£100k salary, feeling poor – is tax killing ambition?
The Politics Show
The New Statesman
4.2 • 1.5K Ratings
🗓️ 13 February 2026
⏱️ 24 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
A listener paying 67% in tax asks if Labour are destroying UK productivity.
From the new and improved New Statesman podcast studio, Anoosh and Rachel answer listener questions on tax, student loans and Nigel Farage MP's second (and third, and fourth) jobs.
In the mailbag this week:
A listener earning over £100,000 writes in to ask why the government is failing to address the "tax trap" that means high-earning parents are "penalised".
Would the British public back student loan forgiveness?
And why can Nigel Farage and other parliamentarians present TV shows, run consultancies, and earn money on the side of their MP job?
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The New Statesman. |
| 0:05.1 | Hello and welcome to Daily Politics from The New Statesman. |
| 0:08.5 | This is an episode we like to call You Ask Us. |
| 0:11.4 | I'm Anusha Kellyan and I'm here with Rachel Cuddleyth to answer all of the questions that you've been sending in. |
| 0:16.0 | Hello, Rachel. |
| 0:16.7 | Hello, happy yet as where we are. |
| 0:18.2 | We are in our new and improved studio. I love it. I love it so much. |
| 0:22.8 | For those of you who are not watching on YouTube, the old school podcast consumers, we are surrounded by these very tasteful bookshelves. |
| 0:30.7 | There are plants. There are plants. So there's signs of life in the studio at last, beyond our hosks in these chairs. |
| 0:39.8 | There's all of our podcast awards, which look kind of, I mean, they're these silver stars. |
| 0:43.6 | They look a bit like Soviet awards for whose mind the most plutonium this year. |
| 0:49.9 | Yeah, I think they've got six of them. |
| 0:51.6 | Yeah, we've done well. |
| 0:53.7 | So, yes, it's very nice to be sitting in this comfortable chair with you. Check us out of them. Yeah, we've done well. So yes, very nice to be sitting |
| 0:55.1 | in this comfortable chair with you. Check us out on YouTube. Yeah, yeah, yeah, have a look on |
| 0:58.9 | YouTube and see whether you like the design. And if you don't, don't send a comment, but if you do, |
| 1:04.3 | please get in touch. Please tell us how nice our chairs are. All right, Rachel, let's go to |
| 1:10.5 | the mailbag. What questions have we got |
| 1:12.5 | today? We've got ones on tax, student loans as always, these days, and Nigel Farage. But this |
| 1:19.6 | question is from Ashley. They've sent quite a long question, so I'm going to paraphrase it. |
| 1:23.8 | Ashley earns a little over 100K and says they are in the tax trap, paying an effective rate of 67%. |
| 1:30.2 | They say they don't mind paying the taxes. It's right that high earners should pay more, but they now |
... |
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