the brilliantly leaping gazelle

One of the many reasons why the electorate holds politicians in such contempt is because they make wildly preposterous claims which they expect to be taken seriously. This wholly rational way of thinking has been borne out time and time again, but reaches a cyclical peak every general election campaign.

Nothing epitomises this truism more than taxes, specifically any claim a politician makes that they won’t raise taxes. Both the main parties will make this pledge that even as they make them they must know to be if not untrue, then highly improbable. Because in making such a pledge they deny reality by ignoring the challenges that the double-whammy of an increasing and ageing population population presents.

Yesterday it was Rachel Reeves Labours Shadow Chancellor turn. Speaking on BBC1’s ‘Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg’ she said that Labour supported lower taxes, but she would not put forward “unfunded proposals”. Pressed repeatedly on her tax plans, she said: “What I want and Keir [Starmer] wants is taxes on working people to be lower and we certainly won’t be increasing income tax or national insurance if we win at the election.

The bad news for her is that her notion of ‘want’ and ‘support’ is as effective as a child making a wish as they blow out the candles on their birthday cake. The demographics bear this out.

According to the Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR), whereas today 18% of the population is over the age of 65, by 2065 they predict it will be 26%. The OBR also has a lot of forecasts, analysis and projections that I’m sure are as fascinating as they are terrifying but what I takeaway from it is this; 26% of people in 2065 will be costing the state much more than they contribute. The older people get, the more they’ll be prone to age related illness, meaning more pressure on the NHS and because of the increasing onerous obligations that statutory social care places on councils, a state of affairs that’s clearly financially unsustainable.

And with 15% of the population predicted to be under 16 by 2065, that means that 41% of them will be paying no tax. Even if the OBR forecasts are wrong – and that hasn’t happened before, has it? – we still face the same problem albeit it being a tiny bit less of a problem. How on earth does Ms Reeves – or MisLeading as she is now – imagine this ever worsening problem is to be resolved?

She dare not because it is another truism of politics that the older someone is, the more likely to vote they are. No politician wants to risk the kind of political shitshow that engulfed Theresa May when she inexplicably chose to announce her plans to reform adult social care in the middle of her 2017 election campaign. But several large hats off to her for even attempting to be honest with the electorate about the sums of money involved. Adult social care alone cost £26.9 billion in 2021/22, up 3.8% from 2020/21 and the more older people there are and the more they keep living longer, that cost is only going to increase.

And then there’s pensions.

According to the OBR, pensions will account for 42% of the welfare budget this year, that’s £124 billion, the largest single expenditure and it follows that the more pensioners there are, and the longer that they live, the greater tax burden they’ll place on the decreasing amount of people paying that tax.

When the current crop of pensioners – those over 80 I’m talking about here – were adults of working age and paid tax, successive governments had a realistic expectation that their time as a pensioner might last for maybe 15 years or so. Wasn’t that the deal with state pensions? That their tax paid for the pensions of the old, and when they were old the tax paid by others paid for theirs. However, the Office for National Statistics estimates that by 2045 there will be 3.1 million of them or 4.3% of the population. So to my way of thinking, anyone over the age of 85 who is claiming a state pension is guilty of benefit fraud. It may well be through no fault of their own, but they’re still claiming a benefit to which they’re not entitled.

Not that I care too much about it as I’ll most likely be dead by 2065, at least I hope so if the meat runs out before then. But that doesn’t excuse the blatant sophistry of MisLeading, because whilst she may well rule out raising taxes, she doesn’t rule out introducing new ones, does she?

Did Londoners see the ULEZ scheme coming?