by Wes Streeting’s admission yesterday – that Labor has spending plans beyond what it promised in its manifesto – should open the doors and properly examine what exactly Sir Keir Starmer’s government would do.
On television, the shadow health secretary admitted that the Labor manifesto was not the party’s true plan for government. This should come as no surprise: Starmer has a form – during his own leadership campaign – of making promises only to scrap them as soon as he wins. The declaration is a document but people could not believe.
Labor promises a revolution in the NHS, funded by closing a few tax loopholes it says will be done easily. He claims he will decarbonise the power grid by 2030 – a goal experts have said is impossible – and that a fifth of the budget he initially set for himself will go towards doing the work.
Even the tax increases that Labor admits to mean, based on official forecasts, would take Britain’s total tax burden to its highest ever proportion of our national wealth: more even than the previous record set by Clement Attlee in 1948.
But of course, he has published plans to make a statement. As Paul Johnson of the Institute for Fiscal Studies says, “Labour’s manifesto gives no indication of a plan for where the money would come from” to finance its promises. This is because, as reported leaks cabinet shadow i The Guardian confirm, Starmer and his shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves are planning an emergency budget this autumn.
In that budget, the party will claim that the finances are much worse than feared – even though all the data it needs is already published and readily available – and will raise a dozen taxes new. According to a source familiar with the plan, Reeves wants to “take a kitchen sink approach to increasing tax revenue.” The source admitted: “This is not what they are presenting to the public at the moment.”
This is straight from the Labor playbook. Starmer and Reeves boast about how they learned from the New Labor years. In 1997, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown had already agreed to end tax relief on dividends received by pension funds, but kept the plan out of the manifesto and bullied the editor of the Guardian to stop reporting it . In 2001, they refused to inform the country that they planned to raise national insurance contributions to fund additional health spending.
Now Starmer and Reeves refuse to tell us their secret tax plans in this election. Labor has promised not to raise income tax, national insurance contributions or VAT. But he claims that – as with charging VAT on school fees – ending relief is not a tax increase. So any current tax relief – on pension contributions, for example, or business taxes – is outside the scope of the commitment.
Labor has been extremely unclear about its approach to taxing pensions. Refusing to back the Conservative “triple plus green” policy – which promises to stop the basic state pension being drawn into income tax by linking its value to pensioners’ personal tax allowances – does not mean he intends to taxing the state pension itself. In fact, he proposes that he will reduce income tax thresholds entirely over the next five years – although his spokesman and shadow ministers continue to claim that “people will not be paying more income tax”.
Then there is the issue of applying capital gains tax to family homes. Firstly, Angela Rayner, the deputy Labor leader, refused to rule this out during an ITV debate last week. And then, Sir Keir Starmer did the same during his BBC interview with Nick Robinson. On Saturday, Starmer’s campaign director, Morgan McSweeney, “Liked” a social media post saying Labor should “raise capital gains tax” to bring £15 billion into the Exchequer. No doubt Starmer will claim, as he does with school fees, that this would not be a tax increase, as it would technically be an end to tax relief.
This is Labour’s logic: the instinct of Starmer and his party. Anything that is not taxed is treated with suspicion – a privilege to be enjoyed by the state. And so everything will be fair game. Business taxes, pension taxes, driving taxes, property taxes, green taxes on energy bills – they are all in Labour’s sights. He even wants to enshrine tax and spending and redistribution in law, placing a legal duty on public bodies to reduce inequality. This was quite dangerous when it was first mentioned in 2010, during the passage of the Equality Act. In the age of critical race theory and the pursuit of “equity” the result will be catastrophic inequality – perhaps even systemic.
And this is the lesson of Labour’s manifesto and its wider campaign. Listen very carefully to what he has to say. Pay close attention to what he doesn’t say. And try to understand not only the policies that are put forward, but the intuitions and underlying motives that guide them. We cannot know what will happen next year, let alone what will happen in 2029. In the next five years, we will have to face economic challenges, geopolitical threats, and the dangers of terrorism. Key risks include another pandemic, loss of telecommunications cables, and disruption of food or energy supplies.
The instincts of its leaders guide how a government responds to the unknown. Starmer fought to cancel the Brexit referendum, campaigned to make Jeremy Corbyn prime minister, tried to block the deportation of foreign criminals, wanted Covid lockdowns to continue for longer and more cost, supporting a critical race theory of segregation and a discredited gender ideology, and i. In response to Black Lives Matter, the generation chose to take the cameras.
The polls suggest we are heading for a huge Labor majority. If he gets it, we know what to expect. It’s clear, not just from what Starmer says – and what he doesn’t do – but from his instinctive response to every challenge. There is no problem that the answer is not higher taxes, more government, and legal intervention. These are not the ingredients for us. We will need a strong Conservative Party to stand by it.
