What tax rises are Labour planning?

The Tory manifesto is ‘a clear plan’ promising ‘bold action’. Rishi Sunak uses the word ‘bold’ three times in two paragraphs. If it were bold, it would not need its 80 pages. Its detail is best seen as a resource for candidates trying to deploy specific promises with specific interest groups. This is a way of shoring up the Tory vote, not of winning the election – a tacit admission of defeat. It may have an eye, too, to what happens afterwards. Labour wants to be able to say that the Conservatives crashed out on the most extreme manifesto ever. Indeed, Sir Keir Starmer is already calling it a Jeremy Corbyn-style document, but from the right. This is untrue. The manifesto is essentially technocratic, as is the party’s leader. It is not wicked or extreme, just rather beside the point.

In each election, a game is played in which Labour and/or the Conservatives try to conceal the taxes they intend to increase. The concealment rarely lasts, but it buys the parties a bit of time to distract public attention while the media go on the hunt for the missing piece. In this election, we have reached the point at which it becomes clear that Labour, having foresworn rises in income tax, National Insurance or VAT, will therefore have to increase the rates of capital and property taxes and/or the spread of such taxes. This will be presented as hitting only the rich. It would hit them: indeed, the prospect is already driving mobile capitalists abroad. But it will mark a wider policy shift, attacking the capital accumulation of millions of householders, something which no government has done for a long time. How clear will Labour be about this? Before the 1979 election, Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives had decided that, to fulfil their big promise to cut income tax, they would have to raise VAT.