If you want a vision of the future, imagine the government picking your pocket every year - forever

If you want a vision of the future, imagine the government picking your pocket every year - forever

In purely tactical terms, Jeremy Hunt managing to bounce Labour into ruling out raising any of the big revenue taxes ahead of the last election surely has to be up there with Gordon Brown’s invention of the 50p rate in terms of spiking one’s opponents’ economic policy guns. Neither Sir Keir Starmer nor Rachel Reeves seem to have had any clear idea of what they wanted to do with the public finances (or indeed, anything else), and to have shared w…