Tax hike proposals are coming thick and fast. Slap VAT on private school fees. Hike capital gains tax and inheritance tax. Raid pensions. Increase fuel duty. Tax smoking. Tax pubs. Tax non-doms. The list goes on and one.
An army of left-wing think tanks are dreaming up new ideas by the day, including more national insurance, a wealth tax and an exit tax for those who can’t stand it any longer and want to get out.
But there’s one area where chancellor Rachel Reeves appears bereft of ideas, as we saw in her keynote speech at yesterday’s Labour Party conference.
She hasn’t got a practical thought in her head on how to generate the growth we desperately need to boost productivity, boost living standards and get the economy moving again.
Every idea Labour has come up with seems designed to do the exact opposite.
Higher taxes will drive up costs and deter entrepreneurs. Just the thought of what’s coming is destroying board room and consumer confidence. Investment and spending are already falling rather than rising.
Was that part of the plan?
Yesterday, Reeves responded to criticism about spreading doom and gloom by putting on her biggest smile and delivering an upbeat speech to Labour activists.
She started with the usual Labour trick of blaming the uselss Conservative Party for everything, while glossing over her decision to axe the Winter Fuel Payment for 10million pensioners, something the Tories would never have done.
Conference loved it, but then came the tricky bit. Assuring the nation that she had a plan to make things better.
Growth would come, she assured us. Homes would build themselves. Hospitals would spring magically out of the ground. She certainly gave us no idea how Labour would make this happen in practice.
It would have been nice to have a single idea of how Reeves could deliver the growth we urgently need, but she didn’t.
Not a single one.
We know Labour plans to build 1.5million houses in five years, but that’s not a plan. It’s an aspiration. It’s not actually going to happen.
Former Tory PM David Cameron pledged the same thing in 2015. That didn’t happen either.
Housebuilders don’t have the capacity. Britain doesn’t have the skills. Buyers and housing associations don’t have the cash to buy the mandated affordable housing.
Labour’s other big growth idea is Ed Miliband. His mission is to turn the UK into a Clean Energy Superpower relies on the same magical thinking.
As does his flagship project GB Energy, which Miliband has pledged to set up with £8billion of taxpayers’ money.
Miliband’s actual plan runs to just four pages. As shadow energy secretary Claire Coutinho scornfully noted: “There’s barely anything in it.
“No investment plan, no figures for the energy that will be produced, no numbers for the energy bill savings or carbon emission reductions, not even a timeline.”
And this is Labour’s big idea? Oh dear.
It has bountiful plans to strangle the productive part of our economy with red tape and taxes, as we will learn to our cost on October 30. But growth? Labour hasn’t got a clue.
