With the UK government having stolen two of Labour’s ideas to raise tax revenue – scrapping the non-dom status and expanding the oil and gas windfall – reporters have asked shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves where else she will raise revenue for her party’s priorities.
She lists what the initial commitments were that the government has used elsewhere.
She says she will go through the budget documents to work out where else money can be raised.
“Those pledges very much stand,” she says. “They are national priorities and they are Labour’s priorities as well, and we will now make sure we identify the funding streams because everything in our manifesto will be fully funded.”
Ms Reeves repeats her pledge that there will be no borrowing to pay for day-to-day expenditure.
Does Labour have a big hole in its budget plans?
Reacting to the interview with the shadow chancellor is Paul Johnson, the director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, the UK’s leading non-partisan economic research institute.
Trevor asks if the Tories’ theft of two of Labour’s key revenue-raising policies – scrapping the non-dom status and expanding the oil and gas windfall tax – have left a hole in the party’s budgeting plans.
He says: “No, not really.”
The amount the policies will bring in amount to “a really small amount of money” which is “not going to make much difference to anything”.
The policies, he says, were all “part of the politicking”, saying the policies “sound big, but are not enough to do anything”.
Mr Johnson says the key challenge for the opposition is that the government spent £10bn a year on cutting national insurance by a further two percentage points.
“Unless a Labour government would reverse that, one way or another, that means they have £10bn less for investment in public services,” he says.
Reeves and Hunt are not being honest about challenges to public spending
Paul Johnson, the director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, the UK’s leading non-partisan economic research institute, agrees there is a “conspiracy of silence” in both political parties because neither is acknowledging just how tightly squeezed public spending will be.
He says if you take seriously what both parties are saying about their spending plans, they “involve significant cuts in a whole range of public services”.
“No one is talking about that, no one is saying where those cuts would come from, or whether there would be significantly more borrowing, or whether taxes would go up.”
He says there are “only three options here”, but not talking about that “suits both parties”.
Mr Johnson also says shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves in her interview minutes ago “wasn’t talking about actually the scale of challenges which will face public services”.
If she did, she would have to admit that she would face those challenges, and that’s similar to Jeremy Hunt as well.
For example, he says, “there is no world in which health spending will only go up by 1% a year – it will go up a lot more than that, not least because of the commitment to the NHS Workforce Plan”.
That plan, he says, will cost as much as the entire defence budget over the next decade.
His guess, he says, is that there will either be more borrowing, a tax rise of some kind – or a combination of both.

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