Skint workers and employers buckling under the weight of record taxes can’t take more hikes

Stick to tax vow

CHANCELLOR Rachel Reeves insists she will never repeat her inflationary, ­business-bashing Budget, and that she had “no alternative.”

Voters will question if this is really true.

After all, as the Tories imploded, she had months to prepare a radical ­programme.

Labour could have unveiled credible plans to slash Government spending.

Instead it opted for bumper public sector pay-rises, including 15 per cent for train drivers.

She could have laid waste to the aid budget.

Instead farmers overseas are handed £500m of our money — while Reeves whacks British farms for the same amount in Inheritance Tax.

Or perhaps the Chancellor could have foreseen that businesses would not be able to simply absorb the impact of her £25billion National Insurance rise, which will now inevitably lead to job losses and higher prices.

Reeves — who deserves credit for at least sparing motorists a fuel duty rise, in the most popular measure in her Budget — feels able to predict she won’t have to launch another tax bombshell.

For her sake and everybody else’s, the Chancellor had better be right.

Skint workers and employers buckling under the weight of record taxes can’t take much more.

Woke-us pocus

HOLLYWOOD’s backing for JK Rowling over the new Harry Potter franchise is another welcome sign that the woke culture suffocating our lives is being dismantled.

Rowling has been a staunch defender of women’s safety and rights.

For this she has been relentlessly trolled and pilloried online.

In the face of such vile bullying she has remained resolute.

Not so the actors who made their fame and fortune off the back of Rowling’s brilliant imagination.

Emma Watson, Daniel Radcliffe and Rupert Grint cravenly betrayed her to the trans extremists.

In standing by the decision to keep Rowling as a producer on a new Potter series, TV execs at HBO have signalled a major sea change.

That the spiteful hate mob that infests social media won’t win over plain common sense.

Chagos shame

THE sight of our new National Security Adviser scurrying to Mauritius to give away the Chagos islands shames Britain.

Jonathan Powell is desperate to sew up the grubby deal before Donald Trump — who hates the idea — becomes president.

Such blatant poking of our strongest ally over global defence is a folly which makes our key interests less secure.