Labour £100bn pledge
JEREMY Corbyn has launched the most radical Labour manifesto in decades, promising £100billion to tackle poverty in Scotland in the hope of blunting demands for independence.
The Labour leader put a blockbuster £11billion tax on North Sea oil companies at the centre of massive public investment in a green industrial revolution to transform the country,
The revenue-raiser is 10 times more than the Treasury expects to raise from the oil and gas sector this year.
Labour would use the money to create a “just transition fund” to help shift the UK towards a green economy without mass job losses.
In his upbeat manifesto speech, Corbyn said Labour would not leave North Sea oil workers high and dry and pledged the money would be used for retraining them and their communities.
The one-off tax would be calculated according to each firm’s past contribution to the climate crisis, Labour said, and could be paid over a number of years.
Pressing home his green credentials, Corbyn said: “We can no longer deny the climate emergency. We can see it all around us, as the recent floods in Yorkshire and the East
Midlands have shown. We have no time to waste. The crisis demands swift action but it isn’t right to load the costs of the climate emergency on to the nurse, the builder or energy worker.
“So a Labour government will ensure the big oil and gas corporations that profit from heating up our planet will shoulder and pay their fair share of the burden with a just transition tax.”
John McDonnell, Labour’s shadow chancellor, rebuffed opponents’ claims that the windfall tax would destroy the North Sea oil and gas industry just as it recovers from a lean period.
He rejected the notion that the £11billion bill amounted to a tax on
Aberdeen, the north-east base for the oil industry.
He told the Daily Record: “No, it’s a tax for Aberdeen because all that money will go on investing in jobs that people need in the just transition from fossil fuels to renewables. It will be the biggest investment Scotland has seen in generations, £100billion and more, all for the Scottish people to make sure their economy will thrive.”
McDonnell had previously pledged £70billion but this has risen to £100billion over 10 years.
Speaking at a rally at Birmingham City University, Corbyn called on people to choose “hope” in three weeks instead of Boris Johnson’s Tories backed by “billionaires, big business and dodgy landlords”.
Corbyn insisted, as Labour promised in 2017, there would be no tax rises for 95 per cent of earners, with only those on incomes of more than £80,000 being affected. He said: “You can have this plan for real change, because you don’t need money to buy it, you just need a vote.”
At the centre of the manifesto, titled It’s Time for Real Change, is a massive increase in public investment, funded by taxes on corporations and top earners.
However Paul Johnson, of the independent Institute of Fiscal Studies, said the tax increases required to push up day-to-day spending by £80billion will need to be widely shared rather than “pretending that everything can be paid for by companies and the rich”.
He said: “The truth is, of course, that in the end, corporation tax is paid by workers, customers or shareholders so would affect many in the population. In the end, it is unlikely that one could raise the sums suggested by Labour from the tax policies they set out.
“If you want to transform the scale and scope of the state then you need to be clear that the tax increases required to do that will need to be widely shared.” Labour’s manifesto calls for the bold re-nationalisation of many of the public utilities privatised under Margaret Thatcher bringing rail, mail and broadband provision into public ownership.
Corbyn said the programme was fully costed and would be paid for with extra tax on the highest earners and billions of pounds of borrowing.
Labour would scrap Universal Credit, introduce a “real living wage” of at least £10 an hour, including for younger workers, and pump £155billion into an NHS rescue plan.
On a Scottish referendum, the manifesto said a request to stage one would be rejected “in the early years” of a Labour government and described independence as “economically devastating”.
Answering the Daily Record on the issue, Corbyn said: “It is not our priority to have yet another indy referendum. Our priority is dealing with the levels of poverty and inequality in Scotland. Glasgow, after all, has the lowest life expectancy in the UK, the pollution levels are awful, the housing needs have to be addressed.
“We will invest £100billion in Scotland altogether, in capital investment and Barnett formula consequentials, and it will bring about a transformation in Scotland.”