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Rachel Reeves has defended raising taxes by the highest amount since 1993 as she said “everything has to be paid for”.

The chancellor announced £40bn worth of tax rises in Wednesday’s budget, with the lion’s share coming from a £25bn increase in employers’ National Insurance contributions.

She told Sky News’ Breakfast With Kay Burley that, unlike the previous Conservative government, she has included everything ministers will spend in their forecast, including £11.8bn compensation for victims of the infected blood scandal and £1.8bn for victims of the Post Office accounting scandal.

Politics latest: Hunt to step down from shadow cabinet

Ms Reeves insisted the tax rises would “fix the foundations and wipe the slate clean” and that this would be a one-off budget.

She added: “As a result of what we’ve done, we’re not going to have to come back and ever do a budget like this again, because we’ve brought everything out into the open.”

The chancellor also admitted growth “is largely unchanged” in the next five years, as revealed by the Office for Budget Responsibility’s (OBR) report on the budget.

But she said that is because she is looking at the economy in the long-term.

She said: “For the first time, the OBR are now looking at economic growth over a longer time frame.

“And that’s really important because often politicians make short-term decisions rather than things that are in the long term interests of the country.”

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‘Raising taxes was not an easy decision’

Ms Reeves said she had to make the tax rises she did, despite promising not to raise taxes beyond Labour’s manifesto, because of “the circumstances that I inherited” from the Conservatives as she repeated they left a £22bn black hole.

“I could have swept that under the carpet and pretended it didn’t exist, or try and raise a bit of money this year and a bit more next year,” she said.

“I didn’t want to do that.

“I wanted to be open and honest, to wipe the slate clean, to put our public finances on a stable trajectory, to make sure that our NHS is properly funded so we can bring down those huge waiting lists.”

Read more:
Reeves promised to be the iron chancellor – but her first budget brings dramatic change

Chancellor’s hefty tax and spending plans are a huge gamble

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UK’s economic growth forecast

Ms Reeves’ predecessor, the Conservative Party’s Jeremy Hunt, said Wednesday was a “bad day for trust in British politics” and said it will mean “lower pay, lower living standards, higher inflation, higher mortgages” for ordinary families.

He told Sky News: “Because 30 times this year before the election, the chancellor said she had no plans to increase tax outside of what was explicitly written in the Labour manifesto.

“And we had the biggest tax raising budget in British history.”

The shadow chancellor said a Conservative budget would have taken “the harder path” by cutting the number of people on benefits to 2019 levels to fund public services, which he said would release £34bn a year.

He added he does not think “anyone actually believes this £22bn number… but she didn’t increase taxes by £22bn, she increased them by £40bn”.

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“This was not about her legacy. This was a choice,” he added.

“This was the budget that she wanted to do all along. And it’s a legitimate choice. It’s one I disagree with. But if she’d wanted to do that, she should have told us before the election we could have had the debate.”

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South Africa’s central bank flags crypto, stablecoins as financial risk

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South Africa’s central bank flags crypto, stablecoins as financial risk

The South African Reserve Bank issued its second financial stability report for 2025, identifying digital assets and stablecoins as a new risk as the number of users in the country continues to grow.

In a report released on Tuesday, South Africa’s central bank identified “crypto assets and stablecoins” as a new risk for technology-enabled financial innovation. The bank reported that the number of combined users on the country’s three largest crypto exchanges reached 7.8 million as of July, with about $1.5 billion held in custody at the end of 2024.

“Due to their exclusively digital – and therefore borderless – nature, crypto assets can be used to circumvent the provisions of the Exchange Control Regulations,” said the report, referring to regulations to control the inflows and outflows of funds to South Africa.

Cryptocurrencies, Central Bank, South Africa, Stablecoin
Total registered users across the top crypto exchanges in South Africa. Source: South African Reserve Bank

In addition to crypto assets like Bitcoin (BTC), XRP (XRP), Ether (ETH), and Solana (SOL), the central bank said that there had been a “structural shift” in the adoption of stablecoins based on a significant increase in trading volume since 2022: 

“Whereas Bitcoin and other popular crypto assets were the main conduit for trading crypto assets until 2022, USD-pegged stablecoins have become the preferred trading pair on South African crypto asset trading platforms […] This is due to the notably lower price volatility of stablecoins compared to unbacked crypto assets.”

Related: South Korea stablecoin framework stalls as regulators split over banks’ role

The Financial Stability Board, a financial watchdog for entities in the G20, reported in October that South Africa had “no framework in place”  for regulating global stablecoins, and only “partial regulations in place” for cryptocurrencies. The central bank said that “risks may build up undetected” from crypto, posing a threat to the country’s financial stability until an appropriate regulatory framework is established.

Different story with South Africa’s government on crypto

The central bank’s warning echoed similar sentiments from 2017, when deputy governor Francois Groepe said issuing digital currencies would be too risky for the country.

However, among policymakers in South Africa’s government, the sentiment may be slightly more bullish.

In 2022, the country’s Financial Sector Conduct Authority designated cryptocurrency as a financial product and subsequently issued licenses for crypto companies to conduct business.