We still need honesty from all parties on taxes and public spending

Editorial: Trust in the Tories on tax is at an all-time low – but Keir Starmer has his own questions to answer

The Conservatives have been forced to invent Labour’s hidden tax rise (PA Wire)

Trust in the Conservatives on tax has collapsed, according to an opinion poll by Techne UK for The Independent. More than twice as many people say they trust Sir Keir Starmer most on the issue as say the same about Rishi Sunak.

This is despite the Conservatives seeking to make Labour’s alleged secret tax plans the key issue of the election campaign. The Labour Party has obviously done a good job of filleting its manifesto of spending promises, apart from the few limited ones that are paid for by the specific small tax rises that it sets out.

Unfortunately, this means that both main parties are not being straight with the British people. The Conservatives have been forced to invent Labour’s hidden tax rise, engaging in the bogus exercise of feeding their own assumptions about Labour’s plans into the impartial Treasury machine and coming out with the spuriously precise figure of £2,094 in extra taxes for every working household over four years.

This is a disreputable ploy, and it would seem from our poll that few voters are taken in by it.

However, Labour’s innocent “who, us?” look is also disingenuous. Sir Keir and his shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, know full well that, while their manifesto may be bombproof in its own terms, they will, if they form the government, inherit spending plans that do not add up.

Their manifesto says nothing about how they will deal with that problem – and the Conservatives have not made an issue of it because they have not said what they would do either. As Paul Johnson of the impeccably independent Institute for Fiscal Studies says, the two parties are engaged in a “conspiracy of silence” on this issue.

That means the voters have to guess as to the parties’ true intentions. Most of them, we imagine, calculate that public spending and taxes would be a little higher under a Labour government than a Conservative one, and will cast their votes accordingly. But it is shameful that neither of the parties is prepared to be explicit about their true position.

We do not obtain much greater honesty from the smaller parties – except possibly the Green Party, heirs to the fiscal incontinence of Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell, proposing £170bn a year in higher taxes but lacking any realism about how such a vast sum would be raised. The Liberal Democrats show a similar lack of realism, but on a smaller scale, for example proposing to tax share buybacks – all that would mean would be that companies stop buying back their shares.

The other interesting finding of our poll, though, is that as many voters, 16 per cent, say they trust Nigel Farage, the leader of Reform UK, the most, as say that about Mr Sunak. There is the division on the right of British politics laid bare. Taken together, support for Mr Sunak and Mr Farage, at 32 per cent, is close to matching that for Sir Keir, at 36 per cent.

And Mr Farage’s tax plans are perhaps least credible of all, proposing to raise the income-tax threshold to £20,000 a year and to abolish inheritance tax – policies with strong overtones of Liz Truss’s unfunded tax cuts.

Labour is heading to victory in this election not because of a groundswell of enthusiastic support for its policies, but because the Conservatives have lost the people’s trust. Tory support has therefore divided in all directions, some defecting to Labour, some to Mr Farage, some to other parties and some staying at home.

It would have been better for democracy, and better for the Labour Party if it wins, if Sir Keir and Ms Reeves had acknowledged that more taxes will have to rise than the few specified so far. As it is, if they do win, they will find themselves accused of betrayal when Ms Reeves presents her first Budget.