[Tubby Isaacs]

Jonathan Portes said that too. They should have done that in March. If they can't get the economy growing to allow them to move the thresholds back, they're probably dead anyway.

[Tubby Isaacs]

New populist edge latest.

Don't believe a word Trump says, except when he says something that can be spun into an attack on Labour. Labour brought in quite a bit extra on the rich from freezing tax bands, changes to non dom. inheritance tax VAT on private schools, capital gains tax etc. And Sunak had previously increased them too.

Trump cut top rate taxes in 2017 and these are set to go up again at the end of this year. So that's not Trump raising anything. You think they'd let Starmer get away with cutting top rate tax for 8 years if they went up again?

And he's not going to do a "simple wealth tax" either.

[Boiler]

"Simple Wealth Tax".

FFS.

If you want to do something unpopular, just introduce a new band of income tax - say, 60% at a threshold of oh, I dunno - £500,000? I mean, why has income tax become such a sacred cow? People have believed the lie that you can have good public services and low taxation for far too long. All around us, we can see that it's bollocks.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Surprisingly, their biggest tax rise last time wasn't wealth, it was carbon tax (£90bn a year). Was pretty obvious that this couldn't be raised without a lot of impact being passed on to people on modest incomes, so has it been dropped or cut back? "Wealth tax" would be paid by the wealthy, whatever the problems with implementing it, so that might be why they're stressing that.

Don't know why they aren't saying more about income tax. I presume there's some polling that people think taking more than about half is harsh. Or some Laffer-type stuff (actual research, not a curve drawn on a napkin) that 60% would see less income raised than lower levels.

[Tubby Isaacs]

I think they set fiscal policy like a typical small party- everybody gets their hobbyhorse policy in the program.

They wound up with £170bn of tax rises, £160bn extra day to day spending, and £90bn extra investment. That's £80bn of extra borrowing a year, borrowing not being particularly cheap. Doubtless there are people in the Greens who can see the problem with this, and say so, but it's considered "undemocratic" to take out anybody's brilliant policy. No wonder they think Rachel Reeves adding potentially an extra £100bn over 5 years by changing fiscal rules to favour investment is "austerity".