Labour accuse Sunak of lying over £2,000 tax attack during election debate as Treasury note casts doubt on claim
Labour have accused Rishi Sunak of lying after he claimed Sir Keir Starmer wants to put taxes up by £2,000 a year.
Mr Sunak claimed multiple times during the first TV election debate that Labour’s plans for the country were not costed and would require tax rises of £2,000 per family due to a £38.5bn black hole over four years, a number he said was worked out by impartial civil servants.
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Sir Keir called the claim “absolute garbage” during the ITV debate on Tuesday, but Labour shadow minister Jonathan Ashworth went further on Wednesday when he told Sky News’ Breakfast with Kay Burley: “This is a desperate lie.”
“He lied about Labour’s tax plans. What he said last night about Labour’s tax plans is categorically untrue,” he added.
“Labour will not put up income tax, not put up National Insurance will not put up VAT.
“And I think what we showed last night with Rishi Sunak… was how desperate he becomes – what desperate people do is they lie.”
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Sunak v Starmer debate highlights
The Labour Party said the costings relied on “assumptions from special advisers” appointed by the prime minister rather than an impartial Civil Service assessment.
Doubt was also cast on the Tory claims by a note from the Treasury’s chief civil servant which emerged on Wednesday. It said civil servants were not involved in the calculation of the total figure used and that he had reminded ministers not to present any costings as having been produced by civil servants.
A letter from a top Treasury official casting doubt on a Tory claim that civil servants have been used to put a price on Labour’s spending plans
The Conservatives have continually claimed during the first two weeks of the election campaign that Labour have no plans for the UK’s future.
During the debate, Mr Sunak used the same line of attack, adding: “Keir Starmer is asking you to hand him a blank cheque when he hasn’t said what he’ll buy with it or how much it’s going to cost you.”
But Mr Ashworth said: “Every commitment we are making in this campaign is funded.
“We’re explaining where every penny piece comes from.”
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Key moments from the first TV debate
Mr Ashworth also accused Mr Sunak of being “no better than Boris Johnson, who lied over parties in Downing Street in lockdown”.
“He’s exposed himself as no better and no different. He is desperate and he’s lying to the British public,” Mr Ashworth added.
Read Sky News analysis on the TV debate:
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A Conservative spokesman said: “We were fair to Labour in the production of the Labour Tax rise briefing note and used clear Labour policies, their own costings or official HMT [His Majesty’s Treasury] costings using the lowest assumptions.
“For example, using Labour’s figures for the spending items in the Green Prosperity Plan using £23.7bn over four years instead of £28bn a year.
“It is now for Labour to explain which of the policies which were Labour policy no longer are Labour policy.”
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A snap YouGov poll after the debate found Mr Sunak narrowly came out on top, with 51% of the audience believing he fared better than Sir Keir.
But a poll by Savanta published on Wednesday morning had Sir Keir coming out on top with 44% and Mr Sunak on 39%, while 17% did not know.
When asked who came across as the most honest, the 1,153 adults polled by Savanta found Sir Starmer was the most honest (54%), while 29% thought Mr Sunak was.
The crypto community is missing the opportunity to reimagine rather than transpose rulemaking for financial services. More technologists must join the regulatory conversation.
Whitehall officials tried to convince Michael Gove to go to court to cover up the grooming scandal in 2011, Sky News can reveal.
Dominic Cummings, who was working for Lord Gove at the time, has told Sky News that officials in the Department for Education (DfE) wanted to help efforts by Rotherham Council to stop a national newspaper from exposing the scandal.
In an interview with Sky News, Mr Cummings said that officials wanted a “total cover-up”.
Politics latest: Grooming gangs findings unveiled
The revelation shines a light on the institutional reluctance of some key officials in central government to publicly highlight the grooming gang scandal.
In 2011, Rotherham Council approached the Department for Education asking for help following inquiries by The Times. The paper’s then chief reporter, the late Andrew Norfolk, was asking about sexual abuse and trafficking of children in Rotherham.
The council went to Lord Gove’s Department for Education for help. Officials considered the request and then recommended to Lord Gove’s office that the minister back a judicial review which might, if successful, stop The Times publishing the story.
Lord Gove rejected the request on the advice of Mr Cummings. Sources have independently confirmed Mr Cummings’ account.
Education Secretary Michael Gove in 2011. Pic: PA
Mr Cummings told Sky News: “Officials came to me in the Department of Education and said: ‘There’s this Times journalist who wants to write the story about these gangs. The local authority wants to judicially review it and stop The Times publishing the story’.
“So I went to Michael Gove and said: ‘This council is trying to actually stop this and they’re going to use judicial review. You should tell the council that far from siding with the council to stop The Times you will write to the judge and hand over a whole bunch of documents and actually blow up the council’s JR (judicial review).’
“Some officials wanted a total cover-up and were on the side of the council…
“They wanted to help the local council do the cover-up and stop The Times’ reporting, but other officials, including in the DfE private office, said this is completely outrageous and we should blow it up. Gove did, the judicial review got blown up, Norfolk stories ran.”
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Grooming gangs victim speaks out
The judicial review wanted by officials would have asked a judge to decide about the lawfulness of The Times’ publication plans and the consequences that would flow from this information entering the public domain.
A second source told Sky News that the advice from officials was to side with Rotherham Council and its attempts to stop publication of details it did not want in the public domain.
One of the motivations cited for stopping publication would be to prevent the identities of abused children entering the public domain.
There was also a fear that publication could set back the existing attempts to halt the scandal, although incidents of abuse continued for many years after these cases.
Sources suggested that there is also a natural risk aversion amongst officials to publicity of this sort.
Read more on grooming gangs:
What we do and don’t know from the data
A timeline of the scandal
Mr Cummings, who ran the Vote Leave Brexit campaign and was Boris Johnson’s right-hand man in Downing Street, has long pushed for a national inquiry into grooming gangs to expose failures at the heart of government.
He said the inquiry, announced today, “will be a total s**tshow for Whitehall because it will reveal how much Whitehall worked to try and cover up the whole thing.”
He also described Mr Johnson, with whom he has a long-standing animus, as a “moron’ for saying that money spent on inquiries into historic child sexual abuse had been “spaffed up the wall”.
Asked by Sky News political correspondent Liz Bates why he had not pushed for a public inquiry himself when he worked in Number 10 in 2019-20, Mr Cummings said Brexit and then COVID had taken precedence.
“There are a million things that I wanted to do but in 2019 we were dealing with the constitutional crisis,” he said.
The Department for Education and Rotherham Council have been approached for comment.
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