Here’s a puzzle for you: what do you understand by the phrase ‘working person’? Is it someone who gets up at 5am to work an eight-hour stretch in a factory assembling car parts on £35,000 a year?
Or is it his boss, a serial entrepreneur, who started out as an apprentice at the factory and ended up owning it, and now earns £1m a year?
Maybe it’s an NHS doctor who works a 12-hour shift, earns £70,000 a year and can retire at 55 on a generous pension?
Or is it a building contractor running his own business – a limited company so he pays himself via dividends, and employs a couple of labourers who are sole traders?
All these examples are obviously ‘working people’. What’s more, we all work in some capacity, certainly according to the origin of the Old English word for work, ‘weorc,’ meaning ‘to do’ or ‘to make’.
Whether this work is part-time or full-time, in the private or public sector, as a carer to an elderly parent, a housewife looking after a family, a pensioner on a state pension or, indeed, an unpaid volunteer in a soup kitchen, is not the point.
Labour, under Chancellor Rachel Reeves (left) and Prime Minister Keir Starmer (right), has whacked employers with £25bn of new taxes
How we are rewarded for this – and taxed for our labour – is an entirely different yet important matter.
Which is why Labour ministers have got their knickers in such a twist because of their manifesto pledge that taxes, which included National Insurance Contributions (NICs) and income tax, will not rise for ‘working people’.
Labour has already broken the promise by whacking employers with £25billion of new taxes by raising their NICs.
But the Government has managed to wriggle its way around the breach with the pretence that taxing employers is not taxing ‘working people’. That’s wrong, as it happens, and another form of double-speak.
Yet Labour has not got away with the impact that putting up NICs on employers, increasing the minimum wage and the costs of new employee rights, has had on the jobs market.
As the latest figures show, there’s been a jobs bloodbath with unemployment now at a four-year high.
Ministers know they will have to break those tax pledges again – because they see raising taxes as the only solution.
They are running around like headless chickens trying to find new ways to define their own ridiculous ‘working person’ phrase.
This week Darren Jones, Chancellor Rachel Reeves’ deputy at the Treasury, said that a ‘working person’ is someone who receives a pay cheque, one of the daftest descriptions yet made by a politician.
But if that were the new criteria, Reeves would be able to hit the UK’s 6m or so SMEs, the self-employed and sole traders, with higher taxes without breaking her promise, because most don’t get pay slips.
And we know what happens then. If SME owners were to be clobbered with higher dividend taxes, they will stop hiring. Many already have. Yet SMEs are vital to the UK’s economy, providing 16.6m people with jobs, nearly two-thirds of all private-sector employment.
Not all Jones’s peers agree. Reeves has defined working people as those who get their income from work. Now Heidi Alexander, the Transport Secretary, has added to confusion by saying the tax pledge would protect those on ‘modest incomes’.
When asked in the Commons this week what this meant, Keir Starmer was at a loss to elucidate, saying that it covered people who work ‘hard’ but don’t have savings. And how would that be judged?
Will HMRC be given the powers to start digging into people’s bank accounts?
What a farce. Labour has walked into yet another hole of its own making. And it’s a deep one: 178,000 jobs have been lost since the election with the unemployment rate up to 4.7 per cent in the quarter to May.
The number of job vacancies keeps falling while pay growth has dropped to 5 per cent, a factor which will help persuade the Bank of England to go ahead with a much-needed interest rate cut next month.
If Labour can’t define ‘labour’, then we can’t be surprised that ministers don’t know what they are doing
It’s even more disingenuous – and divisive – when they keep changing the definition.
Time for the Opposition to dust down Saatchi & Saatchi’s 1979 game-changing poster – Labour isn’t working.
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This article was originally published by a www.dailymail.co.uk . Read the Original article here. .