Boundary changes for our constituency (Debate)

Wed 5 Jun, 17:54 (last edited on Wed 5 Jun, 18:01)

Please can we have some decency, or are my ideas about Honour risibly outmoded? Tory Tax Rise already in place on Same Arithmetic by The Spectator mag = £3000 - compared to 2 grand lie by Sunak about LP. Couldn't be masochistic enough to watch debate and preferred to listen to an audiobook about D-Day and Normandy, but this was online meeja headline. 

But The Spectator - The Spectator, rightists highbrow flagship mag! - chose to do same Lies Damn Lies and Statistics averaging fiddle analysis of current taxes,  but applied to The Con Job Party existing policies and came up with THREE GRAND PER HOUSEHOLD for them.

Please can we have some decency, or are my ideas about Honour risibly outmoded?

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/on-sunaks-maths-tories-will-lift-taxes-by-3000-per-household/

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On Sunak’s maths, Tories will lift taxes by £3,000 per household

Fraser Nelson5 June 2024, 1:31pm

(ITV via Getty Images)

My colleague Ross Clark has shown how the Tories cooked up that £2,000 figure. They worked out the total cost of what they think Labour will do, using standard HM Treasury costings. Then, they divided that by the number of in-work households (18.4 million). This is a subset of the 21.4 million total UK households, so no pensioners or workless households. By choosing a smaller denominator, you concentrate the increase and conjure up a scarier figure. Then they quadruple-counted. So they took each year’s estimate for tax rise and then added them together over four years and – presto! – you end up with £2,000.

But let’s apply a similar method to the published plans of the Conservative government. We don’t need to guess what the cost of government would be: the projected tax haul figures were published by the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) and updated in March after the Budget. It will be £1.02 trillion in the current financial year. That’s with the tax/GDP ratio at 36.5 per cent. Let’s use that as our baseline. The OBR says the Tories plan to increase taxes to 37.1 per cent of GDP by 2028/29. So the 0.6-point increase works out at £20 billion more tax raised in that year than if the tax/GDP ratio (below) had stayed flat.

Add up all four years (as the Tories did for their Labour calculation) and you end up with a £320 rise in year one, £620 in year two, £930 in year three and £1,150 in the final year. So a sum of £3,020 per working household. Except this would be just as misleading as the £2,000 figure that Sunak used so often in the debate last night.

There are serious issues at stake in this general election and the Tories have just released nonsense figures with fake attribution then given them to newspapers, who took it on trust. I’m not sure that this will help their chances.

The bottom line is a simple one: there will be tax rises whoever wins this general election. The Tories are in a big old glass house on taxes – yet here they are, still throwing stones. It’s a risky strategy.