Rachel Reeves has her failings, but the relaxation of the Labour Party is worse. When she’s gone, the actual lunatics will take charge, and right now’s insane tax-and-spend insurance policies will speed up. She’s now a puppet chancellor, and there’s someone rather worrying pulling the strings.
Reeves’s goose was cooked the second she fluffed the Winter Fuel Payment cut. And it was burned to a crisp when she backtracked on her half-hearted attempt to cut welfare advantages. But the remaining blow came when a certain Torsten Bell was appointed Parliamentary Secretary to the Treasury in January.
Bell may have the easy, dimpled cheeks of a choir boy, but don’t be fooled. He’s a swivel-eyed ranter who can outswear any sailor when he gets going.
As I’ve reported before, this jumped-up, potty-mouthed, over-promoted bighead thinks he owns every room he walks into.
Treasury veterans go away conferences with ears ringing and blood boiling, as he talks and talks and talks, and never listens. Here’s a pattern of his take on financial coverage, by someone who was there. “It was ‘fck this, fck that, we’ve got to fck them all and then we’ve got to fck them some more.’”
Nice bloke. Along with the less sweary James Murray, who was appointed Chief Secretary to the Treasury in September, Bell is front-runner to change Reeves. But here’s the factor: Torsten Bell is appearing like here’s already working No 11.
The Telegraph reports Reeves has successfully lost her grip on energy because Bell accompanied her to every key assembly with the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) before the Budget.
Even Murray was snubbed, along with everyone else at the Treasury, despite Bell being one of the most junior ministers there.
He’s only been an MP for 18 months after being parachuted into a secure Labour seat, Swansea West, at the last election.
Bell charmed locals by claiming he’d help enhance their wages but all he’s finished so far is drive up their tax payments.
Shadow Chancellor Mel Stride reckons he’s now “calling the shots in the Treasury” after drafting the Budget on behalf of Reeves.
This explains why the Budget was so dreadful: it was “substantially written by someone who has spent his career campaigning for higher taxes and higher welfare spending,” Stride said.
Bell doesn’t just use four-letter phrases — he’s obsessed with a three-letter phrase too: tax. The T-word pops up nearly as typically as the F-word, and a massive proportion of the taxes he rants on about will hit pensioners in the pocket.
Bell was director of the left-leaning Resolution Foundation think tank for a decade, and many of the measures it dreamed up are already in pressure.
They embrace inheritance tax on farmers, companies, and unused pensions, as properly as capital positive aspects tax hikes, dividend tax hikes, council tax hikes, and new taxes on everything from buy-to-let landlords to electric autos.
Not all his concepts have come into pressure yet. He also needs to cut the 25% tax-free pension lump sum, apply CGT to home gross sales and inheritances, cap tax-free ISAs, scrap the £325,000 IHT nil-rate band, and much more. All in the title of what he calls inter-generational equity. Basically, it’s a mixed tax assault on older people.
Bell is in dictating coverage, not Reeves. And pensioners will curse the day.
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