The Labour Party is talking tough on law and order and vowing not to hike taxes, as the Tories seek to move on from Rishi Sunak’s D-Day debacle with a benefits overhaul plan.
The party also promised to deliver 14,000 more prison places as it blamed Conservative inaction for the prison estate “bursting at the seams”. And in a bid to kill off the Tories’ much-disputed claim that Labour would hike taxes by £2,000, Sir Keir will include a cast-iron pledge in the manifesto not to raise income tax, national insurance or VAT for five years, The Sunday Times reported.
The party claims it would help save some £12 billion a year by the end of the next parliament, although the Institute for Fiscal Studies said this “looks difficult in the extreme” as the measures have been previously announced and have therefore already been incorporated into the Budget forecasts. IFS associate director Tom Waters said most of the measures are existing government policy and “cannot be expected to deliver reductions in spending relative to the latest forecasts, since those forecasts are already predicated on most of these policies happening”.
In the interview on Friday, at the peak of the storm over his premature departure from Normandy, he told the newspaper: “I haven’t had many days where there hasn’t been something difficult going on. The Tory manifesto will include a pledge to reform the remit of the official climate watchdog so it is forced to take account of the cost to households and the effect on energy security when advising ministers on carbon targets, according to the paper.