Andrew Neil drills into Labour’s manifesto page by page

The fascinating thing if you step away from this Manifesto is that it is strange. Tran. You know there's been a big bet on growth and supply-side reforms, which of course is what Liz Truss was planning to do now that her difficulty was that she put in the tax cuts. was ahead of the growth plan and did not evaluate anything, that is why it went so wrong and Starmo is not making that mistake, the Labor Manifesto comes out today and, although it is 125

page

s long with more than 30 photographs by Kier Starmer, nowhere does it. It tells us what major taxes workers plan to raise when they take power or how fast economic growth will supposedly magically conjure up the top priority.

Workers have explicitly told us which taxes will not increase income tax VAT National Insurance quite well together count for 60% of total tax revenue, that of course still leaves 40% still available and given that the Kingdom's tax base United now it's around a trillion pounds a year, that's right, a trillion, uh, you're talking about 400 billion taxis left up for grabs. Now, when he presses on what he could do with those taxis, he doesn't rule out increasing the Labor Party's mantra is that it has no plans to raise taxes on workers, but what it means by workers is never defined and when politicians say that no plans usually means yes, but they just don't tell us.

Remember Michael Heseltine, who repeatedly said that he had no plans to run against Margaret Thatcher. Chang's plans, don't you know? One thing is pretty clear if workers want to avoid spending cuts. It's already included in the official fiscal forecast that you will inherit and to afford the things that Labor governments want to do, you will have to raise taxes by a lot and in ways they don't tell us, perhaps increase capital gains tax as they propose liberal dams. billions that would fall largely on those with assets they sell, but many on average and slightly higher incomes would be caught if they fit Labour's definition of workers or it could curb the tax benefit that comes from paying into their pension that It would raise billions more again, largely from the well-off, but it would hit those in the 40% income tax bracket and now there are millions of them.

Increasing all the time, including millions in the public sector. If they are not workers, then the municipal tax must be reevaluated. Prohibitions are absurdly stuck at 1991 levels because politicians don't have the guts to increase them even as property prices skyrocket. Labor could disguise this with strong new bans on million-dollar properties that are undertaxed by international standards, but any revaluation would mean more council tax for everyone, including workers. people, none of this is addressed in the Labor Manifesto, so there is economic growth, the magic elixir designed to cure all your tax and spending worries because it generates more income without more taxes.

Workers are not proposing to boost the economy with an injection of Keynesian priming. more spending or tax cuts to revive the economy like Joe Biden did in the states. No, no, what he proposes is new planning laws to encourage more housing construction to accelerate the green and digital economy. Investments: this is what is called supply side. reforms that take time to lead to higher growth, but the labor sector will need new growth now because it needs new money now, it is not easy when the economy did not grow at all in April, our largest market, the euro zone, will is stagnating and our second largest market, the United States.

The states are rapidly slowing down all the developments that will inhibit the Labor Party's ability to emerge from the economic crisis and all the issues on which the Labor Manifesto is silent. I'm Andrew Neil at Times Radio Your Election St Station. Now K Starm was asked about taxes at last night's conference. Sky News interview no tax rises needed in our Manifesto plans no no tax rises for workers, that's income tax National Insurance R um I just to codify, just to codify that guys, because when a politician says, there are no plans, he does I mean, he might as well have done this a bit, and he was also asked about the revaluation of council tax bans.

Well council taxes are too high for many people, they have been going up, they went up again this year but that is because the government lost control. "You're not, you're not going to do a review of the council tax bans. You really know they were last reassessed when I was a teenager and I'm really old, well there we go, that's what he said last night." I'm joined at the Sky News event by Oliver Wright, political editor of the Times, so let's look at some of these tax issues. Welcome to the program you share, which I think is the consensus of commentators outside the Labor Party anyway.

What we are saying in the

manifesto

is that, given the fiscal straitjacket that they will inherit, it is very strict and given that Labor governments like to spend money, they want to do things, they will be under pressure to spend more money, some important taxes go to increase, yes, I mean. I think those people with long memories will remember the 1997 election campaign, um, and Tony Blau and Gordon Brown, where they pursued a very similar strategy of being cautious, you know, emphasizing that they weren't going to raise taxes and then, of course, in Gordon Brown's campaign. In the first budget there was a rather unexpected attack on pensions that wasn't in the

manifesto

and I think a lot of people are quite rightly sceptical, given the overall economic situation, if Sakama doesn't want to go back to austerity, he won't. have to raise taxes one way or another, so which ones will he and Rachel Reeves likely choose?

I mentioned in my monologue the possibility of capital gains tax reducing the amount of tax benefit you get when you pay a pension contribution. and maybe even council tax bans but there are others too but these would raise a lot of money which you think is a silly answer but it depends on how much money they need, if you need a lot you have to do it. opt for something like capital gains or changing the way you pay tax on your tax relief on pension contributions, pension contributions are important and you could disguise it as helping people who were less well off because at the moment obviously if you don't make 40 if you don't hit the 40% threshold you're only going to get 20% tax relief so if you balance it out but take a little bit of money off then that would be a good way to increase income while I say I'm helping workers.

I mean, you could argue that, as I understand it, the cost of pension tax relief or getting tax relief to pay money into your pension is over 30 billion, it's a lot of money. and it's also biased towards the highest paid because they can deduct 40% and 45%, so I guess a Labor government could say "hey, if everyone deducts 20% of the basic rate", yeah, that's pretty fair and we'll save maybe 10 12. billion, yeah, and the play will be here, um, they come into power, oh my God, things are much worse than we thought. We have seen the books, yes, we have seen the books.

A disaster will be a repeat of 2010 perhaps without the note. What about the capital gains tax and this because now they need money? I mean, when they were in power, when Nigel Lawson raised capital gains tax, there was a two-week period. window between announcing it and saying he was going to do it during which many people crystallized their gains at the lower tax rate and over the next two years, even though the rate had increased, capital gains income actually fell, what doesn't help Rachel Reeves balances that it would have to be an announcement that is not informed in advance if a politician is capable of doing that, sensible people will make their decisions now or not.

I think people are still unclear, I mean, I think a lot of people are taking what Starma says at face value and I think you know just play devil's advocate on your side for a moment. I think there is a desire within the unions to come in and impose some limitations on the public sector. I think the first thing you know is what they have to do is have a comprehensive spending review and I think it will only be a one year comprehensive spending review and I think it will be quite tight, probably in line with the kind of existing government plans, I think where you can see it. the really big changes will come about a year into that period, when they have a better idea of ​​where the economy is heading in terms of growth and where the pressure will be reduced from their own MPs, which will probably be quite a large number of them.

They're going to be starting to turn on the spending spigot, so I think that's when you're really looking at those potential income increases. I don't think Rachel Reeves when she does her first budget in September and October won't do it. I think there will be big surprises there, it will be more about putting some of the manifesto measures into practice. What about this issue of council tax bans now, when they were made under John Major? Younger listeners started here, yes, in 1991. The average residential property in the UK was just under 58,000, now it's £292,000 and obviously much more in London and the South East and yet that's still the basis of municipal tax prohibitions.

I mean, there must be some temptation to reevaluate them to bring them in. they're more in line with current property values, but if you do that, you're actually going to hit a lot of what workers call working people, yeah, if you have any sense, if they have any sense, they'll leave the tax revaluation alone. municipal. Alone, um, now I mean you're right, it probably should be done, it's unfair, but you know, go back even further, you know, to the pole tax, you know there were some pretty clever things about the PO tax, it was designed to change the shape of the system, but the difficulty with all those things is that you create winners and you create losers the winners are silent the losers shout from the rooftops well, we got the pole tax because the T government was too scared to revalue the rates, yes, at that time, and in fact he was forced to do it. in Scotland because that was the law you had to re-evaluate and they said, oh we can't do that, let's try the PO tax, so we'll see that it's the opposite of a stealth tax, we'll see what that gives, the last question.

Oliver, looming over all of this, interestingly enough, is the legacy of Liz Truss, who got into trouble with the bond markets where governments borrowed, they didn't like what she was doing and this now imposes fiscal discipline on the chancellors that never existed. in the previous 10 years, when interest rates were abnormally low, yeah, I mean, I think the fascinating thing if you step away from this Manifesto is that it's strange, Tran um, you know there's been a lot of bets on growth and reforms on the supply side, which of course is what Liz Truss was planning to do now, her difficulty was that she put tax cuts before the growth plan and didn't evaluate anything, that's why it went so wrong and Starmer is not making that mistake, the plans in the Labor Manifesto. they are funded, but what you want to achieve, the kind of growth you want to see in the public service, depends on achieving growth in the economy and if you can't do that then there simply won't be the money to grow. public service in the way he wants and you know he is no more likely to get it than Liz Truss.

I think that's something that you know hasn't been appreciated by enough people yet, but I think that's going to come to four in the coming months and years, well, Oliver, you're the perfect guess because you've sent me perfectly for our next guest. talk about economic growth since the times, thank you for joining us. Pleasure to welcome you lean Halligan, economist and Daily Telegraph Welcome to Learning columnist, let's look at this question of economic growth. Labor always says we will get more growth, we will have a higher growth rate which will solve all sorts of problems, but when I look at what Labor is proposing I can see that some of the things over time would make a difference to growth. economical if done correctly, but there is no short-term solution for the economy.

They are not proposing anything that will result in more growth very quickly. No, there is no lever that can be pulled that will generate economic growth. Of course, economic growth is the sum total of hundreds and thousands and millions and billions oftransactions in the economy at any time and I think there is a sense that there is something a little overconfident about this Labor Manifesto if the workers had someone in their power. Among those who understood the party's own history, they would be talking about Tony Crossland, of course, who wrote the future of socialism in the 1950s, a huge figure in the Labor Party in the 1960s, famous education secretary because he He also tried to solve the central enigma. from the government we don't have enough things to give to our voters saying, but if we grow the economy, the pie gets bigger, so it's Tran, but it's also rooted in the Phil philosophy of most of our major parties, now one of the core supply side reforms and it's a topic you've written a lot about because it's about housing.

That is, they plan to relax planning laws to force councils to designate land for development and more housing construction, etc. I understand the logic behind this, but how long does that take, assuming they can do it? There will be resistance. How long does that take before it manifests into economic growth? I think what the unions are trying to do is right. I'm surprised all parties don't talk more about housing, it's kind of the whole problem, you have a long commute it's because you can't buy a house in the right place, you know a hugely stretched family because everyone works full time because you have a huge mortgage you know knife crime because there is a huge shortage of social housing lots of people in temporary accommodationThere is a huge waiting list for social housing, but it takes time.

Every recession recovery in this country in the last 100 years has been associated with a major housing construction boom, except for the deep recession that followed the global financial crisis of 2008.9 There was no housing construction boom. housing after that, the recession was weak, short and long and the economy hasn't really gotten out of second gear since the global financial crisis. I think we can all agree that building more houses is the right thing to do, but of course you are up against a lot of vested interests, particularly in the Tor and Libdem seats, which is perhaps why the Labor Party has been braver in planning reform or at least talking about planning reform than the other two main parties, specifically they are talking about what is called a land value tax, which you are right, my book Home Truths is covered in detail, but my version of land value tax, which has been supported by many politicians and many think tanks, is that when the value of agricultural land increases because it gets planning permission. can increase 200 300 times if you share that massive increase in planning with the local authority, then they can build the schools and hospitals, the ring roads, which means local development may not be as unpopular as it currently is, workers want to take that whole plan and win and give it to the state so that the landowners are completely stripped of that value which would mean they would have to rely on what are called cpos compulsory purchase orders to get any land release and that will end in the courts and it will continue for years and years and years a lawyer bonanza paid for by us and I guess the point from the beginning is that even if you do these things well, it takes a while before it trickles down into additional renewed economic growth.

Now, the other thing the unions have been saying. Of course, they are going to have green investments, they are going to go to Net Zero by 2030, no one else believes they will be able to achieve it by then, but the unions say that is what they are going to do. I present the problem to you. First of all, they have considerably reduced the amount they are going to invest: it is no longer 28 billion a year, nothing like maybe 25 billion in five years, but also much of that investment requires a lot of capital and does not create many jobs and therefore So it doesn't put money in people's pockets and it doesn't lead to economic growth again, so I go back to my original point.

I see the point of all these supply-side reforms, but they don't deliver economic growth this year. and maybe not next year. Yes, supply-side performance, by its very nature, takes a long time to impact the economy. It's the opposite of fiscal policy, where you can raise money and spend it immediately, put it in people's pockets immediately, but of course we know from history if you do that too often you end up like we did in the mid-1990s. 70s when workers went to the international monetary fund the UK literally needed a bailout it was our economic sewers my first memory was maybe too nerdy as a kid but you are right green investment will take a long time and anyway way, I think we are moving towards a situation where there is a slightly less enthusiastic approach to Net Zero policies, that doesn't mean that ordinary people don't want to.

Across Europe there is something incredible, you know, the greens were absolutely defeated among young people in Germany Cy uh uh, but it seems to me that this green investment takes a long time and I think that ordinary people want to leave a better world for their children, grandchildren, but the costs of Net Zero, putting all the subsidies to the companies of renewables on people's fuel and energy bills, it's deeply regressive because poor households pay more for their fuel and energy, so I think we're going to see a bit of Of course, environmentalists will say it's slower," scandal, shock, horror," but I think ordinary men and women, well-meaning families, will think we want to do this, but the cost of Net Zero has to be distributed more equitably across society so that it's not the man target of the van who has to pay so much to meet these objectives and the last point I would like to make to you, Liam, on the topic of economic growth is that by putting so much weight on it, you are held hostage by events that are not under your control. that economic growth in Britain was also determined by global factors and I look at the Eurozone now that it is stagnating is still not my sign of growth as the largest economy is actually in decline and on the other side of the Atlantic I see signs of a slowdown there too and that's our biggest domestic export market, so if these two things are also happening, that makes economic growth even harder to achieve, plus there aren't many of us in the media, Andrew, We follow politics very closely, but we also follow the economy and particularly the world. economics obviously you do, I try it my way and despite being a trained economic forecaster, most economic forecasts are just a job of educated guesswork or the idea that we are arguing about tax burdens in 1920 in 2029 like proportion of GDP in 2029.

They are both huge numbers, we have no idea what either of them are going to be and we are having discussions about the percentage points of the division of the two, that is completely crazy, that doesn't mean we don't make our statistics. We don't build models, of course we do, but it's very difficult to know how those models will turn out, and you're absolutely right. Growth is difficult to achieve. Growth is also extremely volatile and unknowable. It depends both on the price of oil and You know that the basic rate of income tax in the UK you have no control over which we of course have no control over and in fact you know that as the geopolitical risks, I would say geopolitical risks are currently at a post-Cold War high. of oil, the price of gas, seizing the rare earths on which this entire Green Revolution depends, seizing semiconductors whose production is dominated by countries that are not always friendly to us, these are the great global geniuses who will really determine the direction future economic situation of this country for all the talk we talked about the British general election, in fact, we'll end there Liam Haligan, thank you for joining me and I hope that listeners hear Oliver right there and Liam Halan who You're listening to the kind of discussion about what's being faced in the context of elections, kind of discussion you might not hear anywhere else anyway, that's our style.