Letters: Labour’s evasiveness on tax bodes ill for hard-pressed households (2024)

SIR – We must consider what Labour is not saying about tax (report, June 6). It has promised not to raise income tax, national insurance and VAT, but has never been able to resist taxing wealth and stymying wealth creators. This is in its DNA.

To fund Labour’s pledges if it wins a large majority, Sir Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor, will in all likelihood increase capital gains tax (CGT) substantially, pillage private pension funds (again) by reintroducing the lifetime allowance, restrict pension contribution tax relief, and – perhaps most pernicious of all – include pension funds in one’s estate on death, and so make the funds liable to inheritance tax.

These are the potential tax rises Labour desperately does not want to talk about in any detail. But when they become reality, the electorate cannot claim to be surprised.

Richard Allison
Edinburgh

SIR– Jeremy Hunt, the Chancellor, has challenged Labour to rule out raising property taxes if it wins the election (report, June 6).

Rather than give a direct answer, Labour has side-stepped the issue by stating, once again, that taxes are at a 70-year high. The Liberal Democrats have given a similar response.

Two events are the main causes of the high level of government debt and taxation: the pandemic and Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

Given that they are so critical of the current level of taxation, Labour and the Liberal Democrats must be challenged to say what they would have done differently to have avoided the increase in government expenditure brought about by those two events.

Without the support that was provided during Covid-19, both the NHS and the economy would be in a much worse state than they are now. And if we didn’t provide support to Ukraine, we would be threatening our own safety. So, who is really on the side of the NHS, business and working people, and our national security?

Sir Richard Barnett
Hilton, Cambridgeshire

SIR– Jeremy Hunt pledges not to make taxes worse, but doesn’t say how he’d reduce them. He should take a leaf out of Reform UK’s book: cut stamp duty, increase tax thresholds, and get rid of inheritance tax on estates worth under £2 million.

Mr Hunt states that he will not raise CGT, perhaps forgetting he has already decreased the tax-free CGT allowance from £12,300 to £3,000 during his tenure.

Hardly a vote winner.

Camilla Coats-Carr
Teddington, Middlesex

SIR– When Rachel Reeves says she has no plans to tax “working people”, does she mean that she’ll tax pensioners instead?

Lynn Birchard
Tunbridge Wells, Kent

SIR– I will never forget the day that General George Patton came to our house for tea.

My father farmed 250 acres of land at Peover Hall Farm in Cheshire. In preparation for D-Day (Letters, June 6), the government commandeered 25 acres of this land to accommodate General Patton’s Third Army. It was covered with tents for the men, while the officers stayed in the stately Peover Hall, built in 1585 during the reign of Elizabeth I.

Our farm supplied milk and other goods for General Patton’s army during its encampment, and General Patton himself worshipped inour church, St Lawrence, each Sunday. Recognising the locals’ kindness, he presented the church with an American flag, which hangs there to this day.

Shortly before the army left, my father asked the General if he would come to tea and meet our family. We were all so excited when he accepted.

I was nine at the time, and had no idea why all these men were billeted on our farm. They were all very kind, giving chocolate bars and chewing gum to me and my friends, and letting us join their baseball games.

I came home from school one day in early June 1944 to find they had gone (Iknew not where). I was devastated.

Douglas B Griffiths
Burgess Hill, West Sussex

SIR– As we remember the heroism and sacrifice of those involved 80 years ago in the Normandy landings, let us not forget the “experiment” conducted up the coast in August 1942, known as the Dieppe Raid. This was carried out to test tactics for an assault on the French coast; the Canadian forces suffered considerable losses, but valuable lessons were learnt.

On the 50th anniversary of D-Day, I accompanied my father to the beaches and we identified the bunker his destroyer was shelling during the assault. We then visited the Commonwealth war graves in Dieppe at the request of my mother, who had worked with the Canadian troops as a Wren cypher clerk. The lists of names, the unidentified graves and the immaculate maintenance of the site make it a poignant tribute to the sacrifice of all those involved in the conflict. We must always remember them.

John Hinton
East Bergholt, Suffolk

SIR– While we rightly commemorate the events on the Normandy beaches, we should also remember that, simultaneously, Field Marshal Slim’s Fourteenth Army was in a desperate, ultimately successful struggle to prevent the Japanese invading India, and that the Allied armies in Italy entered Rome.

David Martin
Bristol

SIR– Ian Cribb’s difficulties ordering a drink abroad (Letters, June 5) reminded me of a time, many years ago, when I visited my uncle who was working in Holland.

He took my girlfriend and me out for a meal and was keen to impress us with his mastery of Dutch. Along with the food, he ordered a bottle of Mateus Rosé. Sadly, the waiter brought him a box of matches.

Tony Bray
Marple, Cheshire

SIR– While we were on holiday in the Algarve, the diners at the next table ordered a “gin and orange”.

After quite a long interval, the waiter returned, carrying a plate of beautifully sliced oranges with a gin dressing.

Daphne Johnson
Liverpool

SIR – My wife recently had a tumour removed from her ascending colon. She became symptomatic following a particularly tough exercise class. She was very ill and, after some weeks, wasoperated on. She has been diagnosed at stage 4. We await her treatment plan.

We were shocked by these events as she had received a negative result from her first ever test under the NHS biennial screening programme for over-55s less than 18 months ago.

The surgeon explained that, in England, when testing identifies 120 or more micrograms of blood per gram of sample, a referral is made. Given that my wife’s tumour was in the ascending colon, the levels of blood would have been reduced in the sample because ofthe distance travelled across the colon. In Scotland the cut-off is less than 120, and in Germany and Holland it is lower still.

Saving all lives struck with colon cancer will not be possible until NHS England adopts similar standards.

David Burgess
Battle, East Sussex

SIR– Richard Ogden (Letters, June 5), suggesting how health and social care should be managed, gives a good description of what a quango ought to be: an organisation run independently by qualified people, with light oversight from government, which provides much of the funding.

This works well for bodies such as national museums. But it doesn’t work with the NHS because the huge amount of taxpayer funding and intense public interest demand democratic – political – accountability.

The size of the health service is also a problem, as there will inevitably be weaker parts, and these attract the most media interest. There have been attempts to make smaller units more accountable, with some success. But we have yet to find a successful formula for the whole.

Mike Keatinge
Sherborne, Dorset

SIR– My advice to Ben Lawrence (“Iown too many books, so which titles should I keep?”, Arts, June 6) is to hold on to every book he has read twice and throw the rest out.

I have retained two by Tolstoy, one by Turgenev and none by Dostoevsky. Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet remains prominent on my shelves – and often on my bedside table. Of course, reading on a Kindle makes these decisions much easier.

Nick Kester
Wattisfield, Suffolk

SIR – David Atherton, a former winner of The Great British Bake Off, says “authentic croissants should not be curved” (report, June 3). If he consulted a French dictionary, he would find that croissant means crescent.

It is believed that the original croissant was made in Vienna in 1683 to celebrate the defeat of the Turks after the siege of the city, hence the crescent shape taken from the Ottoman flag. The reason they have become straight is because they are easier to make and more can be put on a baking tray.

Timothy Morgan-Owen
Derby

SIR – Traditional pasties are made with beef skirt, not mince, and no Cornish person would use the crimp as a handle, as David Atherton suggests. The approved method is to start at one end (“corner”) and continue to the other.

Miners’ freshly-cooked lunchtime pasties were wrapped in a cloth and lowered in baskets into the pit using a rope. The miner would hold the hot pasty in the cloth and eat all of it, including the crimp, though to avoid mischief from the piskies he might leave the final corner for them.

Specifying that the crimp be down the side is also over-prescriptive, though convenient for mass production. My Cornish wife’s excellent pasties use her family method, going back at least six generations, in which the crimp runs down the middle.

Jolyon Cox
Witney, Oxfordshire

SIR – Six days before Dortmund fans let off flares at Wembley (Letters, June 5), I had a Mars bar and pack of Mini Cheddars confiscated on my way into the stadium. It’s good to know where the FA’s priority lies.

In the unlikely event that the general election winner delivers on promises to increase Armed Forces personnel, I hope they are utilised to provide proper security at national events – at significant cost to the FA.

Julyan Coe
Lytchett Matravers, Dorset