Revealed: Reeves’s tax rises expose Labour’s misleading manifesto claims

Casting his mind back to the election, Mr S recalls a heated debate about which party would raise taxes most. In the final televised debate before the national poll, Sir Keir Starmer was quick to accuse then-PM Rishi Sunak of ‘repeating a lie’ – that Labour were going to raise taxes by £2,000 per person. And, to be fair, he had a point: on Sunak’s own maths the Tories would have raised taxes by, er, £3,000 per person. Awkward…

Mr S’s friends at The Spectator’s DataHub have crunched all the manifestos put out at the time to see just who really would be responsible for the greatest tax hikes – with some rather interesting results. After removing the Green eco-zealots (who planned to raise the tax burden off the scale of any graph), the Lib Dems were in the lead. Sir Ed Davey’s lot would have taken the tax burden to a staggering 38 per cent of GDP – matching a post-war high.