Paul Johnson: Tory and Labour attacks are ‘broadly fictional’

We’re five weeks into the election campaign – and just days away from polling day – and voters have plenty of parties, and numbers, to consider. Labour will raise everyone’s tax bill by £2,000, claim the Conservatives. Mortgages will rise by £4,800 under another Tory government, insist Labour. Is any of it true?

‘I would suggest that voters entirely ignore all of those sorts of numbers and calculations’, says Paul Johnson, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, in The Spectator’s office. ‘I think they’re broadly fictional.’ They are impossible claims to make, partly because ‘we don’t know what would happen under these different governments, because they really haven’t told us.’

The IFS is one of the UK’s leading economic research centres, which in addition to releasing dozens of its own reports, plays a role in assessing the impact of government policy. In the absence of the Office for Budget Responsibility during an election, the think tank thoroughly scrutinises the costings in party manifestos.