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‘I didn’t come into politics to raise taxes on working people,’ said the shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves in Liverpool this week. ‘Indeed I want them to be lower.’ That was a direct electoral attack on Reeves’s opposite number, Jeremy Hunt, who has increased the already huge fiscal burden on the British public. If the Tories aren’t the party of lower taxes, what are they for?
The challenge for the Treasury whips is how to stop tensions in the tearooms over tax from spilling out into the open
Hunt’s more immediate challenge comes from a tax rebellion within his own ranks. His Tory colleague Sir Jake Berry – the pugnacious leader of the Northern Research Group – has corralled a phalanx of fellow MPs into endorsing a pledge to not vote for any new taxes that increase the overall burden.
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