Healey urged to ‘restore faith’ by ending personal allowance freeze in budget
UK savers are demanding chancellor John Healey end the freeze on the personal allowance in his maiden Autumn Budget, as more Brits get dragged into higher tax bands.
A recent poll showed nearly 70 per cent of taxpayers want Healey to unfreeze the personal allowance, with critics arguing it has forced workers and pensioners into higher bands, according to the latest survey from Pension Bee.
Coupled with frozen thresholds, the personal allowance freeze has seen scores of pensioners become tangled in the income tax net, despite not considering themselves wealthy.
And so on...
Journalism is a strange game, adjusting language to conventional expectations as in this case for example. Nobody with their faculties intact could possibly have their faith in UK government restored - there is no base from which to restore it, whatever 'faith' is supposed to indicate in this context.
A few ambivalent concessions from a maniacally plundering, increasingly totalitarian and increasingly inept government cannot even open the coffin lid of faith in government.
Yet the language games go on. In this context, even the words 'restore faith' count as propaganda, a suggestion that any lapse of faith is unfortunate and should be temporary - not lying somewhere in the long forgotten graveyard of democratic expectations.
There is of course a lingering official faith in propaganda. This is what Healey is expected to have a bash at restoring - merely that.
4 comments:
Without official faith in propaganda politicians and bureaucrats have nothing.
I remember when I was still working and doing promotion interviews I was trained to question what the candidates had done already rather than accepting what they said they would do in the future.
DJ - yes, voters could pay less attention to political parties and more attention to what election candidates have done in the past. Nothing but politics should be inadequate, whatever the party.
‘…the personal allowance freeze has seen scores of pensioners become tangled in the income tax net, despite not considering themselves wealthy.’
If British pensioners have ‘become tangled in the income tax net’ for the first time as a result of the personal allowance being frozen at £12,570, one might argue that they are not wealthy by anyone’s standards rather than simply in their own estimation.
Despite her financial reporting credentials, has the 26-year-old author of the piece unconsciously accepted the current orthodoxy that all boomers and beyond are better off than the following generations (an orthodoxy which, supported by the Resolution Foundation and The Intergenerational Foundation, is currently at the heart of Labour’s thinking)?
And does she know how many a score is?
Macheath - good point, there certainly is a current orthodoxy that boomers and beyond are better off than everyone else even though it's not worth much as a generalisation. Media folk generally seem to go along with these things though, as if bias is one of the tools of their trade.
She probably doesn't know what a score is either.
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