The Government should not forget the lessons Margaret Thatcher taught us about public money - Sarah Todd

While pouring cold water on everything former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher ever said or did is a national pastime, she knew about money. She was from a generation that understood about looking after the pennies and the pounds taking care of themselves.

Her father, Alf, ran a corner shop in the Lincolnshire market town of Grantham. He had left school at 12 and started out as a shop assistant; eventually buying his own business through hard work and saving.

During her political career, Margaret often called upon the simple economics of that grocery shop.

Such an easily understandable approach to the national pursestrings is what our country needs right now. Bringing back piggy banks for children and building society passbooks would be a start. Today’s population has become too distanced from its money. It’s now the ping of a mobile phone screen, or a click at the online checkout to accept instant credit.

There can’t be much on television at the moment, as an old video of Thatcher addressing the Conservative Party conference in 1983 has been found and watched online.

In it, she says: “Let us never forget this fundamental truth. The state has no source of money other than the money people earn themselves. If the state wishes to spend more, it can do so only by borrowing your savings or by taxing you more. There is no such thing as public money, there is only taxpayers’ money.”

Too right Margaret. Over the intervening years, it feels like this fiscal fact has been forgotten. Workers and savers are used to prop up everybody else.

When teachers, train drivers or doctors get pay rises it’s not public money paying for them. It’s taxpayers’ money. When illegal immigrants are housed in hotels it’s not public money picking up the tab. Investment in the NHS? This contributor doesn’t want her tax return spent on computer systems, just doctors who see patients in person please.

It’s a long-running joke that The Husband is careful with his money, purchasing his glasses for a pound from a shop on Scarborough seafront. He may be an extreme example, but there are plenty like him that would be absolutely and utterly appalled to read recently about Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer’s £2,435-worth of designer glasses.

Is he blind? That’s not an ophthalmic observation but about being out of step with us taxpayers. Such amounts are vulgar. It doesn’t matter who is picking up the bill for them; to spend such amounts on items such as clothing or spectacles is in poor taste. Not just to those on the breadline, but people living within their means yet constantly coughing into the system for the benefit of others rather than treating themselves.

Would those rumoured to be targeted in next week’s Budget ever spend such silly amounts? How many of those working 365 days a year on traditional family farms or pensioners have ever worn a £500 jumper?

So, speculation has been mounting about what will be included in next week's parliament-defining budget. Let’s get this straight; not everybody who owns property, land or businesses are the enemy. It’s nothing nowadays for the average sized family home to be worth £325,000, the point at which inheritance tax comes into play.

There are, of course, loopholes that consecutive Governments have failed to close.

Farming’s new hero, Jeremy Clarkson, openly admits he bought land on the advice of his accountant. Of course, he went from not caring diddly-squat to becoming a countryside champion; giving back through his support of farmers more than any amount of tax saved.

The Country Land and Business Association (CLA) has used the example of an average-sized family farm of 215 acres to demonstrate what is likely to happen if agricultural land inheritance tax reliefs are scrapped. Its research shows someone inheriting such a farm from their parents could well be forced to sell off up to 40 per cent to pay the tax demand.

Doors, sorry five-bar gates, would be wide open for big businesses to buy up land for solar panels - taking it out of food production and making us more reliant on imports - or for crackpots to rewild and release wolves or goodness knows what else onto.

Come on Labour, go after the grifters not the grafters. No maths GCSE is needed to know the sense of leaving genuine family farms, passed from generation to generation without so much as a new tractor, never mind an expensive pair of glasses or designer suit, alone. Same goes for pensioners and Britain’s backbone of people perennially paying-in to a system that treats them like muck on a proper (rather than tax avoiding investor) farmer’s boot.

Sarah Todd is a journalist specialising in farming and rural life. Read her weekly column in Wednesday’s edition of The Yorkshire Post.