The billionaire inventor claimed that Rachel Reeves’s “death taxes” on farmers and Ed Miliband’s refusal to scrap carbon taxes are undermining the country’s ability to be self-sufficient in food and energy production.
In an article for the Times, Sir James said: “Reeves is sacrificing key elements of our national security to make a politically vindictive attack on enterprise and wealth creation.”
Reeves announced that farming assets would be subject to 20% inheritance tax from 2027. The policy provoked a major backlash from rural voters, prompting the Prime Minister to water down the proposals in December last year.
“The amount her death tax on family firms generates, which no foreign, private equity or publicly listed business has to pay, will be dwarfed by the loss of income tax and corporation tax as businesses disappear,” said Sir James.
“The combination of tax hikes and ever more restrictive employment laws will ramp up unemployment – already above 5% and rising – and further erode the tax take.
“Labour has adopted revenge economics as a central policy, which is already damaging the nation and its security.”
Sir James said Sir Keir Starmer was pursuing policies that were forcing the UK to depend on unreliable imports for two of Britain’s most vital resources: energy and food.
Pointing out that the Middle East had demonstrated the fragility of Labour’s approach to energy, he said the Government had been “incredibly slow” to act on North Sea gas drilling and continued to block fracking while “recklessly” buying energy from other countries.
Miliband is considering whether to approve the first major North Sea gas field project, known as Jackdaw, but remains opposed to any development of the giant Rosebank field, which predominantly contains oil reserves.
“This is folly,” said Sir James. “As President Trump likes to remind us, the US has its own energy so can survive without the Strait of Hormuz being open, while Britain, under Ed Miliband’s perverse destruction of our energy assets, cannot.
“We have further huge reserves of gas and oil in the North Sea and untold quantities of gas under our land that can be quickly extracted through fracking. There is no possible justification for not making the UK self-sufficient.”
He said Kemi Badenoch’s proposal to scrap carbon taxes was a “step in the right direction”....<<<Read More>>>...
