers in their children's school. So Hunt's budget, with its inadequate NHS and schools funding and new round of cuts for councils and social care, is likely to go down at best as irrelevant and more likely as nothing more than the cynical pre-election gaming of a desperate government in its last days.”
Downfall of a former world power
The Frankfurter Rundschau says the tax breaks are just election campaign handouts:
“So that the Tories and their clientele can buy time before certain disaster at the ballot box and salvage what they can. The mess left behind - the social, cultural and economic wasteland of a former world power without which this planet would be much poorer, but which has been squeezed dry by Brexit madness and Eton bigheads - will have to be cleaned up by the next Labour government. The British social democrats don't aim to do any better anyway. Olaf-Scholz-clone Keir Starmer has already watered down or scrapped various reform projects.”