Election Latest

Purdah doesn't apply around here and it's never been very politically balanced any way, but rather prides itself on trying to get to the bottom of things and ferret out truth from humbug, hypocrisy and lies. I'm not just grumpy any more, I'm beginning to get angry. 

So lets try and get this straight. You get caught out lying about tax hikes by a future Labour government by using dodgy figures you say were agreed by HM Treasury, who then publicly refute that claim and prove you were given prior warning not to use them, so you decide to simply 'double-down' and as Prime Minister fly back from D-Day commemorations avoiding a photo-call with three world leaders thus dissing last surviving veterans to do a political interview with ITV which won't be broadcast until next Wednesday and in the process facilitate a photo call between Keir Starmer and President Zelenskyy of Ukraine, oh and in the process lose support of key Tory commentators such as Tim Montgomerie of ConservativeHome. 

You need to watch last night's BBC Newsnight which annoyingly is not yet on iplayer. Youtube here.

Even the Spectator are proving Rishi's figures are dodgy:-

On Sunak’s maths, Tories will lift taxes by £3,000 per household

My colleague Ross Clark has shown how the Tories cooked up that £2,000 figure. They worked out the total cost of what they think Labour will do, using standard HM Treasury costings. Then, they divided that by the number of in-work households (18.4 million). This is a subset of the 21.4 million total UK households, so no pensioners or workless households. By choosing a smaller denominator, you concentrate the increase and conjure up a scarier figure. Then they quadruple-counted. So they took each year’s estimate for tax rise and then added them together over four years and – presto! – you end up with £2,000.

But let’s apply a similar method to the published plans of the Conservative government. We don’t need to guess what the cost of government would be: the projected tax haul figures were published by the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) and updated in March after the Budget. It will be £1.02 trillion in the current financial year. That’s with the tax/GDP ratio at 36.5 per cent. Let’s use that as our baseline. The OBR says the Tories plan to increase taxes to 37.1 per cent of GDP by 2028/29. So the 0.6-point increase works out at £20 billion more tax raised in that year than if the tax/GDP ratio (below) had stayed flat.

Add up all four years (as the Tories did for their Labour calculation) and you end up with a £320 rise in year one, £620 in year two, £930 in year three and £1,150 in the final year. So: a sum of £3,020 per working household. Except this would be just as misleading as the £2,000 figure that Sunak used so often in the debate last night.

Given that this is a nonsense exercise, there are several other ways to cut it. If you take this year's tax take in cash as a baseline (rather than the tax/GDP ratio) you can get conjure up a figure of £9,000 of Tory tax rises. Or add a fifth year of government. But spin aside and we're left with one significant and important fact: the Tories genuinely do intend to take the tax burden to the highest seen in the lifetimes of most voters. They are in a big old glass house when in comes to tax rises – yet here they are, still throwing stones. It’s a risky strategy.

There are serious issues at stake in this general election and the Tories have just released nonsense figures with fake attribution then given them to newspapers, who took it on trust. I’m not sure that this will help their chances.

--oo00oo--

The political techtonic plates are definitely shifting.