Labour on Friday defended its manifesto plans after independent analysts said they rely on a vague promise of economic growth and do not reveal the full extent of painful spending choices to come.
Shadow health secretary Wes Streeting insisted that growth levels seen under the last Labour government were a realistic ambition, citing his own plan to slash NHS waiting lists and enlist 8,500 new mental health staff as contributing to getting three million people people back into work.
He said the Labour plan would not raise any taxes on “working people” and was “fully costed”, in comparison to Rishi Sunak’s “unfunded” Tory manifesto which he likened to “Liz Truss on steroids”.
Shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves briefed business leaders in London this morning after Sir Keir Starmer on Thursday vowed to “relight the fires” of the UK economy. She tweeted: “Our manifesto in two words: economic growth.”
Labour’s plan for growth includes a boost on education spending paid for in part by scrapping a 20 percent VAT exemption on private school fees, which has seen warnings from the independent sector of an exodus of pupils into hard-pressed state schools.
Mr Streeting hit back hard, insisting on Times Radio: “It is not going to happen. If it were the case that schools and indeed their customers were that price sensitive, we wouldn't have seen them raising their own fees above inflation by more than a decade.”
He added: “It's no good independent schools pleading poverty now. I'm just not buying it. They have been perfectly fine for more than a decade. They didn't blink when they were levying higher-than-inflation increases on parents at their schools. So forgive me for not believing the crocodile tears of independent schools now."
The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), Institute for Government and Resolution Foundation all stressed the potential traps ahead for Labour. It is committed to maintaining Conservative fiscal rules, under which unprotected government departments other than education, health and defence are already facing cuts of up to £20 billion a year by the end of the decade.
IFS director Paul Johnson said Labour’s plans were better than “a shopping list of half-baked policy announcements”, in an apparent reference to Mr Sunak’s manifesto. But he warned: “Labour’s manifesto offers no indication that there is a plan for where the money would come from to finance this.”
Mr Streeting said on LBC: ““I take Paul's challenge about the fact that we are in the economic doldrums. I think we have been honest about some of the harder choices we've had to make.
“But what Paul Johnson also recognised is that if you've got the right policies in place, and he mentioned some of the policies that Labour's committed to, things like an industrial strategy, planning reform, investment in our country's skills base, those are the sorts of things that will get the economy growing.”
For the Tories, Chief Secretary to the Treasury Laura Trott accused Labour of failing to rule out other tax hikes including on pensions and fuel duty. “Rishi Sunak and the Conservatives will continue to take bold action to cut taxes and put more money back into people’s pockets,” she said.
Mr Streeting is meanwhile defending his seat of Ilford North against an insurgent campaign by protesters opposed to Israel’s war in Gaza. For details of that and other battleground contests in London, see the Standard’s interactive map.
