Empty promises?

So where’s the money coming from? How will you fund your huge spending plans? That’s what the Tories have been asking Labour to explain, said Chaminda Jayanetti on Politics.co.uk. But if Labour is muddled on how much it’ll be able to collect in taxes, the Tories are just as muddled about how much they’ll be spending. Their manifesto says, for example, that there will be £8bn of extra funding over five years for the NHS. Does this mean £8bn in total (a relative pittance) or £8bn a year (a significant amount)? No one seems to know. The Tory manifesto is downright misleading, said Philip Aldrick in The Times. An analysis by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) found that despite all its promises of extra support for schools, social care and the NHS, overall spending would be broadly unchanged from the last Budget.

The IFS is just as scathing about Labour’s tax plans, said Tim Harford in the FT. They are built on the “fantasy that there

are pots of free money – called ‘corporations’ – out there”. There aren’t. Once the taxman turns up the heat on business, as Labour wants him to, corporate profits tend to “evaporate”. And even if corporate taxes do get paid, the cost is just passed on in higher prices and lower pensions.

Home Secretary Amber Rudd has derided Labour’s policies as the economics of the “Magic Money Tree”, said Simon Duke in The Sunday Times. She’s right. Jeremy Corbyn promises to make everyone a winner: students will be freed of the burden of tuition fees, fathers will see paternity pay double, railways and utilities will return to public ownership. But the price of such a utopia would be “colossal”. Nationalisation alone would cost £237bn, or £8,777 for every household. But this isn’t the only deception practised on the electorate. The Tories, too, have been censured – and rightly – for failing to explain how they can pledge to maintain public services while keeping taxes low. So “whoever wins, the UK’S voters could be left with a bitter aftertaste”.