The state has taken back control of Britain’s economy

Plus: The impact of inheritance tax hikes; unreliable forecasts; Rishi Sunak’s last hurrah; and whatever happened to ‘working people’?

SIR – The Budget is a hammer blow to the economy and to trust in politics. It is based on stealth, broken promises and sleight of hand. 
Increased taxes, massive borrowing, huge public spending and burdensome employment regulations do not promote growth. 
We are back to the failed Labour policies of big government and state control.
John HicksManchester
SIR – First Labour removed winter fuel payments from impoverished pensioners to give well-to-do public-sector workers inflation-busting pay rises. Now we have monumental tax hikes, which will be felt most by workers and businesses in the private sector. 
Just like in the 1970s, the country has been sold a clapped-out old banger under the guise of a smart new car – and, just like then, the country will have to tolerate sinking further into the mire for the next five years, until the appalling mess can be corrected.
Keith WhittakerNewcastle-under-Lyme, Staffordshire
SIR – Let’s hope the Labour Government has put the International Monetary Fund on notice that, as in 1976, a sizeable bailout may be needed to prevent Britain going bust. 
David WilliamsNottingham
SIR – I had not realised that the Government’s interest in assisted dying extended to the economy.
Jane MothStone, Staffordshire
SIR – This disastrous Budget is the inevitable result of people who lack real-world business experience putting their prejudices before basic economics. 
The Labour party hates the private sector, especially small businesses, private landlords and anyone with enough wealth to be independent of the state. What Rachel Reeves and Sir Keir Starmer forget is that those they detest are not cardboard cut-outs but real people with agency, who will react to the Government’s actions.
Entrepreneurs will emigrate to places where their talent and energy are rewarded. Private landlords will sell up, or invest less in properties, thus contracting the rental market. Businesses will employ fewer people.
Otto InglisCrossgates, Fife
SIR – National Insurance (NI) contributions are not used for long-term investment. This is a tax levied to meet immediate obligations, such as social security payments. 
However, the notion of “sharing” it between employers and employees is deceptive. The price of labour includes all costs that businesses incur when employing someone – such as employers’ NI.
If this money were not taken by the Exchequer, it could be paid to employees, and in the long run the market must respond accordingly. Therefore it will be workers who pay for Labour’s latest hike in employers’ NI – whatever Rachel Reeves might wish us to believe.
Dr Peter HarveyAmport, Hampshire
SIR – What is the point of starting your own small business now?
Phil AngellHelston, Cornwall
SIR – I hope that the Bishops in the House of Lords are not too busy discussing foreign affairs to raise the impact on parishes of the change in employers’ NI thresholds.
Parishes will be asked to help cover the increased cost of church staff, whose salary is just above the new starting point of £5,000 for employer NI payments (down from £9,000). 
This change will also affect many small charities and private schools that are already working out how to deal with the imposition of VAT.
Simon GimsonWanborough, Wiltshire
SIR  – I note that the National Living Wage is to be increased to £12.21 per hour, equivalent to £476 per week or £24,760 per annum for those working a 39-hour week.
If this is the minimum amount required to live on, why is tax still due at £12,570, and why are old-style pensions only paying £169.50 per week, or £8,814 per annum? 
William KentAndover, Hampshire
SIR – Quoting the Office for Budget Responsibility, Rachel Reeves said CPI inflation will be 2.1 per cent in 2028 and 2.0 per cent in 2029.
Such fanciful precision makes reading the tea leaves seem wise.
Dr John DohertyStratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire
SIR – How can anyone quote forecast figures for growth in GDP with a straight face? It is a figure calculated by dividing one enormous and inaccurate number by another. 
For a start, the figure used for nominal GDP includes government expenditure, so can be heavily distorted by state spending. 
Secondly, the nominal growth figures have to be corrected for inflation, which is notoriously inaccurate and almost always understated – inevitably, since the Government has so many liabilities based on inflation. 
And thirdly, growth figures are so low that the headlines are taken up with hysterical analyses of a decimal point. 
What actually matters is how much wealth there is in the country, and we can see from the way Labour is begging for overseas investors that we clearly do not have enough of the home-grown variety. Could this be because wealth is overtaxed?
Charles PughLondon SW10
 
SIR – The Chancellor announced in the Budget that self-invested personal pensions (Sipp) will be subject to inheritance tax from April 2025. This is immoral and unfair.
I had a sizeable final-salary pension, which, after seeking guidance from several professional financial advisors, I chose to convert into a Sipp. The driving factor for my decision was that this pot sits outside of my estate for inheritance tax purposes. This was a strategic financial decision based on professional advice – not “exploiting a loophole”. I was being savvy.
Rachel Reeves’s announcement has stripped away the primary reason for my decision to cash in my defined benefit pension, has left me with a lower income for life, and has denied my children a significant amount of inheritance. I despair.
Simon HargreavesKingsley, Hampshire
SIR – Why oh why didn’t Jeremy Hunt abolish inheritance tax when he had the chance? It just got considerably worse, and amounts to a brutal confiscation of family assets.Please God I live long enough to see out this lot – but it will be a close run thing.
Lauren GroomSalisbury, Wiltshire
SIR – I found it difficult to contain my excitement and gratitude to Rachel Reeves when I heard that my pint in the pub will be a whole penny cheaper.
Chris HuntSwanley, Kent
SIR – As I was mulling the inventive ways that Labour will seize my hard-earned money, I wondered why running the country is the only thing you don’t need a qualification for. 
I’m 28 and my hard-working friends and I are doctors, lawyers, accountants and so on. We’ve spent the past eight years working full-time (although clearly not considered “working people”), while studying for difficult exams that can take years to complete. There are more than 10 accountancy exams, and most companies have a “fail one and you’re out” policy. 
What would happen if we gave ministers an exam of their own, with business and economics taking centre stage, and a sprinkling of domestic and foreign policy for good measure? I suppose they’d need to be given more than one chance to pass, or our Cabinet might start looking very lean indeed.
Emily LockyerWarwick
SIR – Kim Thonger (Letters, October 29) is entirely right to say that, at five times the size of the public sector, the private sector needs political parties to take up its cause. 
However, understanding the scale of the challenge requires recognition of the extent to which many ostensibly private businesses in fact depend on the state for their income. 
In my own field of legal services, for example, there are many law firms that would have to be painfully weaned off their dependence on taxpayers’ money, if we again started to give free trade and industry priority over subsidising the sterile paper-shuffling of public administration.
Michael UptonEdinburgh
SIR – The Government has decided to throw yet more money at the NHS in a bid to ensure that we believe it is doing something to cure it.
Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary, told all who would listen that the NHS was dead on its feet, but after several taxpayer-funded trips to see foreign health systems, he had the solution. Where is it ? 
The obvious one is to involve the private sector, but this does not fit into the public-sector utopia that Labour desires. Mr Streeting claims that this Budget will enable him to arrest the decline and start fixing the foundations. Yet Rachel Reeves could hand over the entire amount raised in her various tax raids, and the NHS would still be broken.
How many times does it have to be said that the NHS in its present form is incurable? We need a health secretary who has the bottle to reform it.
Charles Penfold Ulverston, Cumbria 
SIR – It is clear that MPs have no understanding of the pressure on the lowest paid workers and their families. 
I volunteer at our local food stop, and we get between 40 and 80 families coming for food. They are not being greedy or joining a gravy train. I talk to them each week, and they are acting out of necessity. They force themselves to endure the shame of registering and then coming each week to collect food. 
It is outrageous that Labour is piling extra costs on the poor and the needy by allowing bus fares to increase (report, October 30). 
What happened to supporting working people?
David LewisPurley, Surrey
SIR – In her opening statement introducing the Budget debate, Nusrat Ghani, the Deputy Speaker, admonished the Government for breaking House of Commons conventions by leaking measures of the Budget in advance. She added that claiming precedent was no excuse. 
I have never seen the Speaker himself, Sir Lindsay Hoyle, so angry as he was the other day when he, too, admonished the Government on this very issue.
Since both Rachel Reeves and Sir Keir Starmer have driven a coach and horses through convention and precedent in recent weeks, the least one might have hoped for would be an apology to the Deputy Speaker, yet none was forthcoming.
The hubris of this Government in its lack of respect for Parliament will be its undoing.
Jeremy CrickNewcastle-under-Lyme, Staffordshire
SIR – Rishi Sunak’s response to the budget was full of passion and energy. Why didn’t he show that when he was prime minister? Had he, he might still be in office now.
Rob DorrellBath, Somerset
SIR – In his last hurrah, Rishi Sunak exposed all of Labour’s lies and sleights of hand. He was in incredible form. Could either of the Conservative leadership candidates have matched that performance? I doubt it. 
Does he have to stand down?
Ray PowellShefford, Bedfordshire
SIR – I think I might finally have cracked it. The sole purpose of the Labour Party is to make the Tories look like a sensible alternative.
Vincent HearneChinon, Indre-et-Loire, France
 
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