John Healey must not increase Britain’s historically high tax rates until mountain of welfare waste is toppled

Labour’s forgotten its wallet yet again WHEN he was a humble Treasury minister in 2006, John Healey arrived at the till in the Commons tea room and realised he had no cash on him. To save himself embarrassment Mr Healey quickly asked Labour colleagues to bail him out. John Healey must not increase Britain’s historically high tax rates until mountain of welfare waste is toppled Credit: Alamy Mr Burnham should tackle the staggering £10billion lost to benefit fraud and error every year Credit: Getty Flash forward 20 years. He is now Chancellor and the nation’s coffers are empty thanks to a debt of £3trillion. So Mr Healey has been tasked with another whipround to save the nation’s blushes, this time from his Labour Cabinet colleagues. Sign up for The Sun newsletter Thank you! Andy Burnham wants the Chancellor to find savings from existing Whitehall budgets across the board. Mr Healey is very resourceful, but the kind of spending the new PM wants can’t be funded by passing the hat round to find some shrapnel from the back of the sofa. It demands deep cuts to ballooning public spending, most notably the £333billion-a-year welfare bill. For a start Mr Burnham should tackle the staggering £10billion lost to benefit fraud and error every year, which is an insult to every single taxpayer. There must be no Budget plans to increase Britain’s already historically high tax rates until this mountain of welfare waste is toppled. The new PM talks a good game when he is attacking private financial scandals. Why doesn’t he apply the same standards to Government waste? Most read in The Sun Only last week Mr Burnham blasted rip-off water companies, saying: “Customers can’t be treated as a blank cheque . . . or a bottomless source of funding for other people’s failures.” Spot on, PM. Now change the word “customers” to “taxpayers” and sort out the mess on your own doorstep. Creative accounting ANOTHER clue to Andy Burnham’s business sense can be found in his new appointment as Arts Minister. The PM went out of his way to make Ruth Mackenzie a peer last month so she could take up the post in his Government. With that support, most people would imagine she is a much sought-after appointment. But she was fired from one of her previous jobs in Paris when her ultra woke regime ended up driving a theatre towards a deficit of almost five million euros. Earlier in her career she was a boss of Scottish Opera when it was brought to the brink of collapse with debts of £2.5million. Ms Mackenzie may be a titan of culture. But when it comes to money she doesn’t appear to know her arts from her elbow. Comment now