“Labour will raise your taxes. It’s who they are, it’s in their DNA. The Conservatives are the party of free enterprise and entrepreneurialism. Labour are the party of an ever-increasing state. Our philosophy is founded on clear principles that people and businesses should keep more of their money to spend and reinvest, thereby creating economic growth. Labour’s philosophy depends on grabbing ever more of that money to feed an expanding public sector.”
So writes Jeremy Hunt in this morning’s Daily Telegraph. At first glance it’s an unremarkable passage, a orthodox restatement of a classic Tory catechism about the fundamental differences between themselves and Labour.
But to what extent is it really true anymore?
I mean yes, Labour does tend to end up “grabbing ever more of that money to feed an expanding public sector”. But that’s exactly what this Government has done, too.
This makes the classic ‘Labour’s Tax Bombshell’ bit difficult to pull off. When Rishi Sunak warned in Tuesday’s debate that under Labour pensions will be taxed for the first time, that’s only because he froze income tax thresholds and is now proposing to unfreeze them – but only for pensioners. The Prime Minister has turned inflation into a tax bombshell for working people (although he’ll get away with it because Labour aren’t going to un-freeze thresholds).
Likewise, and notwithstanding the increasingly vicious row which is now raging over Sunak’s claim that Labour’s tax plans carry a £2000 price tag for households, peddling that claim invites comparisons to the Government’s own tax record, as poor Bim Afolami discovered yesterday; according to Sky’s Ed Conway, the comparable increase is £13,000.
Freezing thresholds allows the Chancellor to announce some headline ‘tax cuts’ whilst depending on inflation to push people into higher rates, increasing the overall tax burden. It’s a profoundly dishonest way to draw up a Budget; sadly, it seems likely to be the new normal, whoever is in office.
Beyond tax, ministers are talking big on immigration again (little wonder, seeing those Reform poll numbers), but just last month the Government went out of its way to get the Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) to advise against scrapping the graduate visa, a policy the MAC deeply dislikes.
The departments of Education and Business, to say nothing of the Treasury, will not be any less inclined to lobby against any cut to numbers after the election. Why should we think Sunak or Hunt would be more inclined to face them down?
And then we have this morning’s announcement that the Conservatives would undertake a serious overhaul of the law on murder, including an increase in the minimum sentence for murders committed in the home from 15 years to 25. Fine, sounds like something the party of law and order (so-called) might say.
But at present ministers are letting prisoners out early, and police chiefs trying to arrest as few criminals as possible, because we don’t have sufficient jail space. Building more prisons is essential if any pledge to get tough on crime is to mean anything. (Labour haven’t mentioned this either, by the way, so their own law-and-order push will go the same way.)
Politicians have always spun their messaging, of course. But has there ever been a point previously where the rhetoric and the policy were so divorced from each other?
