The Autumn Statement – the Ghost of Christmas Past

Dominic Thomas
Nov 2023 • 2 min read

The Autumn Statement – the Ghost of Christmas Past

We are in the closing weeks of the year. Our thoughts turn to Christmas celebrations and perhaps looking ahead to the New Year. The familiarity of our traditions poses a challenge to attempts to change them, yet even the harshest of men, Mr Scrooge, managed to pay attention to what is important and change his behaviour.

I don’t think it is contentious to say that the Conservatives are a party of tax cutting and yet we currently have one of the highest rates of personal taxes in the main economies. Few of us enjoy paying taxes, perhaps because often it seems that our hard-earned money is wasted on expensive ideas and ‘kit’ that doesn’t work very well at all … anyone tried the NHS IT system or indeed any ‘converting to digital’ Governmental system, let alone the military’s ability to spend a fortune on malfunctioning weaponry to cite just a couple of examples. We all have opinions. (As an aside the Power of Attorney system is going digital in 2024, so I urge you to sort yours before they muck it up and make the backlog even longer).

The Conservatives came to power in May 2010, admittedly with the assistance of the LibDems, but then we have had an entire mess of Government ever since.

According to Jeremy Paxton in 2018, David Cameron was the worst Prime Minister since Eden:

“[He] got to the top of a tree in order to set it on fire and cleared off, put the interests of his party before the country and decided to have this referendum, believed one thing was the only right outcome for the country, didn’t campaign for it, got the opposite outcome and XXX off. It doesn’t seem like leadership to me”.

Given the PMs we have had since 2018, Cameron might actually look a lot better, the bar seems woefully low, anyway, for now Cameron is back, this time as Foreign Secretary.

The backdrop of a Covid enquiry which merely proves what most of us thought, that Mr Johnson is an unreliable character (I am being polite), we have the prospect of an election looming by the end of January 2025. The Labour party seems set on sabotage and the plethora of political open goals being squandered is lamentable. The traditional approach of appealing to the notion “everyone has their price” is in the hands of the Chancellor, who is being tempted to cut taxes now that inflation appears to be returning to a more comfortable figure (4.7% October 2023 ONS).

Which of us doesn’t want to pay less tax? In an environment of rising prices, seeing your net pay remain pitifully stagnant is irksome. Yet we also know that tax pays to keep society running in some vaguely civil way. We can all find things to disagree with, it’s almost a rite of passage into a fifth decade. It’s clear that ‘the system’ doesn’t work for all, and indeed seems to generally work best for the few. The sadness is that there seems to be so few alternatives to the binary choices we have here in the UK; stuck in traditions that don’t work for the good of the country. Creativity and visionary leadership remain sadly elusive.

There was a time when the economy was thought about as a way of serving society, yet here in 2023 we are evidently a society that is serving the economy. There is no good reason why this cannot change, and despite experience, I remain an optimist in a sufficient number of decent people.

For the record, I have no intention of offending your political beliefs, but I do think we all deserve rather better than we have had. On 22 November 2023 we shall get further notice …

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I, Daniel Blake

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I, Daniel Blake

The new Ken Loach movie “ I, Daniel Blake” has created something of a ruckus. It would seem that if you hold entrenched political views, then probably you would learn nothing new. If you are a little more willing to be informed or at the very least, challenged, then this film has something to offer.

You might wonder why a financial planner is writing about a story, essentially about poverty and the UK benefits system. After all, our clients don’t draw benefits and are clearly not poor, by most normal definitions. My reasoning is that human dignity is simply a human issue for us all, and of course should disaster strike, any one of us could be left at the mercy of the State system – one that we all contribute towards and reflects our wider collective values.

Daniel Blake is one of those typical, gritty, grim and grey British films, that in truth you probably have to be in the mood for. It isn’t “entertainment” and it isn’t a documentary. However in the days of food banks and some fairly vile tabloid newspapers, it’s a film that needs to be seen, rather like the truthfulness of your own finances.

Passive? moi?

Perhaps like you, I am occasionally found shouting at the TV or radio as something rattles my cage, yet it is not often that I do so in a cinema. Yet, that’s what I was doing within about 15 minutes, exasperated by the ludicrous treatment of someone by box-ticking automatons. I won’t ruin your experience of it by giving away the story, but it resonated with similar experiences that most of us will have had at some point when dealing with some organizations, particularly Governmental ones.

A curriculum vitae…

The story of Daniel, a carpenter in his late 50s or perhaps early 60s suffers a heart attack, signed off work by those professionally qualified to do so (his doctors) and then assessed by a “professional health worker” (as if) that he is not sick enough to be off work… and so the story ensues with an exploration into the penalty system introduced by a man who was actually found to mislead within his CV (according to BBC News night) one Mr. Iain Duncan-Smith.

You cannot be serious..

I know many of you are medical professionals – proper ones, not deemed so by a job title that reflects the ability to read a questionnaire containing medical terminology. So I am sure that some of you will have had experience of being confronted by those less qualified, purporting to know better…. which these days seems to be most people in political office.

Clearly none of us want a society where it is easier and more rewarding to “do nothing” than to provide something of value to others. We don’t want to encourage a culture of benefit vultures or tourists. However this is loaded with political sentiment and bias. One might make the case that a rich businessman that pays no taxes is also a benefit scrounger, not “paying their way” for all the things that the rest of us mere mortals believe important for the wider society.

It seems to me that “the system” simply isn’t very good and attempts to make it work rather better because of bile generated from supposed “journalists” have failed spectacularly.

There’s something very wrong with this isn’t there?

My own former MP was at a hustings and said he was “proud that we have a food bank here” which is hardly something to be proud of, merely reflecting the failure of our “first world” social system and is actually a reflection that the local people believe that this is very wrong, and respond to a very real, very human problem.

Planning upon uncertainty

As for your financial plan… well at the heart of this is the ability to do your sums. To live within your means… which is a lot easier when you are healthy and let’s be honest, wealthy (by comparison). However when health becomes an issue, you have probably ensured that you have savings and insurance to cover certain eventualities (well if you took my advice you did). So it will always appear easier to cope than it is in practice, because you and I are fortunate enough to have enough to plan and think ahead, even thinking about the bleak, improbable and perhaps unlikely. Part of my job is to reduce reliance on the State system by creating independence of it, self-sufficiency. This is not the same as being disconnected or unconcerned, which is the general line taken by those who have chosen to “critique” the film for being an extreme example….

Ok, there will always be some people that want to do nothing and expect something, but I struggle to believe that is how most of us behave. Most want a better life, not a benefits life. When I talk of lifestyle financial planning I am not advocating one of selfish disconnection, but of self-direction.

Anyway, wherever you are on the political spectrum (and I find myself finding some merit in most arguments from all sides) here is the trailer for a truly valuable film.

Dominic Thomas
Solomons IFA

You can read more articles about Pensions, Wealth Management, Retirement, Investments, Financial Planning and Estate Planning on my blog which gets updated every week. If you would like to talk to me about your personal wealth planning and how we can make you stay wealthier for longer then please get in touch by calling 08000 736 273 or email info@solomonsifa.co.uk