So, what's it to be, Britain – blue pill or red pill?
A month before the chancellor's second Budget, with the prognosis worsening by the day, could tax rises, spending cuts, or a cocktail of the two, help fix the country's parlous finances? Nurse… the screens!
In our editorial on Sunday, we suggested that taxes must now go up, but that any tax hikes must also be seen to be fair: "A rise in the top rate of income tax, or a lowering of the threshold, would be regarded by voters as an 'understandable' breach of the manifesto promise not to raise any of the main taxes."
And yet soaking the rich alone would hurt growth and raise too little revenue – and so soaking everyone would be the fairer and more effective thing to do: the chancellor Rachel Reeves "should raise the basic rate of income tax, which will take money from the broadest base of taxpayers according to their ability to pay". Nurse… the hosepipe!
For Chris Blackhurst, a levy on the very richest in our society would merely be an attack on aspiration: "Problems within the system cannot be solved by 'just adding another wealth tax to it'," as Reeves's old boss at the Bank of England, the mild-mannered Lord Mervyn King, put it.
Sean O'Grady suggested that Labour should also forget about a mansion tax – "superficially, an attractive idea: in the version that has leaked into the public domain, it targets people with homes worth £2m or more, with a levy of 1 per cent to be paid on the excess over that threshold" – and look instead to centrist policies to boost growth.
As for spending cuts – the toughest medicine for any Labour administration to stomach – O'Grady reckoned that the £15.3bn asylum bill needs to be lanced. "There is talk of converting disused military camps, but that's been tried before, and the accommodation was inhumanely poor. The asylum hotels have to be shut down within months – not, as is currently planned, by the end of this parliament – so the new camps need to be built now, as were the Nightingale hospitals in the pandemic."
The chancellor isn't the only one facing hard medicine. Charlotte Cripps wondered if jabbing podgy children with one of the new slimming wonderdrugs could prevent them from being bullied, and quite how many parenting red lines that might cross. It sounds dystopian – "Darling, come and have your weekly injection… it's Wegovy Wednesday!" – but, as a mother, "of course I'd give a jab to my 12-year-old if it made them happy and stopped the torment". Join the debate below the article.
Kat Brown greeted news of a morning-after pill, now available for free over the counter at your local chemist, with a bitter-sweetness – musing about how it would have altered the course of her life. "Fifteen years ago, when I needed the £30 morning-after pill, it may as well have been a grand. I rushed round to Boots to buy one, but my card was declined." Read her piece in full here.
But if you have bandwidth for just one moving personal health story this week, make it this one, by Andrew Grice: our veteran political columnist's tale starts with a glass of wine in a pub, after which he wakes up in A&E following a suspected stroke. His 18-hour ordeal to be seen by a doctor will leave you angry and counting your blessings.
Until next week.
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