Labour needs to define what it means by ‘working people’

There are 109 paid members of the government (there’d be more if the figure wasn’t limited by law), and, as we’ve come to learn, each has their own definition of what constitutes “working people”.

- SEAN O'GRADY

This includes non-definition definitions, such as the one most recently offered by the chancellor, Rachel Reeves: “I don’t think we need to define more than that, really. We made a commitment in our manifesto to not increase those taxes. We didn’t last year. It remains our commitment for this parliament.”

To be fair, she was referring back to her party’s well-known manifesto commitment (“income tax, VAT and national insurance are the key taxes that working people pay”). And that’s undeniable to the point of truism. But what this fails to acknowledge is that lots of the idle rich pay considerable sums in VAT every time they buy a private jet, or dine out at a fancy restaurant. Should we consider them to be “working people”?

Reeves’s deputy, Darren Jones, chief secretary to the Treasury, has been a bit more specific of late, stating that the term “working people” covers “anyone with a payslip”. That could be extremely broad in the figurative sense of doing paid work for an employer - or very narrow if it literally means you get a physical slip of paper on which your gross and net pay, tax, NI and pension contributions are typed out.

Of course, when she was under less pressure, in those easy, balmy days of opposition, Reeves was more forthcoming - well, somewhat - when she suggested that “working people are people who go out to work and work for their incomes”, adding: “There are people who do have savings, who have been able to save up, and those are working people as well.” How big are their savings, though? No figure has ever been suggested.