The difference between death and taxes is that you can die quickly. Painlessly. Whereas tax is slow, lingering, increasingly agonising and just when you think you’re cured, the ‘surgeon’ looks at the scans and says: “oh, I’ve just seen something here…” Ok, maybe the ‘accountant’ but we’re talking metaphors here. And accountants can only ever provide ‘palliative care’ anyway.

So whilst we’re all involved in masses of speculation over the upcoming budget and the ‘joys’ it will hold for us all, I need to clarify the situation for you, so you don’t get a shock when Rachel Reeves fucks you right over on the 30th. And she will.

This government’s key pledge in their manifesto before the election was ‘we won’t increase tax’. There are details involved, precisely which taxes will and won’t be possibly raised, but the gist of it was but one simple message, to the simpletons of the electorate, like me, which was this: “we want to be a Labour government and so we need to give you the confidence that we won’t be like all previous Labour governments and hike taxes stupidly. No. We’re a ‘middle-class-friendly’ Labour that you can feel happy to elect because ‘taxes won’t rise’. The old expression that you ‘can’t trust Labour on tax’ is a thing of previous Labour governments”.

So the first thing they do is invent a ‘black hole’, into which they wish to pour my future. And yours. And, though they just don’t get this, the future of many small businesses which will either be driven to destruction financially, or those which don’t even start because of the onerous demands on the cash which they haven’t even started earning yet. With many workers not employed because of the raise on company NI. Ahhh, the government say, that’s COMPANY contribution, so it won’t affect YOUR salary. No, but it increases the employer’s liability means many ‘staff increases’ won’t happen.

And with that amazingly blinkered outlook that Labour governments specialise in, IF YOU HIT HARD ON ‘THOSE WITH THE BROADEST SHOULDERS’, those broad shoulders will move abroad. They all can. Thus, you ‘hit the rich hard’ and find you end up with less tax than you had before.

So as ‘she’ plans to hike Capital Gains Tax, and NI, and attack pensions, and basically charge anyone not involved in mining or the railways as much as they can, I’m moving tomorrow. I’m going to live in Albania. Houses are cheap and there’s no pick-pocketing there whatsoever, because those people are all in Leicester Square.

God help us all. Because the government won’t.

Happy Saturday

A xxxx