Labour has no choice but to break its promises on tax

We knew their promises were undeliverable. Everybody said so.

- JOHN RENTOUL

Paul Johnson of the Institute for Fiscal Studies talked himself hoarse during the election campaign saying that both parties were engaged in a "conspiracy of silence" about the sustainability of the public finances.

As he heads off, after a decade at the IFS, to be provost of The Queen’s College, Oxford, with the thanks of a grateful nation echoing in his ears, we can observe that he understated the case. It was not actually “silence” of which the parties were guilty: their crime was that of making audible promises that they could not keep.

Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves promised no tax rises on working people, and sometimes said that no additional tax rises were needed to fund the plans in their manifesto. Within days of the election, the new prime minister and chancellor announced that they were going to have to break those promises – although they didn’t quite put it like that – because the books were in a worse state than they had expected.

This was despite Reeves having explicitly said during the election that this device of claiming surprise at the real state of the finances was something that she would not do. “We’ve got the OBR now,” she told the Financial Times on 18 June. The independent Office for Budget Responsibility sets out the public finances in an impartial way so that the government cannot hide the bad news. “We know things are in a pretty bad state,” she said. “You don’t need to win an election to find that out.”