Tories discover the magic money tree

Many of the ten Tory leadership candidates have are making reckless promises about their tax and spending plans.

951_MW_P08_Michael-Gove

Gove has reckless big ideas

Many of the ten Tory leadership candidates have "set off" on the race "kicking great lumps out of fiscal orthodoxy" and "spraying us all with whopping great promises" about their tax and spending plans, says Alf Young in The Times.

As for Michael Gove's big idea to abolish VAT, which raises nearly £140bn a year, and replace it with a sales tax, that would be the "biggest, riskiest and most disruptive change" in the tax system in more than 50 years, says Paul Johnson, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, in The Times. He should perhaps ask himself why countries around the world are moving in "precisely the opposite direction". British politics has "become so routinely shocking that sometimes you have to remember to be surprised", says Robert Shrimsley in the Financial Times. "Supposedly serious candidates " are trashing economic discipline. "The once fabled magic money tree' is now a veritable arboretum of impossible pledges."

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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.