Income tax rate: Balls takes the gloves off

Labour's shadow chancellor Ed Balls pledged to restore the 50p tax rate. A shrewd move or political folly? Emily Hohler reports.

Ed Balls' announcement that Labour will restore the 50p rate on those earning more than £150,000 is a "politically savvy manoeuvre", but it is wrong economically, says The Independent on Sunday.

True, raising taxes on the rich is electorally popular: 60% of voters support it, according to a Survation/Mail on Sunday poll. But the reason the government reduced the top rate from 50% to 45% in 2012 was that, according to HMRC figures, the yield was "almost statistically insignificant".

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Emily Hohler
Politics editor

Emily has worked as a journalist for more than thirty years and was formerly Assistant Editor of MoneyWeek, which she helped launch in 2000. Prior to this, she was Deputy Features Editor of The Times and a Commissioning Editor for The Independent on Sunday and The Daily Telegraph. She has written for most of the national newspapers including The Times, the Daily and Sunday Telegraph, The Evening Standard and The Daily Mail, She interviewed celebrities weekly for The Sunday Telegraph and wrote a regular column for The Evening Standard. As Political Editor of MoneyWeek, Emily has covered subjects from Brexit to the Gaza war.

Aside from her writing, Emily trained as Nutritional Therapist following her son's diagnosis with Type 1 diabetes in 2011 and now works as a practitioner for Nature Doc, offering one-to-one consultations and running workshops in Oxfordshire.