Increases to national insurance and income tax ruled out under Labour – as Reeves promises cash ‘injection’

Published

4 months ago

May 27, 2024

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Labour has ruled out increasing income tax or national insurance if they were to win the election.

Shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves said she and Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer want to lower taxes for working people but she would not put forward “unfunded proposals”.

Ms Reeves said: “None of our plans require increasing taxes.”

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She also said she did not want to make public spending cuts. However, she could not give guarantees and said there would have to be a spending review if she was in charge of the Treasury.

She said: “We want taxes on working people to be lower and we certainly will not be increasing the rates of income tax or National Insurance, and that applies to all the bands of income tax.

“We would like taxes on working people to be lower, but unlike the Conservatives I would never make pledges that are not fully costed and fully funded.

“It’s only by having pledges that are fully costed and fully funded that people can actually believe what you’re going to say.”

She refused to say when Labour would increase defence spending to 2.5% of GDP, as promised, but said it would happen “as quickly as possible”.

Ms Reeves earlier promised there is “not going to be a return to austerity” under Labour and would boost frontline services with a “down payment on the changes that we want to make”.

“But in the end, we have to grow the economy, we have to turn around this dire economic performance,” she told the BBC’s Sunday With Laura Kuenssberg programme.

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The shadow chancellor said there would be an “immediate injection” of cash into public services – for the NHS, more police and more teachers.

That would be funded by ensuring those with non-dom status “pay their fair share of tax” and cracking down on tax avoidance, she argued.

Labour would also place VAT and business rates on private schools “to recruit 6,500 additional state school teachers”, she said.

And she insisted Labour “will end fire and rehire”, where companies sack their staff and then bring them back on worse contracts.

The Unite union had criticised Labour for excluding an outright ban on the practice but Ms Reeves said: “We will not allow that to happen.”

Politics

Lisa Nandy says Sir Keir Starmer ‘very sensible’ to accept football tickets worth thousands

Published

13 hours ago

September 21, 2024

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Lisa Nandy says Sir Keir Starmer 'very sensible' to accept football tickets worth thousands

Lisa Nandy has said Sir Keir Starmer’s decision to accept thousands of pounds worth of football tickets was “very sensible”.

The minister for culture, media and sport also said she had never accepted free clothes from a donor.

Speaking to Sky News at the start of the Labour Party conference today, the MP for Wigan said: “The problem that has arisen since [Sir Keir] became leader of the opposition and then prime minister is that for him to sit in the stands would require a huge security detail, would be disruptive for other people and it would cost the taxpayer a lot of money.

“So I think he’s taken a very sensible decision that’s not the right and appropriate thing to do, and it’s right to accept that he has to go and sit in a different area.

“But I know that he’d much rather be sitting in the stands cheering people on with the usual crowd that he’s been going to the football with for years.”

Ms Nandy also said while she has not accepted free clothes – joking “I think you can probably see that I choose my own clothes sadly” – she doesn’t “make any judgements about what other members of parliament do”.

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She said: “The only judgement I would make is if they’re breaking the rules, so they’re trying to hide what they’re doing. That’s when problems arise.

“Because the point of being open and transparent is that people can see where the relationships are, and they can then judge for themselves whether there’s been any undue influence.”

She asserted there had not been an undue influence in gifts accepted by senior Labour figures, adding: “We don’t want the news and the commentary to be dominated by conversations about clothes.

“We rightly have a system, I think, where the taxpayer doesn’t fund these things. We don’t claim on expenses for them. And so MPs will always take donations, will always take gifts in kind.

“MPs of all political parties have historically done that and that is the system that we have.”

She added: “I don’t think there’s any suggestion here that Keir Starmer has broken any rules. I don’t think there’s any suggestion that he’s done anything wrong.

“We expect our politicians to be well turned out, we expect them to be people who go out and represent us at different events and represent the country at different events and are clothed appropriately.

“But the point is that when we accept donations for that or for anything else, that we declare them and we’re open and transparent about them.”

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Sir Keir, Angela Rayner and Rachel Reeves said yesterday they will no longer accept donations in the future to pay for clothes.

The announcement followed criticism of Sir Keir’s gifts from donors, which included clothing worth £16,200 and multiple pairs of glasses worth £2,485, according to the MPs’ register of interests.

The register shows Ms Rayner has accepted clothing donations to the value of £2,230.

Sky News also revealed the scale of Sir Keir’s donations this week as part of our Westminster Accounts investigation.

Sir Keir was found to have received substantially more gifts and freebies than any other MP – his total in gifts, benefits, and hospitality topped £100,000 since December 2019.