Labour today has tried to shift the National Insurance debate from whether you should
cut waste to prevent a tax rise, to whether the Tories’ sums add up. When the Tories announced their plan to avoid the worst of Labour’s NICs rise by cutting waste they made a conscious
decision not to offer details on how they would make these efficiency savings. As one shadow Cabinet minister explained to me, they had no desire to repeat the experience of the James Review when
they were going on Newsnight to argue the toss over individual savings. The Tories think that the argument that government can save one pound in every hundred that it spends is credible and that
combined with the endorsement of two men who have advised the government on efficiency so recently is enough.
Labour is trying to use this lack of detail in the Tory plans to attack them as uncredible; back of the envelope calculations Brown called them this morning.
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