Analysis: Labour manifesto vs the rest

Let's take a look in a bit more detail at some of those policies announced by Sir Keir Starmer, Our Economics and Data editor. Ed Conwaite is standing by. And I'm very pleased to say that Ed has taken the time, used it wisely and crunched some of the numbers. So, Ed, are you going to put a red line on your famous chart? Well, this is this is slightly quick and dirty because we've just, we've literally just had the numbers through from from Labour. So let me give you kind of an initial sense. But as the afternoon goes on, I'm sure that we'll have kind of more analysis kind of going through it. Well, I know we will because I'm doing a lot of it. This is showing you some of the big pictures. Don't worry, we don't have to go through all of the, the the outline items here. But I just want to kind of give you a sense of the main policies that Labour says matter when it comes to its public spending plans. And if you kind of glance at some of this stuff, whether you're talking about free office clubs, dentistry, this the dark bars are showing you kind of money that's being spent. So spending pledges for the next parliament, this is all quite familiar stuff. Okay, so there's nothing new and you'll have gathered that from the actual kind of manifesto launch itself. There's nothing new here that we hadn't heard about before. But here's something kind of interesting. So there's all the spending pledges, there are the tax increases. So the biggest of them all is non doms. But I say, I say non doms. It's also that includes lots of anti avoidance measures and that raises kind of upwards of five £1,000,000. Let's just tot all of these up. So put them on top of each other and work out how much we talking about in terms of the total spending plans and then the total kind of revenues that come in in tax. So we're totting them all up there. You've got the spending there, you've got the revenues coming in and you'll have seen what's quite striking here. If you've seen the other manifestos, including the one from the Conservative Party, you'll have noted that these bars are basically the same height. But here actually the amount that Labour plans to raise in taxes is slightly bigger than the amount that it's planning to spend. And that gap matters because they say that that is caution. That's caution. They're leaving some extra money in case they need to do a bit more spending. I just say this is not all of the the plans because on top of this, this is the kind of current public services side of things. They also have a kind of separate few items when it comes to their green prosperity plan. So you've got a bit of extra tax there when it comes to tax, windfall taxes on oil, and then a bit of extra spending on investment. Now here's what's interesting. OK, I'm going to compare these kind of bars. OK, So we'll take those bars and we'll put them over here. So I'm going to compare these bars with what we're hearing about from the other parties because you know that that gives you a sense of how ambitious, how big some of these different manifesto pledges are. We've had all of the major manifestos. So there's the Labour Party. The bars are like that high, quite big. You might have thought billions of pounds, certainly, but now look at the Conservatives bigger. And that's kind of interesting. So this was the manifesto we had from Rishi Sunak. And note that point about the bars being the same height. Miraculously, you can miraculously raise the same amount of taxes or same amount in anti avoidance measures as precisely how much you want to to put out there into the economy. But just look at how much bigger the Conservative plans are than the Labour plans. You've got caution there. And that's more radical, perhaps betraying where they are at the moment. And then the Lib Dems as well, well, even higher, even higher. So that's perhaps the big story here, just looking at the numbers, is how small that stuff is. OK, £9 billion, it's not nothing, but it's really quite small compared to the other parties. And another thing I want to compare is not just Labour versus the Conservatives and the Lib Dems in this election. Let's compare Labour versus previous Labour manifestos to give you another sense of how cautious this might be. So the same bars again, I've added on the investment bar as well because a bit of extra investment, but the key thing is look at the height. OK, that's this election 2024. What about the Jeremy Corbyn 2019 election? Look at that. Look at just how much higher Labour's plans were back in 2019 under Jeremy Corbyn. Of course, that election where he was trounced by Boris Johnson, that was a massive manifesto. And by the way, that's kind of undercounting it because there was extra promises that came in after the manifesto was launched. Or you can compare the 2017 manifesto, the Jeremy Corbyn 2017 manifesto. But again, I'll step back so you can see the key picture here. Starmer versus Corbyn, so much more cautious when it comes to the numbers, so much smaller when it comes to these tax pledges of extra taxes and spending than anything we've seen for a long time for the Labour Party. It's really striking just to see it in that historical comparison with the rest of Labour's pledges going back sometime. But we are still talking about tax rises. OK, so that blue bar is taxes going up, not half as much as they would have gone up under Jeremy Corbyn under those plans or indeed in the 2017 manifesto. But let's just factor that into the chart that we've been focusing on a little bit recently, which is looking at the overall tax button. And I just want to say this is not all of the story, OK? But it's certainly something people focus on a lot because on the other side of it, you've got spending as well. But this is taxes, all taxes in the UK. Everything we face going back through history, the higher the liners, the more highly weird tax. You can see it was high post war, came down a bit, bounced around. You've got COVID there, you've got the energy price shock. It's gone up quite a lot. And that is the current plan factored into the Office of Budget Responsibility numbers. The Conservatives, as you might recall, they are going to, you're still going to see taxes increase under the Conservatives on the basis of their manifesto, but not as quickly as the current plans. OK, So that line's still going up, but not quite as quickly. You saw the Lib Dems plans as I showed you that those bar bars earlier, they're up quite a lot. Raising the question though, now we have the Labour manifesto, where is the red line? Let me bring it on. So there it is. Now this is this is slightly back of envelope stuff, OK. But I've just done exactly the same sums that we've done with the other parties. And you can see the Labour Party with the tax burden being slightly higher than the current plans. And that would bring it to an all time record because if you look and go back all the way here, you're talking about that getting up to around just probably just a bit little higher than than it was in 1948. So there we have it. Now we have the major kind of points, the major plans from each of the different parties. I don't think anyone would be necessarily very surprised by this. The differences aren't enormous, but nonetheless, Conservatives slightly lower, Labour slightly higher, and the Lib Dems higher still. But frankly, all of these plans see all of us paying more taxes in the next few years.