……at last!
Marvellous!
The Porcine Aviation Society has met and delivered!
From next month, 400,000 small businesses will be excluded from paying the pernicious jobs tax; Employers’ National Insurance Contributions. The only impost in the Country that taxes job creation not dosh will no longer apply to those employers paying £2,000 pa or less. The application of marginality means that for hundreds of thousands more potential employers of just one more young unemployed person each, the cost of so doing has just dramatically reduced.
Those of you who while away a tedious hour by reading my humble offerings will know this is something for which I have been campaigning for a long time.
Well done George!
Also well done on accelerating the move to making the first ten grand of earnings tax free. So the low-paid get to keep more of their hard-earned dosh……making getting a job pay more than the dole and putting more spending money in their mitts which, when they spend it, will create another job somewhere.
Blimey! If you’re not careful George you’ll be precious close to developing an implementable strategy for small business, employment-driven job-creation!
Add to that the Nation (that’s you and me) taking a 20% stake in new home, first-time buyers’ foray into the housing market (at a stroke removing over-reliance on debt for both lender and borrower) which will create more jobs as the houses are built and more training opportunities for apprentices and suddenly there’s light at the end of the tunnel and it ain’t the light of the train coming the other way!
Given these rays of sunshine it seems almost churlish to criticise but there were a couple of glaring omissions:
1. You’ll never be as unpopular as this ever again George, so why not go for the whole nine yards and raise the State Retirement Age to 70? Allow tapering so no-one gets short-changed but do it NOW! Not one country in the developed world can afford to pay the pensions being promised from ages as low as 60 (France… are you surprised?!) and no Finance Minister has the cajoles to do much about it. “Vote for me and I’ll make you work longer for less” isn’t the catchiest electoral slogan of all time! Turkeys do not vote for Christmas.
2. An apology would do; on behalf of all the Finance Ministers, Treasury Secretaries and Chancellors of the Exchequer of countries from the Pacific shores of California to the Ural Mountains, from the Article Circle to the toe of Italy of all parties all the time since the mid-fifties who have assured their electorates that they can have it all. Low taxation, high public spending….
……and borrow the difference! The Great Lie! Well…..those that have historically lent it haven’t got it anymore and those that will now lend it are applying very tough conditions; the chicken has well and truly come home and is roosting in New York, London, Frankfurt…..and clearly Rome, Madrid and Athens.
Perhaps today, in The House of Commons, there were the faint acknowledgements from the entire Body Politic that the hard-earned penny has finally dropped; there is precious little room for manoeuvre whatever your political taste and “the other lot” would be doing pretty much the same.
Democratic Capitalism is in the mire; today was perhaps a first step to finding a sustainable way back.
Oh! and George……thanks for the abolition of Employers’ National Insurance Contributions for small businesses…..it means a lot to me…….but it’ll mean the world to a young man or woman who’ll now get a chance to shine…..and that’s why we’re all here isn’t it?