Today Jeremy Corbyn launched Labour’s 2017 manifesto in Bradford. Given that the draft version of the document leaked last week, a lot of the contents haven’t come as a surprise. However, there are still a few significant things to note from the 124-page document:
- Labour have not factored in the cost of nationalisation into their ‘full costing’. Despite promising last week that the party’s policies would be ‘fully costed’, there is a large chunk of the party’s plans that are missing from the calculations. The cost of buying back public utilities, railways and Royal Mail is not included. Given that Thames Water alone is valued at over £10bn, this is no small feat. The party say that the costs are not in the document as they are one-off payments that would fall into capital spending (something they can borrow for). However, when asked, Jeremy Corbyn declined to say just how much the party would have to borrow to put the plans into action.
- A Labour government would give more money to students than the NHS. Despite all the party’s talk about prioritising the NHS, it’s students that appear to have the most to gain from a Labour government. £11.2bn will go on ‘removing tuition fees and restoring maintenance grants’, compared with £5bn on healthcare. On Coffee House, Ross Clark has more details on who exactly benefits here (clue: middle-class families).
- Labour’s tax revenue estimates are optimistic, at best. The party says it will raise £6.4bn from increasing income tax bands to 45pc for those earning above £80k and 50pc for those above £123k, £1.3bn from excessive pay levy and £6.5bn from Labour’s tax avoidance programme. Every election parties promise to bring in more revenue by cracking down on things like tax avoidance often to little avail. What’s more, the Institute of Fiscal Studies argues that the 50pc top rate of income tax does not raise much revenue after increased avoidance is taken into account.
- A Labour government could introduce a ‘land value tax’. Buried in a footnote, the party says it will ‘initiate a review into reforming council tax and business rates and consider new options, such as a land value tax, to ensure local government has sustainable funding for the long term. A land value tax would mean the party could take advantage of increases in property prices — but it would be divisive, which is presumably why they have kept it as a ‘maybe’.
- A Prime Minister Corbyn would crackdown on media empires. Watch out Rupert Murdoch, it sounds as though Jeremy Corbyn is coming for you. Although the Labour leader urged his supporters not to heckle the press, he also talked about media ‘plurality’. In the manifesto the party commits to taking steps to ‘ensure that Ofcom is better able to safeguard a healthy plurality of media ownership and to put in place clearer rules on who is fit and proper to own or run TV and radio stations’.
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