Are Reeves’s taxes only about grabbing more of our money?

Monday blog

Only a couple of months to go before Reeves/Starmer launch their next pillaging of our money in the November 2025 budget. Starmer laughably claims that in Phase 1 of his premiership, Labour “fixed the foundations”. This “fixing the foundations” consisted of turning a largely fictitious £22bn ‘black hole’ in the country’s finances into a real £40bn+ black hole which Reeves/Starmer must fill by taking ever more of our cash.

But are the Reeves/Starmer tax increases really only about raising revenue to waste on our useless, work-from-home, do-nothing, deliver-nothing, over-paid, over-pensioned, self-serving public sector?

You’ll all know about the Laffer Curve – The Laffer curve is a theoretical relationship between tax rates and government revenue, which suggests that there is an optimal tax rate that maximizes revenue and any increase in taxes above that optimal rate actually results in less tax revenue.

A good example of the Laffer Curve may be the imposition of VAT on private schools. This was (we were told) intended to raise about £1.5bn to be spent on hiring more teachers for state schools. However, private school student numbers have dropped by 13,000 in the past year, and 23 private schools have announced plans for closure or possible closure. The average cost to operate a state-funded school in England, including capital expenditure, was approximately £9,120 per pupil for the 2024-25 financial year. This figure reflects the total funding received by the school to cover all aspects of its operation, such as salaries, maintenance, and resources, distributed according to a National Funding Formula. 

So, if an additional 13,000 pupils left private schools and joined the state sector, this would cost an extra £118m. That’s about enough money to pay for an extra 3,000 state-school teachers. Hopefully Comrades Reeves and Starmer took this into account when promising us £1.5bn more tax to pay for thousands of extra state schools teachers?

The previous and coming Starmer/Reeves tax increases are supposedly to raise more money. But some people may doubt whether they care whether their increased taxes do raise more money or not. Just like with communism: the advertised aim was the liberation of the proletariat and the totalitarian dictatorship was only supposed to be the means to achieve that aim. There’s the old Soviet joke:

Q: What’s the difference between capitalism and communism?

A: Capitalism is the exploitation of man by man. Communism is the opposite.

The aim of a leftist, socialist government is always total state dependence. Every single individual should be financially dependent on the state, so that effectively everyone is a slave. Private property allows the individual some freedom: this is against state power. According to new analysis by the Adam Smith Institute on March 2025, 52.1% of British adults are reliant on the state for their livelihood. With about 3,000 people a day signing on to out-of-work benefits the percent of the population dependent on the state will continue to rise.

Policies like Net Zero, crushing free speech with the pathetically misnamed ‘Online Safety Bill’ and crippling taxes are just ways to achieve national impoverishment and increasing dependence on the state. Starmer and Reeves and Miliband and Rayner and the rest of the morons in government don’t really want growth. Why would they? An impoverished population is much easier to control. This is why poverty invariably follows socialism.