The Guardian is quoting Kemi Badenoch using the word “excessive” when talking about tax as ‘taking from one group of people and giving to another’, when questioned about maternity pay.
I mean, the whole point of tax is that it’s about taking money from individual citizens and businesses and using it to pay for things that might not be possible without taking and pooling those funds. Such as, let’s say, pandemic preparations.
She fails to mention that one of the reasons businesses are failing is because of the additional costs of imports and exports post-Brexit.
She also fails to mention that there was a time when houses didn’t costs six times your salary, when rents were lower, when council houses were being built, and when the UK’s economic infrastructure was owned by the tax payer not by overseas multinational corporations.
Quote from the Guardian coverage below.
Badenoch says maternity pay benefits 'excessive'
Kemi Badenoch has said she thinks maternity pay is too high.
In an interview with Times Radio, she was asked if she thought maternity pay was at the right level. She replied:
Maternity pay varies, depending on who you work for. But statutory maternity pay is a function of tax, tax comes from people who are working. We’re taking from one group of people and giving to another. This, in my view, is excessive.
Businesses are closing, businesses are not starting in the UK, because they say that the burden of regulation is too high.
When asked to confirm that she thinks maternity pay is excessive, she replied:
I think it’s gone too far the other way, in terms of general business regulation. We need to allow businesses, especially small businesses, to make more of those decisions.
The exact amount of maternity pay, in my view, is neither here nor there. We need to make sure that we are creating an enviroment where people can work and people can have more freedom to make their own decisions.
When it was put to her that level of maternity pay was important for people who could not otherwise afford to have a baby, Badenoch said:
We need to have more personal responsibility. There was a time when there wasn’t any maternity pay and people were having more babies.
Statutory maternity pay is 90% of average weekly earnings for the first six weeks, and then £184 per week, or 90% of average pay, for the next 33 weeks.
Badenoch says she practises what she preaches in this regard. According to Blue Ambition, Michael Ashcroft’s useful and mostly positive biography of Badenoch, when she was head of digital operations at the Spectator, before becoming an MP, and she became pregnant with her second child, she resigned instead of taking maternity leave. “She told me she thought it would be unfair to ask us to keep her job open while she was on maternity leave,” Fraser Nelson, the Spectator editor, is quoted in the book as saying. “She would have been within her rights not to have done that.”
Badenoch might have been helped in making this decision by the fact that her husband is an investment banker.