Labour have taken the art of political lying to a whole new level

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Starmer took his party members for fools, and now he is doing the same to the rest of us

Nick Timothy

Daily Telegraph - 03 November 2024 

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Labour’s first Budget was an ideological act. It taxes and borrows and spends and, by its own account, will fail to improve growth, wages or the public finances. We know in future budgets the Chancellor will return demanding more and more.

The consequences already show. Businesses are contemplating redundancies as they assess their growing wage bills. Companies are reporting price rises from suppliers. GP practices are excluded from the NHS National Insurance exemption. Family farming is in crisis as inheritance tax rules change. Government borrowing costs are rising and mortgage costs are forecast to stay higher for longer.

And there was no mandate at all to do this. Before the election Rachel Reeves said “we don’t need higher taxes. What we need is growth… and I have no plans to increase any taxes beyond those which we have already set out.” Then, Reeves said she would increase taxes by £8.5 billion, spending by £9.5 billion, and borrowing by £3.5 billion by 2028/29. Last week, she raised taxes by £40 billion, spending by £76 billion, and borrowing by £36 billion.

This weekend, Reeves justified her broken promise, telling the BBC, “I didn’t know about the state of the public finances” before the election. But this was a lie on top of another lie. In June, before the election, her secret tax plans were reported in the Guardian. Labour sources had blabbed, saying upon arrival at the Treasury Reeves would claim to be surprised by her inheritance and seek a “doctor’s mandate” to raise taxes. “That is not what they are presenting the public with right now,” the sources admitted.

Such was the suspicion that Reeves would do this, she was forced to deny it in a pre-election interview in the Financial Times. “We’ve got the OBR now,” she said, explaining that the independent Office for Budget Responsibility meant “you don’t need to win an election” to know the details of the public finances. Among the tax rises she ruled out in that interview, two – capital gains tax and changes to inheritance tax reliefs – were in the Budget, and proposed in a report written by Reeves in 2018.

Along with the Prime Minister, Reeves has on different occasions claimed that her tax rises and extra borrowing are necessary, variously, to fund public services, ensure fiscal credibility, and fill the fictional £22 billion black hole she invented after the election. The changing justifications are in themselves enough to arouse suspicion, but at no point before the election did Labour ever say they believed public services needed such an injection of cash. 

And her claims about the so-called fiscal hole have also fallen apart. Before the Budget, the Treasury briefed the media that the OBR would publish a full breakdown of the £22 billion figure, and justify what Reeves has been saying since July. But that is not what happened. The OBR report identified £9.5 billion of in-year spending pressures – pressures of the kind that arise every year, and were never denied by the Tories – and said the remainder of Reeves’s claim was explained by Labour’s own public sector pay deals. “Nothing in our review,” the OBR Chairman said, “was a legitimisation of that £22 billion.” 

Of course, if Tory ministers had covered up the public finances, as Reeves claims, the Treasury permanent secretary and other senior civil servants would have been in on it too. If Reeves really believed what she says, she would already have insisted on the resignations of all the Whitehall accounting officers concerned. But she has not, because she knows what she says is untrue.

And this is not nearly all. Even now, Reeves claims her Budget protected “working people”, while admitting in an interview that her increase in National Insurance – something she called a “jobs tax” in opposition – will mean lower wages for workers. She claims she has “put the public finances on a firm footing”, but public sector net borrowing will rise every year following the Budget, and debt interest spending will rise over £120 billion a year. 

Reeves and her colleagues have taken the “art” of political lying to a whole new level. Before the election the Environment Secretary, Steve Reed, said Labour had “no intention” of changing agricultural property relief for inheritance tax, and said it was “desperate nonsense” to claim otherwise. But the Budget cut the relief for thousands of farms. 

In the Department of Health, Wes Streeting refuses to answer questions about the role of Alan Milburn, who is working with officials, sees classified papers, but has not been asked to disclose or publish his significant financial interests in the health sector. In the Home Office, Yvette Cooper refuses to answer questions about the claims she has made about the cost of asylum policies. The figures she presented to Parliament are based on what appears to be blatant double-counting, yet she will not explain herself or apologise.

As Kemi Badenoch takes the reins of the Conservative Party, this is a target-rich environment for a hungry opposition. In a political system like ours, still dependent on respect for norms and conventions and precedent, it can be difficult to make ministers pay the price for dishonesty, particularly when the public is jaded and much of the media cynical, and certainly when a government has already proved itself so shameless. But the Tory pursuit of Labour must be tireless.

For this is not only about Reeves and Reed, or Streeting and Cooper. It is about the culture of a party set by its leader. Keir Starmer was in on all those promises made during the election campaign, and he knew as well as Reeves did that he would break them. We have known since his Labour leadership campaign five years ago that such dishonesty is his modus operandi. Then, he promised to nationalise rail, mail, energy and water, end outsourcing in the public sector, get rid of Universal Credit and scrap tuition fees – only to drop the commitments as soon as he won. 

Starmer took Labour members for fools, and now he is doing the same to the rest of us. We cannot let him get away with it.