Portrait of the week: Tax rises, Tube gets busier and Taliban names its government

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Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, announced a new tax in the Commons branded a ‘health and social care levy’. It would increase National Insurance paid by employees and employers by 1.25 percentage points from April 2022. A year later it would become a separate tax that even pensioners still earning would have to pay. Share dividends would also see an extra 1.25 per cent tax rate. Of the £12 billion a year raised, only £1.8 billion would go to social care for the next three years. Some of the tax would go to meet the increased tax bill of the NHS as an employer paying the levy. From October 2023 there would be a cap on personal care liabilities of £86,000 over a person’s lifetime, though this would not cover accommodation. The new tax broke the Conservative manifesto undertaking not to raise income tax or National Insurance, but Mr Johnson said: ‘A global pandemic was in no one’s manifesto.’ Sir Keir Starmer, the leader of the Labour party, replying in the Commons, said: ‘Read my lips — the Tories can never again claim to be the party of low tax.’ The Institute for Fiscal Studies said that the increases, taken with those announced in the March Budget, represented the highest tax rises in 30 years. For good measure, the government suspended for a year the ‘triple lock’ on state pension increases by disregarding the average wage increase of 8 per cent, leaving pensioners with an increase nearer the 2.5 per cent. Sajid Javid, the Health Secretary, had earlier announced an extra £5.4 billion for the NHS in England over the next six months.