RETIREMENT TAX

It's great when the politicos go head to head to have a good verbal scrap - love it, love it, love it!

Political bitch fight

Don’t be fooled by all that pre-election rhetoric spewing forth from the Tory mouth especially their latest ruse to blame Labour for what they are calling the ‘Retirement Tax’.

This alleged tax on the poor old pensioner is nothing to do with the Labour party but everything to do with Tory inflicted fiscal drag resulting from not raising the personal tax allowances.

I’ve been banging on about the plight of state pensioners being dragged into the tax bucket on this blog since January 2023. It seems that its only now that everyone has realised what was only inevitable and not just for pensioners but for anyone whose income is galloping towards any one of the personal allowance tax limits.

Retirement Tax for sheep?

Don’t let those Tory boys pull the wool over your voting eyes. Chancellor Hunt must have realised this would be the case when pulling together his future budget forecasts but chose to keep shtum about it instead of looking at ways of offering a tax exemption to those being paid a state pension. The Tories could have remedied this situation at any time in their tenure but decided not to and now they have the cheek to make out it’s going to be Sir Keir’s fault that pensioners are likely to be taxed in future.

Sir Keir will have to take it on the chin if he gets into no 10 because thanks to the Tories, he won’t be in a financial position to scratch his arse let alone increase the tax allowances in the short term as the coffers have been well and truly emptied by all those expensive/useless migration schemes and generous giveaways to other countries (France, Ukraine etc etc).

Labour would have to find a ton of cash from somewhere if they wanted to increase the personal tax allowances prior to the current 2028 freeze date and I can’t see Rwanda giving the UK a refund any time soon.

Remember – it’s not just pensioners that will be dragged over the tax cliff edge. Part time workers like myself who didn’t benefit from Chancellor Hunt’s ‘generous’ national insurance cut are also facing the tax plunge once a few more pay rises have taken effect.

Who's pinched the tax safety net?

For fear of repeating myself – this is all down to the Tories, NOT Labour. Can you really trust the current Government to put something in place before 2028 to mitigate the impact of fiscal drag on state pensioners? Or will they just push out the freeze deadline even further so that no income is left untaxed?

Do you pick the red pill or the blue pill?

Voting made simple

You have around 4 weeks to decide where the cross is going to go on your ballot paper but believe me, there’s going to be a lot more of this type of political bullshit flying around before then.