https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/bankers-roll-in-cash-as-pensioners-freeze-and-children-forced-to-go-hungry

RACHEL REEVES’S decision to protect fat cat bankers has lost the public £15 billion — money that could have saved freezing pensioners and hundreds of thousands of children from going hungry, a damning new report found today.

Campaigners for a windfall tax on banking profits slammed the Chancellor after it emerged that Britain’s four biggest banks made a record £45.9bn in profits for 2024.

Positive Money found that the policy, called for by unions and left MPs, would have brought in an additional £14.7bn for the Exchequer this year after Lloyds Bank became the last of the so-called Big Four to announce its £6bn pre-tax profits for last year.

The group calculated that increasing the existing surcharge on bank profits from 3 to 35 per cent, in line with the government’s windfall tax on energy companies, could have raised this sum from Lloyds, HSBC, Barclays and NatWest alone.

This would be enough to cover the cost of scrapping the two-child benefit cap — fives times over.

…

Article continues at https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/bankers-roll-in-cash-as-pensioners-freeze-and-children-forced-to-go-hungry

Editorial:The stark division in modern capitalist Britain – people or profits