OPINION – RICHARD TICE: Taxing pleasure has wreaked havoc on the Treasury.
Almost as soon as they took office, Starmer and Reeves declared war on working people having a good time. A pint after work. A flutter on the horses. A cigarette on the doorstep. One by one, they taxed every simple pleasure out of reach and wondered why nobody was lining up to say thank you. Today, the only thing the British public are thanking is the heavens that they’re both packing their bags.
But the good news is short-lived, because we’re about to get a prime minister who wants to spend even more of your money. If Comrade Burnham really cared about working people like he says he does, he’d scrap all the crackers taxes Reeves was planning and make the cost of a good time affordable for normal people again.
Take tobacco. Rachel Reeves has hammered smokers with eye-watering tax hikes year after year, convinced that if she makes cigarettes expensive enough, people will simply quit. They haven’t. They’ve just stopped buying them legally.
One in four cigarettes smoked in Britain today comes from the black market. A pack that costs over £15 in a supermarket can be had for a fiver under the counter. Hard-pressed working people – already squeezed on energy bills, food and rent – are taking the only option left to them. And who can blame them?
The consequence is a yawning black hole in the Treasury. Duty-paid cigarette sales have collapsed by almost half in just three years. That money isn’t going to fund nurses or plug the budget gap. It’s going to criminal gangs. That isn’t a public health success story. It’s a policy catastrophe of Labour’s own making.
In October, Reeves was planning to do it again – only worse. Another duty hike. Another 2% escalator. Plus a one-off charge on every pack and every pouch of rolling tobacco. The definition of madness is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. By that measure, our outgoing Chancellor qualifies. We’ll soon find out if Burnham does too.
Normal Brits, in normal towns, are being pushed into the arms of the very criminal networks the Government claims to be fighting. The Government is now spending £30 million of taxpayers’ money on a new High Street Organised Crime Unit to deal with the fallout. Thirty million pounds. To fix a problem the outgoing Chancellor created herself.
If Burnham really wants to regenerate our forgotten towns, he’ll scrap Reeves’ tobacco taxes and pull the rug from under the organised criminals blighting high streets all over the country.
The same goes for alcohol. Duty hikes, minimum pricing, endless lectures. Meanwhile pub after pub closes its doors for good, and high streets, hollowed out by years of Labour and Tory failure, become home to nobody except underground dealers moving in to fill the gap.
Labour doesn’t trust you. They don’t think you’re capable of deciding whether to have a smoke, a drink or a bet without the state stepping in to price you out of it. They would rather you handed that money to a criminal gang than enjoyed yourself on their watch.
Let me put it plainly. If Burnham blindly carries on with Reeves’ hikes to tobacco duty, he isn’t helping public health. He isn’t closing the tax gap. He is choosing criminal gangs over corner shops. He is feeding the black market that is strangling our high streets, and then expecting applause for announcing another crackdown.
Working people deserve better than this. They deserve a government that treats them as adults, backs British businesses and stops lining the pockets of criminals.