Gordon McElroy: It’s starting to look as though capital taxes – inheritance tax & capital gains tax – may rise in the Chancellor’s October budget. Whether the previous government really did leave a black hole in the public finances or not is open to question, but we have to take the Prime Minister’s recent comments at face value.

The downside, of course, is that while Capital Gains Tax might go up, the tax take could come down as people find ways to avoid selling things that would incur CGT. In the South, avoiding CGT has become something of an art form.

As for wider tax hikes, I hope Labour don’t break their manifesto promises. Even a small rise in corporation tax would have a major impact on investment and I think we would see larger organisations upping and leaving the UK.

Another issue across the UK is the challenge of getting the economically inactive back into some form of work, made all the more difficult by the fact that there are a million more of them post-Covid.

All in all, I want to see the Labour Government doing well, and Sir Keir Starmer has been more impressive as a Prime Minister than he was as opposition leader. He dealt with the recent street disorder well and his legal background (as a former Director of Public Prosecutions) came through.

The problem is that Northern Ireland, and the UK as a whole, needs a huge investment in infrastructure. Locally, Northern Ireland Water is just one very obvious example.

On a local level, the Executive has settled in and the very fact that we’re not talking about devolved government’s failings all the time means that it’s working at a day to day level. But serious funding challenges lie ahead.

And the Executive hasn’t had to face a really serious storm as yet. We won’t know how stable our government really is until it manages to come through one of those.

If the Executive isn’t going to consider introducing water charges – not to mention some prescription charges – then how else are we going to find the money for infrastructure investment. That’s before we think about the health service and policing, the other big draws on public money.

It remains a worry that business rates might just be an easy target. It’s much more palatable, and easier, to hit business rather than the public as a whole. The problem is that our business rates here in Northern Ireland are already higher than the rest of the UK, and any rise would have a serious effect on businesses here.