General Election 2024: Five things the main parties aren’t talking about this election
The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) says there’s a conspiracy of silence this election – that all of the major political parties aren’t being honest enough about their fiscal plans this election.
And they have a point. Most obviously (and this is the main thing the IFS is complaining about) none of the major manifestos – from Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Conservative parties – have been clear about how they will fill an impending black hole in the government’s spending plans.
No need to go into all the gritty details, but the overarching point is that all government spending plans include some broad assumptions about how much spending (and for that matter, taxes and economic growth) will grow in the coming years. Economists call this the “baseline”.
But there’s a problem with this baseline: it assumes quite a slow increase in overall government spending in the next four years, an average of about 1 per cent a year after accounting for inflation. Which doesn’t sound too bad except that we all know from experience that NHS spending always grows more quickly than that, and that 1 per cent needs to accommodate all sorts of other promises, like increasing schools and defence spending and so on.
NHS spending grows more quickly than the ‘baseline’
If all those bits of government are going to consume quite a lot of that extra money (far more than a 1 per cent increase, certainly) then other bits of government won’t get as much. In fact, the IFS reckons those other bits of government – from the Home Office to the legal system – will face annual cuts of 3.5 per cent. In other words, it’s austerity all over again.
But here’s the genius thing (for the politicians, at least). While they have to set a baseline, to make all their other sums add up, the dysfunctional nature of the way government sets its spending budgets means it only has to fill in the small print about which department gets what when it does a spending review. And that spending review isn’t due until after the election.
The upshot is all the parties can pretend they’ve signed up to the baseline even when it’s patently obvious that more money will be needed for those unprotected departments (or else it’s a return to austerity).
So yes, the IFS is right: the numbers in each manifesto, including Labour’s, are massively overshadowed by this other bigger conspiracy of silence.
But I would argue that actually the conspiracy of silence goes even deeper. Because it’s not just fiscal baselines we’re not talking about enough. Consider five other issues none of the major parties is confronting (when I say major parties, in this case I’m talking about the Conservative, Labour and Lib Dem manifestos – to some extent the Green and Reform manifestos are somewhat less guilty of these particular sins, even if they commit others).
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Taxes going up
First, for all their promises not to raise any of the major tax rates (something Labour, the Conservatives and Lib Dems have all committed to) the reality is taxes are going up. We will all be paying more in taxes by the end of the parliament compared with today.
Indeed, we’ll all be paying more income tax. Except that we’ll be paying more of it because we’ll be paying tax on more of our income – that’s the inexorable logic of freezing the thresholds at which you start paying certain rates of tax (which is what this government has done – and none of the other parties say they’ll reverse).
Second, the main parties might say they believe in different things, but they all seem to believe in one particular offbeat religion: the magic tax avoidance money tree. All three of these manifestos assume they will make enormous sums – more, actually, than from any single other money-raising measure – from tightening up tax avoidance rules.
While it’s perfectly plausible that you could raise at least some money from clamping down on tax avoidance, it’s hardly a slam-dunk. That this is the centrepiece of each party’s money-raising efforts says a lot. And, another thing that’s often glossed over: raising more money this way will also raise the tax burden.
Should the Bank of England be paying large sums in interest to banks? File pic: AP
Third is another thing all the parties agree on and are desperate not to question: the fiscal rules. The government has a set of rules requiring it to keep borrowing and (more importantly given where the numbers are right now) total debt down to a certain level.
But here’s the thing. These rules are not god-given. They are not necessarily even all that good. The debt rule is utterly gameable. It hasn’t stopped the Conservatives raising the national debt to the highest level in decades. And it’s not altogether clear the particular measure of debt being used (net debt excluding Bank of England interventions) is even the right one.
Which raises another micro-conspiracy. Of all the parties at this election, the only one talking about whether the Bank of England should really be paying large sums in interest to banks as it winds up its quantitative easing programme is the Reform Party. This policy, first posited by a left-wing thinktank (the New Economics Foundation) is something many economists are discussing. It’s something the Labour Party will quite plausibly carry out to raise some extra money if it gets elected. But no one wants to discuss it. Odd.
Brexit impact
Anyway, the fourth issue everyone seems to have agreed not to discuss is, you’ve guessed it, Brexit. While the 2019 election was all about Brexit, this one, by contrast, has barely featured the B word. Perhaps you’re relieved. For a lot of people we’ve talked so much about Brexit over the past decade or so that, frankly, we need a bit of a break. That’s certainly what the main parties seem to have concluded.
But while the impact of leaving the European Union is often overstated (no, it’s not responsible for every one of our economic problems) it’s far from irrelevant to our economic plight. And where we go with our economic neighbours is a non-trivial issue in the future.
Anyway, this brings us to the fifth and final thing no one is talking about. The fact that pretty much all the guff spouted on the campaign trail is completely dwarfed by bigger international issues they seem reluctant or ill-equipped to discuss. Take the example of China and electric cars.
Brexit has barely featured in the election. File pic: Victoria Jones/PA
Just recently, both the US and European Union have announced large tariffs on the import of Chinese EVs. Now, in America’s case those tariffs are primarily performative (the country imports only a tiny quantity of Chinese EVs). But in Europe‘s case Chinese EVs are a very substantial part of the market – same for the UK.
Raising the question: what is the UK going to do? You could make a strong case for saying Britain should be emulating the EU and US, in an effort to protect the domestic car market. After all, failing to impose tariffs will mean this country will have a tidal wave of cars coming from China (especially since they can no longer go to the rest of the continent without facing tariffs) which will make it even harder for domestic carmakers to compete. And they’re already struggling to compete.
By the same token, imposing tariffs will mean the cost of those cheap Chinese-made cars (think: MGs, most Teslas and all those newfangled BYDs and so on) will go up. A lot. Is this really the right moment to impose those extra costs on consumers.
In short, this is quite a big issue. Yet it hasn’t come up as a big issue in this campaign. Which is madness. But then you could say the same thing about, say, the broader race for minerals, about net zero policy more widely and about how we’re going to go about tightening up sanctions on Russia to make them more effective.
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Parochial election
Elections are always parochial but given the scale of these big, international issues (and there are many more), this one feels especially parochial.
So in short: yes, there have been lots of gaps. Enormous gaps. The “conspiracy of silence” goes way, way beyond the stuff the IFS has talked about.
But ’twas ever thus.
Read more:
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Think back to the last time a political party actually confronted some long-standing issues no one wanted to talk about in their manifesto. I’m talking about the 2017 Conservative manifesto, which pledged to resolve the mess of social care in this country, once and for all.
It sought to confront a big social issue, intergenerational inequality, in so doing ensuring younger people wouldn’t have to subsidise the elderly.
The manifesto was an absolute, abject, electoral disaster. It was largely responsible for Theresa May‘s slide in the polls from a 20 point lead to a hung parliament.
And while most people don’t talk about that manifesto anymore, make no mistake: today’s political strategists won’t forget it in a hurry. Hence why this year’s campaign and this year’s major manifestos are so thin.
Elections are rarely won on policy proposals. But they are sometimes lost on them.
The mother of missing Jay Slater says she and her family are “absolutely devastated” about the teenager’s disappearance.
The 19-year-old, from Oswaldtwistle in Lancashire, disappeared on 17 June after setting off to walk back to his accommodation while on holiday in Tenerife.
In a statement issued through the British overseas missing persons charity LBT Global, Debbie Duncan said “words cannot describe the pain and agony we are experiencing”.
“Jay is a normal guy who is in his third year of an apprenticeship, and he is a very popular young man with a large circle of friends,” she said.
“We are a very close family and are absolutely devastated about his disappearance.
“Words cannot describe the pain and agony we are experiencing. He is our beautiful boy with his whole life ahead of him and we just want to find him.
“We do not have any information on his whereabouts.”
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Jay Slater. Pic: LBT Global/Slater family
Helicopters, drones and search dogs were deployed to find the apprentice bricklayer, who arrived on the island on 13 June for the NRG music festival with two friends.
Ms Duncan praised the Spanish police, who she said had “worked tirelessly up in the mountains where Jay’s last phonecall was traced”.
His last known location was the Rural de Teno Park in the north of the island – which was about an 11-hour walk from his accommodation.
“They [police] conducted a land search for 12 days which involved every resource they had available,” Ms Duncan added.
A valley covered in part of the search
“Although the land search ended, the Spanish police still continue with their investigations into why Jay had travelled to the location so far away from his accommodation.
“We offer our sincere thanks to the Spanish authorities who continue to follow lines of inquiries.”
On Friday, the Guardia Civil appealed for experts in rugged terrain to assist in a “massive search” on Saturday.
The search in the village of Masca, near his last-known location, took in a steep rocky area, including ravines, trails and paths.
He had travelled to an Airbnb in Masca and the two men said to have rented the property were later ruled “not relevant” to the case.
Read more:
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As the family continues to hope for a breakthrough in investigations, Ms Duncan asked the media to respect their privacy and said they are aware of conspiracy theories.
She said she can only describe the speculation as “vile”, adding the “negative comments are extremely distressing” to the family.
“We also embrace the love and support we have received from across the globe,” she added.
“It has not gone unnoticed, especially his home town in Oswaldtwistle, Lancashire. As a family we would like the world to respect our privacy at this present time.”
A trainee nurse has been found guilty of attempting to launch an ISIS-inspired suicide attack using a homemade bomb on the hospital where he worked.
Mohammad Sohail Farooq, 28, was arrested outside St James’s Hospital in Leeds with a viable bomb, manufactured from a pressure cooker containing 9.9kg of low explosive, in January 2023.
Other items, including two knives, black tape and an imitation firearm with blank ammunition, were also found on him or in his car.
Sheffield Crown Court heard he immersed himself in “extremist Islamic ideology” and went to the site to “seek his own martyrdom” through a “murderous terrorist attack”.
But his plan was thwarted by a “simple act of kindness” from a patient at the hospital who engaged him in conversation outside the building and managed to persuade him to abandon the plan.
A jury convicted him on Tuesday after deliberating for less than two hours.
It can be disclosed that police discovered Farooq had watched antisemitic videos on TikTok and had taken a photograph on his phone of a plaque which commemorated Jewish links to the hospital.
Investigations also revealed he had been carrying out a secret poison pen campaign against several colleagues after he was made to repeat a year of his course because he was regularly ringing in sick and did not pass the required exams.
Farooq had originally planned to attack RAF Menwith Hill in North Yorkshire, but switched targets after conducting a series of reconnaissance trips and finding it was too well guarded.
Farooq’s device outside St James’s Hospital in Leeds. Pic: Counter Terrorism Policing North East
Prosecutors said Farooq had followed guidance in a terrorist manual titled “safety and security guidelines for lone wolf mujahedeen and small cells” to have two plans for his terrorist attack – a “Plan A”, and a “Plan B” in case the first was not possible.
However, the plot was prevented by Nathan Newby, a patient at the hospital. After returning from a walk to get some air, he saw Farooq outside the entrance to the Gledhow Wing of the hospital.
Jonathan Sandiford KC, for the prosecution, earlier told the court: “Mr Newby realised something was amiss and instead of walking away, he began talking to the defendant.
“That simple act of kindness almost certainly saved many lives that night.”
It came after Farooq had earlier sent a bomb threat in a text to an off-duty nurse in order to lure people to the car park where he was waiting to detonate his device.
However, the text was not seen for almost an hour, and the full-scale evacuation he had hoped for did not happen.
Prosecutors said Farooq left but returned shortly afterwards with a new plan to wait for a staff shift change before exploding his bomb – until he got chatting with Mr Newby.
Farooq claimed his bomb was meant to be twice as powerful as the one used in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings. Pic: PA
Mr Newby told police: “I’m quite good at reading people’s body language, I don’t know why, I thought I would go over and see if he’s alright, to try and cheer him up and see why he looks like the way he did – down, depressed and upset, like he had been given some bad news, swaying backwards and forwards.”
They got chatting and for a while they had a “totally normal chat” but then Farooq unzipped the bag to show Newby the pressure cooker and wires. “He said: ‘Do you like that?’ That’s what he said. I thought wow, as if I was looking at what he said was a bomb.”
Newby moved Farooq to a bench away from the hospital entrance and, three hours later, persuaded him to let him call the police.
Items, including a knife, were found in Farooq’s car. Pic: Counter Terrorism Policing North East
Afterwards Mr Newby told police: “I was shocked I had managed to talk him out of it. I reached out my hand, I gave him a hug and said mate you’ve done the right thing, to try and keep him calm.
“I thought what would have happened if I had wrestled him to the floor and he got agitated – a lot of what ifs.”
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Farooq did not give evidence during his trial but admitted to police that he had made the bomb while in his car at night, parked outside Roundhay Park in Leeds.
He had earlier pleaded guilty to firearms offences, possessing an explosive substance with intent and having a document likely to be useful to a person preparing or committing an act of terrorism.
On Tuesday he was found guilty of preparing terrorist acts.
Bethan David, head of the Crown Prosecution Service‘s counter terrorism division, said: “Farooq is an extremely dangerous individual who amassed a significant amount of practical and theoretical information that enabled him to produce a viable explosive device.
“He then took that homemade explosive device to a hospital where he worked with the intention to cause serious harm.”
She added: “The extremist views Farooq holds are a threat to our society, and I am pleased the jury found him guilty of his crimes.”
Serial killer nurse Lucy Letby has been found guilty of the attempted murder of an extremely premature baby, just two hours after she was born.
Letby, who was convicted last year of the murder of seven babies and the attempted murder of six others, was found guilty by a jury at a retrial at Manchester Crown Court.
The jury at her original trial had been unable to reach a verdict on the charge that she attempted to murder the premature baby, known as Baby K, at the Countess of Chester Hospital in February 2016.
The prosecution said that Letby had displaced the baby’s breathing tube and had been caught “virtually red-handed” when a doctor walked into the room.
Consultant paediatrician Dr Ravi Jayaram told the jury he saw Letby standing beside the infant’s incubator doing nothing as her blood oxygen levels fell to life-threatening levels.
An alarm that should have been sounding was silent.
After the baby recovered, her tube was displaced two more times that night, the prosecution said, alleging Letby had tried to make it appear like the infant habitually displaced it herself.
The baby, who had been born at 25 weeks’ gestation, was transferred to a specialist neo-natal unit but died three days later.
Letby’s actions were not alleged to have caused her death.
The parents of Child K gasped and then cried when the verdict was read out – after the jury deliberated for just three-and-a-half hours.
Letby showed no emotion in the dock.
Sentencing will take place on Friday at 10.30am.
Senior Crown Prosecutor Nicola Wyn Williams, of CPS Mersey-Cheshire’s Complex Casework Unit, said that Letby has “continually denied that she tried to kill this baby or any of the babies that she has been convicted of murdering or attempting to murder”.
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Moment of Lucy Letby’s arrest in 2018
She said: “Our case included direct evidence from a doctor who walked into the nursery to find a very premature baby desaturating with Letby standing by, taking no action to help or to raise the alarm. She had deliberately dislodged the breathing tube in an attempt to kill her.
“Staff at the unit had to think the unthinkable – that one of their own was deliberately harming and killing babies in their care.
“Letby dislodged the tube a further two times over the following few hours in an attempt to cover her tracks and suggest that the first dislodgment was accidental. These were the actions of a cold-blooded, calculated killer.
“The grief that the family of Baby K have felt is unimaginable. Our thoughts remain with them and all those affected by this case at this time,” Ms Wyn Williams added.
Letby was previously convicted of seven counts of murder, and six counts of attempted murder
Dr Nigel Scawn, medical director at the Countess of Chester Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, said: “Our thoughts are with the family and loved ones of Baby K. We are extremely sorry that these awful crimes happened at our hospital.
“Since Lucy Letby worked at our hospital, we have made significant changes to our services and remain committed to providing high quality safe care to our local communities.
“We want to acknowledge the impact this continues to have on everyone involved in this case and restate our commitment to do everything we can to help families get the answers they deserve.
Dr Scawn also thanked “the unwavering cooperation and professionalism of our staff, some of whom returned to court to repeat evidence and relive events”.
During the retrial, Letby denied that she had ever intended or tried to harm any baby in her care.
She said she had no recollection of the incident with Baby K but said: “I know I did nothing to interfere.”
Letby was asked about Facebook searches she made for Baby K’s surname more than two years after she left the neonatal unit.
She had also searched for the parents of other babies she was convicted of murdering or attempting to murder.
She denied having a fascination with the families or looking for signs of their grief.
She told the jury: “I’m not guilty of what I’ve been found guilty of.”
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Last August, Letby was sentenced to 14 whole life orders after the jury found her guilty at the end of a ten-month trial.
In sentencing at that trial, the judge Mr Justice Goss said she was guilty of a “cruel, calculated and cynical campaign of child murder involving the smallest and most vulnerable of children”.
He added: “There was a deep malevolence bordering on sadism in your actions.”
The motivation for those actions was unclear.
The prosecution told her original trial that she enjoyed “playing God” and was excited by the drama of staff rushing to save the babies she had attacked.
A public inquiry into events at the Countess of Chester Hospital’s neonatal unit will begin to hear evidence in September.
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