The Treasury this week confirmed the Chancellor will impose a further round of higher taxes on UK energy producers to fund the removal of import tariffs on 100 food and drink lines. Biscuits, chocolate, dried fruit, baked beans. The headline-grabbing saving for the entire country is £150 million a year. That works out at about £2.20 per household. Two pounds twenty. They want a thank-you note.

Picking Pockets To Hand Out Pennies

Let me explain how this works in plain English. You squeeze the companies that drill, refine and supply the energy that powers every home, every factory and every hospital in the country. Those companies then put their bills up to compensate. Those bills land on every British household and every British business. The Treasury then uses the tax take to nudge a few pence off a tin of imported chocolate.

Robbing Peter to pay Peter, and charging Peter a service fee for the privilege. That is the entire policy. The economic illiteracy is staggering and the political contempt for the public who have to read about it is worse.

The Real Tax Picture For 2026

This is on top of the dividend tax rise that came in last month — basic-rate dividend tax has jumped from 8.75% to 10.75%, punishing pensioners and small shareholders who built modest portfolios for retirement. The personal allowance is still frozen at £12,570. Higher-rate thresholds are still frozen. They are frozen through to 2030 and now the rumour mill is saying 2031. That is fiscal drag, and it is the single biggest stealth tax raid in British history.

The Office for Budget Responsibility's own numbers show that 79% of households reported their cost of living rising again in the month to April. Labour came in promising change. Households have got change all right — they have got less of it in their pockets every week.

What Cheaper Beans Will Not Fix

Cutting tariffs on imported food makes British farmers more vulnerable, not less. A British producer of jam, biscuits, baked goods or processed fruit now competes head-to-head with an importer who just had his entry fee waived. Labour is not levelling the playing field. Labour is shoving British producers down a hill in the rain. And then taxing the energy that keeps their cold stores running.

What Reform UK Would Do

Reform UK would lift the income tax personal allowance to £20,000. That is real money in real workers' pockets — over £1,500 a year for a basic-rate taxpayer. It would be funded by scrapping net zero subsidies, slashing quangos, and ending the asylum hotel bill. We would not tax our domestic energy producers into uncompetitiveness — we would unlock the North Sea, license new nuclear, and let British industry power itself with British energy.

You do not lower the cost of living by playing three-cup-monte with tax revenues. You lower it by raising the threshold at which the state takes a slice and by lowering the cost of the energy that flows through every product and service in the economy. Labour has done the opposite on both counts and is asking us to applaud a £2 saving on imported chocolate. The British public is not stupid. They can read the receipt.