Happy Christmas – and a tough New Year

First, let me wish you a very happy Christmas and a fulfilling, successful and prosperous New Year.

When the shops close on Christmas Eve, we will all collapse with exhaustion. We’ll be broke, but happy that the real Christmas has arrived at last.

Sue and I will enjoy a very traditional Christmas, focussed on the Christian festival in Salisbury Cathedral, surrounded by our family and observing all the rituals of stockings, goose, the Queen’s Speech and presents. The day will be rounded off, as usual, by washing up and snoozing in front of a good film.

I hope none of us will forget those who will not be enjoying Christmas at home. Hundreds will be at work in our hospitals, police stations, power stations and elsewhere, so that the rest of us can celebrate.

HM Forces from Wiltshire will be on duty from Iraq to the Falkland Isles, Northern Ireland to the Balkans. Their loved ones back here can count on our support.

Please remember the lonely and the solitary at this season. A cheerful, neighbourly word can make all the difference. This is also the very worst time of year for crimes of domestic violence. Women and children will be battered – and some men, too.

Peace and goodwill may not extend to those who are overwhelmed by debt or by family problems. Listening to the Chancellor of the Exchequer deliver his Pre-Budget Statement in the Commons recently, I’m not sure we count on much peace and goodwill in the Commons in 2004!

The Chancellor’s friend Prudence is unwell. In 2001 Gordon told us he’d borrow £10 billion this year. Whoops! That turned out to be £37 billion. He said that from 2002 to 2006 he’d need £35 billion. Crumbs! Make that £120 billion. Most of his sums are wrong. He said the economy would grow this year by 3 per cent. But it’s only 2 per cent. In 1997 we saved nearly ten per cent of national earnings. That’s down to under five per cent.

But, forget Scrooge – let’s look to the future! Does all this really matter to you and me? You must be the judge, but the average family has paid £600 more in tax this year then in 1997 – and it is going to get worse, I fear. Let’s look at this another way.

In 1929 the US Tax Foundation started calculating the day in the financial year when we stop working for the Government and start working for ourselves. Today our own Adam Smith Institute uses the same methodology to calculate British Tax Freedom day. When Gordon Brown took over in 1997, it fell on May 27th. By 2005 it will fall on June 9th. That’s two weeks extra hard labour. We’d better start saving for next Christmas!

Robert Key
14th December 2003