Michael Ezra

The source of government revenue is a mystery for many people, but one thing voters do remember is that they are taxed. When people open up their pay slips, the income tax deduction stares them in the face. The sight of it is galling, and the higher the percentage taken, the worse it is. This is true even if there is a sense that, like a foul-tasting medicine, it is a necessity. So this aversion to tax explains why Boris Johnson's pledge to raise the level at which the higher rate tax band of 40 per cent kicks in – from £50,000 to £80,000 of earnings – is electorally attractive.

In 1990 Britain joined the ERM (Exchange Rate Mechanism) of the European Union. This meant, in practise, that Britain pegged its currency, sterling (GBP), to a band relative to the Deutschmark, the German currency before the Euro. In 1992, with pressure mounting on sterling, it was becoming increasingly problematic for the government to keep the currency within its band and it had to keep selling foreign currency reserves to buy sterling to support it. Eventually, on September 16, 1992, after relentless selling of sterling from speculators and others, the government had enough. They allowed the pound to come crashing out of the ERM.

Why does Jeremy Corbyn show such disdain for the mainstream Jewish community? Why does he prefer to associate with terrorist “friends” in Hamas and Hezbollah? And why does the Corbyn clique now in charge of Labour insist on diluting the internationally accepted definition of anti-Semitism? The fact is that – despite its own boasts about “anti-racism” – the far-left has had a longstanding problem with Jews, and not just with “Zionists.” This problem pre-dates 1844, when Karl Marx published On The Jewish Question; but Marx’s essay is a good place to start. In On the Jewish Question, Marx tied up Jews with capitalism: “What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money....