Labour minister Torsten Bell has accused Kemi Badenoch of reviving the Conservatives' oldest idea, warning that the party's tax cut promises now add up to more than £30 billion a year with no credible way of paying for them.
Writing ahead of next week's Budget, the Pensions Minister said that after two Conservative conferences the Tory leader had made her choice. "What is the new big idea? Exactly the same as the Conservatives' old big idea: unfunded tax cuts," he said. "It's the lack of imagination as much as the fiscal incontinence that stands out."
Torsten Bell: 'A lettuce wilting level of financial incontinence'
Torsten Bell said the pledges had slipped out "via the drip, drip, drip of announcements that ill-disciplined oppositions often exhibit", and that the total was approaching the £39 billion cost of the tax cuts in Liz Truss's 2022 mini-Budget. "This is a lettuce wilting level of financial incontinence," he said.
He said the Conservatives' own costing of their inheritance tax plan was so flawed that a change they claim costs £6 billion could cost two thirds more, with around 40 per cent of it, some £4 billion, going to the richest 5 per cent of estates. The package, he added, offered "precisely diddly squat to the classic striver: a median earning renter".
'Selling out Britain's tomorrow'
The minister pointed out that Liz Truss also claimed her plans were fiscally responsible, and that the Conservatives cannot pretend to be serious about controlling spending while refusing to back the Government's plan to put the State Pension on a sustainable footing by adjusting the Triple Lock.
Drawing on the records of Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush and the Cameron-Osborne years, Torsten Bell said history was clear that when parties of the right promise huge tax cuts, the public finances get trashed, public services often suffer and the tax cuts themselves are frequently reversed. Modern Conservatism, he argued, offers "a sugar rush today at the price of selling out Britain's tomorrow".
By contrast, he said, Andy Burnham's big idea is devolution, with local economic leadership as the route to good growth in every postcode, something people will hear much more about at next week's Budget.
