Labour won its biggest media hit in the first few days by resorting to 1980s-style comfort territory, promising to hit the rich. There may well be ample justification for raising taxes on those earning more than £70,000 a year. But that justification should be framed not in terms of taxing the affluent for its own sake, but of how it will be spent in order to tackle the growing economic and social inequalities that characterise modern Britain. On this, Labour has little meaningful to say. Its big-ticket spending items so far – free school lunches for all primary school children, scrapping tuition fees, maintaining the pensions triple lock and universal old-age benefits such as the winter fuel allowance – will do very little to improve social mobility.
It increasingly looks like this is an election campaign that will be defined by the two main political parties dodging the real questions facing Britain. The campaign will provide few opportunities to debate key questions about the shape and size of the state.
Do we want the expensive tax cuts Philip Hammond has promised to deliver for more affluent families and businesses, even if they come at the expense of poor working families losing thousands of pounds a year in tax credit cuts, hospitals and schools stretched beyond capacity and declining numbers of low-income pensioners getting state support with the costs of their care?
Beyond that, there will be little airtime devoted to the important economic and social challenges that have confounded policymakers in recent years. How do we tackle spiralling house price growth? What do we do about the widening wealth gap between the prosperous south-east and the rest of the country? How do we address the relatively high rates of illiteracy and innumeracy among British young people? Why have people’s wages all but stopped growing? How do we provide enough quality care for our ageing population?
