Thread by @NJ_Timothy

On Monday Labour are going to tell the biggest lie in British politics. They're pretending everything is worse than they realised, so they can break their promise made less than a month ago, and rinse you with taxes rises. This is why it's untrue. (1/n).

https://x.com/SkyNews/status/1816764285936164980

First off, we know this is what they have always planned, because Labour sources told the Guardian they were secretly planning to do this before the election. theguardian.com/business/artic…

Starmer and Reeves are pretending that the public finances are somehow much worse than they expected them to be. But Reeves admitted in June that, "we’ve got the OBR now... You don’t need to win an election to find out [about the public finances]." ft.com/content/d92d34…

She knew what the fiscal choices were, and she pretended she would not put up taxes. She explicitly promised "no additional tax rises" beyond those she set out, and claimed Labour policy "will be fully funded and fully costed - no ifs, no ands, no buts". bbc.co.uk/news/articles/…

Here's another one: "We have fully costed, fully funded plans ... Nothing in our plans requires any additional tax to be increased." theguardian.com/business/artic…

Now the "if and buts" are coming. Labour claim they have "inherited the worst economic circumstances since the war." This is obviously untrue:

In 2010 Labour left unemployment at 7.8% compared to 4.4% now, and public sector net borrowing 10.3% of GDP compared to 3.1% now...

Then, the economy was in deep recession, and now it is forecast to grow faster than any in the G7. Inflation is down to two per cent – compared to 8.3 per cent when Mrs Thatcher came to power, and 15.5 per cent when Harold Wilson returned to Downing Street in October 1974...

Reeves has claimed: "If you look at debt as a share of our economy that's the highest since 1951." This is factually incorrect. And while high, UK debt is lower than Japan, the United States, Italy, France and Canada.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politi…

And whether we're talking borrowing, debt, inflation or growth, with Covid lockdowns and the energy bailout - which affected each of them - Labour demanded the interventions should last longer and cost more. theguardian.com/politics/2021/…

Labour's trick is to commission an "audit" of public spending, showing a supposed "black hole". But as Paul Johnson, director of the IFS, says, this claim is not “very credible at all”. The choices available to Labour were known before the election. thetimes.com/uk/politics/ar…

They chose to go along with Conservative spending plans, and now claim they didn't know what those plans involved. Now this is another choice. And they are choosing to break their promise and put up taxes.

Some commentators are ignoring the obvious dishonesty and calling it smart politics, comparing the operation to what George Osborne did as Chancellor in 2010. But then Osborne had promised cuts in an election campaign and predicted an "age of austerity".

This year Labour made no equivalent commitment. They claimed they had changed on tax. They promised, "no ifs, no ands, no buts", that there would be "no additional tax rises". They are quite openly breaking that promise, and to justify doing so, they are telling a massive lie.