Mad VATter's Ski Party

The Coalition Government’s austerity programme gets into full-swing today with an approx. 15 percent rise in VAT in possibly the most brazen and direct attack on living standards yet put into practice. One of the headline announcements of last June’s emergency budget, it will see the cost of nearly all goods rise by 2.5 percentage points from this morning, to 20 percent.

Inevitably, this will hit the pockets of the poorest hardest. VAT is among the most regressive of all taxes that doesn’t take into account any disparity in income – children spending their pocket money pay the same flat rate of 20 percent as millionaires purchasing luxury yachts. Indeed, the richest tenth of the population look set to lose around 1 percent of their after-tax income from the rise; the poorest tenth will lose 2.25 percent. This may seem negligible but to people already struggling on the breadline, the impact will be substantial.

So with prices set to rise across the board, on top of already high inflation, unemployment that’s set to hit 2.5 million and forecasts of hundreds of thousands of job losses across the public and private sector, it’s good to know our Chancellor, Gideon ‘George’ Osborne, is living by his mantra of ‘all being in it together’.

Or not, as it seems. For the Mad Vatter himself has been absent of these shores of late – instead choosing to bring in the new year in top toff getaway Klosters, an exclusive ski resort  in the Swiss Alps. Osborne spent nearly a week with his family in the resort, reputedly “the world’s most expensive”, where chalets can cost up to £11,000 a night. Attempting to deflect any enquiries about the trip, Osborne’s office have hilariously refused to comment any further than saying he’s spent the past week in Davos, a nearby town which hosts the World Economic Forum each year – as if to suggest he’s spent the visit on important diplomatic affairs rather than a luxury ski holiday, in the same week that his VAT rise will leave millions out of pocket.

The truth is, of course, that we’re not all in together, and that Osborne is just another Eton-educated millionaire in a cabinet full of them, making a fine job of representing the interests of the rich and powerful. Likewise, the VAT increase is not about bringing down the deficit, but a calculated attempt to transfer societal wealth from the poorest to the richest, and the burden of taxation in the other direction.

Taking the piste