Labour is under huge fire today after it emerged their new Tax Tsar said “codger” pensioners have “had it ridiculously good”.
Sir Edward Troup, a former Treasury special adviser on tax and head of HMRC, was announced as Rachel Reeves’s new tax adviser yesterday, as part of a new expert panel on tackling tax avoidance.
However the party is now under fire after it emerged the new advisor previously called for sweeping tax rises, with a big focus on hitting pensioners.
Appearing at a Resolution Foundation roundtable in 2019, Sir Edward called for increases to income tax, national insurance, VAT and corporation tax.
Advising politicians to raise taxes by stealth, he warned today’s pensioners have “had it ridiculously good”.
He added that it is a “complete disgrace” that pensioners aren’t paying national insurance, adding: “We are gong to have to look at more senior members of society.”
In a final insulting blow, Ms Reeves’s new right-hand man described older voters as “codgers”.
He told the audience: “Where should we be looking? I’m told I can’t use the word codgers, but as I’m officially a codger I think I will.
“You should look to my generation, you know, I’m a baby boomer, I was born in 1955, and we have had it ridiculously good.
“We’ve benefited from low-interest rates, high inflation when we bought our houses, we’ve enjoyed good returns on whatever we’ve managed to put into our pension funds, and we’re not paying national insurance if we’re still working after the age of 60, and it’s a complete disgrace.
“I am part of an under-taxed generation so I’m afraid we are going to have to look at the more senior members of society.”
He then went further, arguing that free TV licences for the elderly are “ridiculous” and we should be “looking [to tax] the codgers”.
He said: “There’s been this great analysis, I think Chris Giles and the FT goes on about the ridiculous nature of giving free television licences to the over-75s who are much better off than young families with children, and if anybody deserves a free television licence to relieve them from the ghastliness of small babies – sorry, I’ve got two small grandchildren so – they’re the ones who deserve the free television licences, anyway, so we should be looking at the codgers.”
Reaction to the shocking revelations, Conservative Party deputy chairman Craig Tracey told the Express: “It should come as no surprise that Labour’s new tax tsar wants to pick the pockets of pensioners.
“They will try to deny it, but Labour’s billions in unfunded spending pledges can only mean one thing – taking us back to square one by hiking up taxes.”
Dennis Reed, the director of Silver Voices, slammed the comments as evidence of “age discrimination”.
He told this website: “I thought comments like these, betraying a dislike of older voters as a whole, were a thing of the past.
“The false trope feeds into these ridiculous views, and if this is going to be his parameters for future tax policy we want nothing of it.
“Older voters in fact had a tax rise in the last budget thanks to the Government cutting National Insurance rather than income tax, and we don’t want that attitude to continue.
“We need to see a statement from Labour distancing themselves from these remarks immediately. If they don’t, we’ll have to assume they agree with him.”
Sir Edward also previously advised corporations on “how to reduce their tax bills”.
Writing in the Financial Times in 1999, the new Labour advisor argued: “Tax avoidance is a normal market reaction… This judgement is not immoral, it is inevitable in a market economy.”
At a committee hearing that same year, Sir Edward was questioned about tax havens and declared that his firm was “giving some advice to some offshore jurisdictions”.
He added he was “putting their representations to the OECD”, which at the time was clamping down on tax havens.
Leading opposition to the then-Labour Government’s anti-tax avoidance reforms, he told a Parliamentary Committee that it is “difficult to see the world without tax havens”.
Sir Edward is one of the new five-strong Labour panel set to advise Ms Reeves on a blueprint for boosting compliance and modernising the work of HMRC.
Responding to the news, a Labour spokesman hit back: “This is desperate stuff from a Conservative government that crashed the economy and left the tax burden at the highest it has been for seventy years, with the average family set to be £870 worse off under Rishi Sunak’s tax plans.
“The Tories should spend less time smearing former civil servants and more time explaining how they will fund the £46billion blackhole in their spending plans.”
