People of Glasgow share their thoughts on Labour’s decision to increase taxes

We take to Buchanan St to ask Glaswegians what they think about tax rises in the government’s recent budget.

Transcript

00:00I'm not a Labourite, but you could say they actually kept their manifesto, which was a load of nonsense anyway.

00:06I would say they're more trustworthy than the other lot.

00:09The other lot kept a lot of things hidden.

00:12And that's not to say Labour will do the same, but they've at least surfaced a lot of the things that were wrong

00:17and that could have been dealt with differently.

00:20And hard decisions have to be made, and because of the current state, somebody's got to do it.

00:26So I haven't a problem with that.

00:28Well, they haven't increased taxes.

00:30They haven't increased the ones they said they wouldn't increase, but they have increased...

00:33They've increased national insurance, which is the employer's contribution,

00:38which is not the same as increasing taxes.

00:41One would argue that it's going to have a knock-on effect to the worker

00:45and or the prices that people purchase from that company.

00:48And at the end of the day, as in all these things, it'll be the average punter that ends up paying for that.

00:53But in comparison to what you've actually said about increased taxes, that's not the case.

00:58The terminology and the actual reality is two different things.

01:03Will it have a knock-on effect to prices?

01:06Yes, of course it will, because at the end of the day, people don't want to get rid of...

01:10Companies don't want to get rid of... People don't want to lay them off.

01:13Therefore, the only way to survive is to increase prices.

01:16Yes, that's going to automatically happen.

01:18Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

01:20I think it's a shame that Labour, which is a socialist-type party, has done this.

01:25But the amount of coppers that are left within the government funding

01:30to go ahead and fund the projects that the government want to fund, if Labour that is,

01:34is now no longer there, so they're going to have to get their money's in some way.

01:38So they either increase taxes, they increase national insurance, or they increase something.

01:43So either personal tax, company tax, and or through taxation through other means such as petrol,

01:49which they actually did do, and or fuel.

01:53Or through the justice services provided through hospitals, social care, education.

01:56And they're not going to do that either.

01:59And I think one would argue that they actually, because they do want to support the NHS

02:04because of what it stands for, would suggest that they have to get their money from somewhere.

02:09There is a massive deficit.

02:11The other thing that people have generally forgotten is that they've actually increased the amount of borrowing they did.

02:17To offset the amount of taxation.