Wes Streeting’s admission yesterday – that Labor has spending plans beyond what was promised in its manifesto – should throw the floodgates open and prompt proper scrutiny of exactly what Sir Keir Starmer’s government will do.
The shadow health secretary admitted on television that Labour’s manifesto was not the party’s real plan for government. This shouldn’t come as a surprise: Starmer has a way of making promises during his own leadership campaign that he’ll throw them away as soon as he wins. The manifesto is a document that only the gullible can believe.
Labor is promising a revolution in the NHS, funded by closing several tax loopholes which it says can be easily done. The company claims it will decarbonize its energy grid by 2030, a goal experts say is impossible, with a fifth of the budget it originally allocated to do the job.
According to official estimates, even the tax increases agreed to by Labor would increase Britain’s overall tax burden to the highest ever percentage of our national wealth: even more than the previous record set by Clement Attlee in 1948.
But of course the published plans are fictitious. As Paul Johnson of the Institute for Fiscal Studies says, “Labour’s manifesto gives no indication of a plan for where the money will come from to fund its promises.” This is because shadow cabinet leaks have reportedly Guard Starmer and his shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves are planning an emergency budget this autumn.
In this budget, the party will argue that the fiscal situation is much worse than feared and will impose a dozen new taxes, even though all the data it needs has already been published and is freely available. Reeves wants to “take a kitchen sink approach to increasing tax revenue,” according to a source familiar with the plan. The source admitted: “That’s not what they’re presenting to the public right now.”
This is straight from the Labor Party playbook. Starmer and Reeves boast about what they learned from the New Labor years. In 1997 Tony Blair and Gordon Brown had already agreed to scrap tax relief on dividends from pension funds, but they left the plan out of the manifesto and pressured the Guardian editor to stop him reporting it. In 2001, they refused to tell the country of their plans to increase national insurance premiums to finance extra health spending.
Now Starmer and Reeves refuse to tell us their secret tax plans this election. Labor has promised not to pay income tax, national insurance contributions or VAT. But he claims that, as with the introduction of VAT on school fees, removing the discount is not a tax increase. Therefore, existing tax deductions such as pension contributions or business taxes are excluded from the scope of the commitment.
Labor has been extremely unsceptical about its approach to taxing pensions. Refusing to support the Conservative Party’s “triple lock plus” policy, which promises to stop the value of the basic state pension from being included in income tax by tying the value of it to pensioners’ personal tax deductions, could mean it plans to tax only the state pension. In fact, he suggests he will completely freeze income tax thresholds for the next five years, although his spokesmen and shadow ministers continue to claim that “people won’t pay any more income tax”.
There is also the issue of capital gains tax being imposed on family homes. First, Labor deputy leader Angela Rayner refused to rule out the possibility of doing so during last week’s ITV debate. Sir Keir Starmer later did the same in an interview with Nick Robinson on the BBC. On Saturday, Starmer’s campaign director Morgan McSweeney “liked” a social media post saying Labor should “increase capital gains tax” to save £15bn for the Treasury. No doubt Starmer will argue that this would not be a tax increase, as was the case with school fees, but would technically mean the removal of tax relief.
Because that is the logic of the Labor Party: the instinct of Starmer and his party. Everything that is not taxed is viewed with suspicion; this is a privilege that will be eliminated by the state. And so everything will be fair game. Business taxes, pension taxes, driving taxes, property taxes, green taxes on energy bills; All of this is right in front of the Labor Party. It even wants to enshrine taxation, spending and redistribution in law by imposing a legal duty on public institutions to reduce inequality. This was dangerous enough when it was first mooted during the introduction of the Equality Act in 2010. In the age of critical race theory and the quest for “equality,” this would lead to catastrophic—we might even say systemic—injustice.
And that is the lesson of Labour’s manifesto and its wider campaign. Listen very carefully to what is said. Pay close attention to what he doesn’t say. And try to understand not just the policies put forward but also the instincts and motivations 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 face economic difficulties, geopolitical threats and terrorist threats. Key risks include another outbreak, loss of telecommunications cables, and disruption of food or energy supplies.
How a government responds to the unknown is determined by the instincts of its leaders. Starmer fought to overturn the Brexit referendum, campaigned to make Jeremy Corbyn prime minister, tried to stop the deportation of foreign criminals, called for Covid lockdowns to continue for longer and at greater expense, promoted divisive critical race theory and discredited gender ideology, and He chose to kneel in front of the cameras in response to Black Lives Matter.
Polls show we are heading towards a Labor majority. If he gets it, we know what to expect. This is clear not only in what Starmer does and does not say, but also in his instinctive response to every challenge. There is no problem for which his response is not higher taxes, more government, and legislative interventionism. These are not materials for us. We will need a strong Conservative Party to oppose him.