First…When Dick Nobinson called Hammond ‘Spreadshit Phil’ was he drunk, did he do it for a bet or was it purely a cynical joke to amuse his BBC buddies and those in Labour who wanted Robinson to be their PR guru? I’m guessing the last one.
Now to the main issue, the BBC’s so-called reporting of the Budget. The BBC’s top economic editor, Nihal, speculated that Hammond was vilifying the self-employed, calling them cheats who were dodging paying their full whack. Great journalism…based on what exactly? The BBC’s reporting has been a very low budget affair that seems very light on facts…one crucial fact that went missing was the reason Hammond increased NIC’s for the self-employed…and indeed have been using a clip from Labour’s John McDonnell claiming that the self-employed have got absolutely nothing back…the BBC provided no counter-voice to that clip. Kind of surprising really as Hammond stated the reason quite plainly in his budget speech….the self-employed now get the full state pension and will get further benefit entitlements later on…not only that but their NICs will still not be at the same level as employed people’s and they are in fact having some contributions reduced…didn’t hear that at all on the BBC all day…..until Tory Bernard Jenkins mentioned it and was immediately shut down and the subject changed by the presenter….which is a bit odd…the absolutely crucial point about the NIC increase and the BBC doesn’t want to talk about it…..from the speech……
An employee earning £32,000 will incur between him and his employer £6,170 of National Insurance Contributions. A self-employed person earning the equivalent amount will pay just £2,300 – significantly less than half as much.
Historically, the differences in NICs between those in employment and the self-employed reflected differences in state pensions and contributory welfare benefits.
But with the introduction of the new state pension, these differences have been very substantially reduced.
Since 2016 self-employed workers now build up the same entitlement to the state pension as employees, a big pension boost to the self-employed.
The most significant remaining area of difference is in relation to parental benefits, and I can announce today that we will consult in the summer on options to address the disparities in this area as the FSB and others have proposed.
Mr Deputy Speaker, The difference in National Insurance Contributions is no longer justified by the difference in benefits entitlement.
The abolition of Class 2 NICs for self-employed people, announced by my predecessor in 2016 and due to take effect in 2018, would further increase the gap between employment and self-employment…. from April 2018, when the Class 2 NIC is abolished, the main rate of Class 4 NICs for the self-employed will increase by 1% to 10%, with a further 1% increase in April 2019.
The combination of the abolition of Class 2 and the Class 4 increases I have announced today, raises a net £145m a year for our public services by 2021-22, an average of around 60p a week per self-employed person in this country.
The BBC was more interested targeting the Tories for breaking their election manifesto promise and Emma Barnett wanted to know if this makes you lose your trust in politicians. Curiously not at all interested in the fact that the budget is not the Remain camp’s ‘Project Fear’ budget that promised to grind us into the ground with an emergency austerity budget to save us from the perils of Brexit…how is it the BBC is not interested in that broken political pledge?
Barnett had a couple on from the FT and the Huffington Post to discuss the budget…both lefty remain supporting rags…naturally they demanded an election as the manifesto promise was broken…..this would suit the Remain camp, as John Major’s like-minded demands illustrate, as most MPs are Remain and would, when re-elected then claim they were elected as Remainers…and thus had a mandate to crush Brexit. So will the BBC be asking if such dishonest, corrupt, anti-Democratic shyster politicians have our trust? No, don’t be silly.
It wasn’t so long ago, when we were having the referendum and it was noted that Leave voters [and of course Trump voters] had no faith in the political class, that the BBC decided we now had to respect and trust politicians…or we’d have more Jo Cox’s…..odd how, now the referendum is over and Trump elected, the BBC goes back to its normal mantra of Politicians are all liars and cheats….well, Tory ones. No such questions of betrayal of democracy when the SNP says it wants another independence referendum, in fact today the BBC is peddling the SNP’s propaganda that another referendum is just common sense…no, it’s not…it’s corrupt and anti-democratic….Brexit has nothing to do with ‘Scotland’…it’s a ‘British’ issue and ‘Scotland’ voted to stay in ‘Britain’.
Only now, after a day of fact-free disparagement of the Budget do we start to get an inkling that things may not be a bad as they are being painted. Have to say, to be fair to the BBC, the likes of the Mail, and indeed some of the usual dumb, bovine, self-harming Tory MP’s, are doing a splendid job of creating a tremendous fuss about nothing and seem to be intent on doing a better job of opposition than the lack-lustre Corbyn.