Labour manifesto vs the rest

The Labour manifesto is perhaps the one that lot of people have been waiting for, given what the polls are showing right now and given there have been question marks over whether Keir Starmer was going to actually do more than he had said previously. I'm afraid his short answer to that, whether you like it or not, is there wasn't really much extra new in this manifesto. There were no surprises whatsoever when it comes to all of the spending commitments. They were basically the kind of things we've heard about for quite some time. When it comes to those tax increases, it's the stuff again that you'll be pretty familiar with. So VAT, business rates on private schools, non Dom crackdown and also tax avoidance measures bringing in a lot of money as well. But here's a few interesting things. If we take all of these commitments. So that's the spending commitments over there, the the tax revenues that they're hoping for over here and just kind of top them all up. So piling them together, you've got two big piles. That's where they think taxes are going to come from £7.4 billion. And then you've got the spending and you've probably noticed there's a difference between these two bars. This one is shorter than this one. Now Labour wants to really kind of emphasise that because they want to point out that look, there is a buffer here. They're bringing in more taxes than they are spending. They are being cautious now. That's what they want to say. And it certainly, when you look just at current spending, so the kind of spending on public services, definitely there is this buffer. However, you've also got a factor in the fact that on top of that, you've also got extra money going on a green investment, You've got windfall taxes coming in. So the bars are a bit different when you take into account that maybe not quite so different as they would have been if you had that £28 billion a year commitment, which has definitely gone, but certainly different. So factor in that stuff, the green investment, factor in the fact that you've got windfall taxes and you can see the bars are different. They're the other way around now, aren't they? Look, spending is bigger than tax revenues, OK? And actually The upshot of all of this stuff together is that it involves about £1 billion, just over £1 billion more borrowing, OK? So there will be more borrowing, but it's a relatively small amount. And when I say relatively small amount, it's worth just kind of putting some of these numbers into context here, OK? So what we'll do is we'll just take these bars. So that's taxes. We've got spending, we've got the green investment, OK, we'll put them over here, OK. So these are the same bars. What we're going to do is we're going to compare the Labour manifesto in numerical terms here with the Conservatives and the Lib Dems. So let's bring on their numbers. These are the comparable numbers for the Conservatives and for the Lib Dems. And you can probably see something quite striking, can't you? Labour is the smallest. So when it comes to all those plans for spending, all the plans for investment, all the plans for taxes, Labour is committing to smaller numbers than the Conservatives and the Lib Dems. Really striking, isn't it? And actually, when you look back in history, compare the Labour Party, not with other parties, but compare the Labour Party with the Labour Party. So compare Keir Starmer with what came before with Jeremy Corbyn, it's even more striking. Look at this. OK, I've had to change the access so these bars look a little bit smaller, but they're the same numbers. OK, so that is this manifesto. Now compare that with the with the Jeremy Corbyn manifesto in 2019 and Jeremy Corbyn in 2017. Look at these. Just look at that difference. So that is the old Labour Party promising enormous amounts of spending, investment, taxes, the rest of it. And that's Keir Starmer, you know, so small, you've got to kind of Crouch down and look at the numbers, which are really I think a lot. I think a lot of people have kind of wondered whether this was going to be quite as small as some of the the commit, the kind of noises that we heard about from Keir Starmer earlier. But they are really quite small, raising the question about whether that's actually what's going to be implemented. But nonetheless, they're there in black and white. And that is what the Labour Party is putting in their manifesto this time around. One thing that's worth also noting, so we've been showing this chart for all of the parties so far because there's been a lot of focus on, particularly with the Conservative manifesto, it's the tax burden. The higher this line is, the more taxed we are as an economy. So coming money coming out of all of our pockets in the form of everything from VAT to National Insurance and income tax. You can see it was very high in the post war period. This is going back to the 1940s, bounced around a bit there. You've got the energy price shock Covad that put taxes up quite a lot, works paying much higher taxes now that we have done for quite some time. And the plan was they going to go even higher. The Conservatives, despite the fact that they are cutting the rates of some of these taxes, National Insurance, most obviously the tax burden itself, the thing we're paying still goes up. It still goes up. It just goes up less quickly. So that's the Conservatives, Liberal Democrats up even higher. So where does the Labour Party sit in this? Where does this manifesto put the tax burden compared with those other plans? Well, the short answer is a bit higher than it would have been otherwise. And that's primarily because of those extra measures on VAT on public schools. And you've also got a few avoidance measures. It's not much of a difference, OK, But it does tip this line over, OK. So if we draw this line all the way back, you can see it just exceeds that point, that high point in 1948. So this is the highest tax burden on record. That being said, basically every party is talking about higher taxes in the future, regardless of which island. It's just kind of how fast they're going up. So that is the we have now the main party manifestos. You have now more of a sense of what they say they stand for. Still some question marks over whether they can achieve it. But we are not getting more of a sense of that picture, the political makeup and the decision that will have to be made in a few weeks time.