Labour has decided to lean into the £2,000 tax hike claim by the Tories, and turn it into a row about lying. Keir Starmer yesterday accused Rishi Sunak of ‘lying’, saying: ‘That’s why the choice at the next election is starker now than it was yesterday. It’s a choice between chaos and confusion, the sort of thing we’ve seen now for 14 years, and now lies on top of it. Or turn the page and rebuilding with Labour.’
The problem is that this £2,000 tax claim is not out of the ordinary
It is not a strategy without risk: it allows the £2,000 claim to be repeated. But given that was going to happen anyway, the party has decided to try to recover from its leader’s flat-footedness in Tuesday’s TV debate.
Interestingly, the party has not made the row about governments requiring the civil service to produce these costings, something former Cabinet Secretary Gus O’Donnell has called the ‘grubbiest’ job he and his fellow mandarins had to carry out.
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