Covid: Tories set to impoverish ordinary people to pay for lockdown while sparing the billionaires – Helen Martin

IT’S emerged that rather than taxing millionaires and billionaires who avoid tax by using tax havens, or international businesses who make fortunes from the UK but don’t pay tax here (something I suggested last week), Chancellor Rishi Sunak is instead planning to hit what are described as “middle-class savers and entrepreneurs” to restore the UK economy.

Chancellor Rishi Sunak is planning tax rises to pay off the cost of the Covid furlough scheme and other measures (Picture: House of Commons/PA Wire)

Financial experts and analysts are warning those who inherit property, buy-to-let landlords, and people who sell their businesses that they could be going through a tax raid.

Sunak knows he cannot get tax from the poor, and he doesn’t want more tax (or perhaps any) from the massively rich, hedge-fund billionaires etc, so he’s focusing on those in the middle and wiping out most of the annual tax-free allowance. But what will that lead to?

I’m a landlord, but with only two rental flats. I even offered tenants, if they lost work during Covid-19, to skip their rent for a few months or more.

If Sunak goes ahead with this, we may have to sell these two flats, as will many other landlords. Some might feel they have to up their rent even more! So, where will those who cannot afford to buy their own home find somewhere they can afford to live when there isn’t enough social housing?

Around 22 per cent – one-fifth of households in Edinburgh – are in private rental properties, and only 17 per cent in social housing.

Only a Tory Chancellor can act in such a way to impoverish more people and increase homelessness.

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