Oh dear. Leeds East MP Richard ‘Benny From Crossroads lookalike’ Burgon* has decided to give his braincell an outing and publicly wibbled about taxing the ‘rich’ without considering that those who really are rich would just up sticks and take their money elsewhere. What Benny Burgon really wants to do is to tax excessively those who’ve worked damned hard to claw their way into the middle classes. Needless to say Burgon’s economic nutbaggery is being completely slated in the below the line comments by people who obviously know more about economics than Benny Burgon, although that’s not difficult.

He wants all those on £80k to be on 45% tax and those on £125k to be on 50% tax, which are comfortable earnings for a middle class professional who might have had years of hard slog and study to get to the position where they were earning this amount. Like all Labour’s historical and contemporary plans to tax who they call the ‘rich’ all that will happen if Burgon had his way is that people would not be arsed to do jobs where half their wages will be seized by the government for the government to waste and the genuinely highly wealthy would just piss off overseas.

I remember the days when under Labour taxation was even higher than what Burgon believes that it should be and what happened is that Britain was the victim of a brain drain and a talent train as those who could earn big money went and earned it in other countries rather than do that in the UK and have Labour take most of it. The fact that Sir Keir Starmer the Labour leader has not sidelined or silenced ‘Benny’ does give the distinct impression that Labour are still wedded to the idea of massive and crippling taxation.

*For those who are too young to remember ‘Benny’ was a character in a soap opera who was quite plainly somewhat ‘mentally challenged’ who became incredibly popular, very much unlike Mr Burgon’s economic ideas.