According to a report by Steven Swinford in the Times today, Labour is considering offering tax cuts at the general election. He says:
Rachel Reeves is weighing up plans to offer income tax or national insurance cuts in Labour’s general election manifesto to show that the party is on the side of “opportunity and aspiration”.
The shadow chancellor is facing pressure from frontbenchers to make a “retail” offer on tax to voters who are struggling with the cost of living crisis. She has said she makes “no apology for wanting working people to have more money” and that she believes the tax burden is too high.
Reeves believes that tax cuts offered by Labour must be “bombproof” and should not threaten the party’s fiscal credibility, which she views as integral to an election win.
Swinford also says that, while Labour is opposed to cutting or abolishing inheritance tax, it is likely to support any move to cut income tax if Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, does that in the March budget. There have been reports suggesting a 2p cut in the basic rate of income tax is being considered. At the weekend a report in the Sunday Times quoted an unnamed cabinet minister as saying:
The tax cuts in March will be enormous. Either they work or we leave Labour with a major headache.
While junior doctors are on strike, some of their work will be covered in hospitals by consultants. But Dr Layla McCay, director of policy at the NHS Confederation, which represents NHS trusts, told LBC this morning that contingency plans at individual hospitals would be in “jeopardy” if just one or two consultants were sick.
She explained:
Across the whole country leaders are telling us that this particular round of industrial action, coming at the time that it does, and being of such a long duration, is going to be perhaps [the NHS’] toughest challenge yet …
Plans have been put in place and people have been working very, very hard on these rotas. But the rotas are just about covered so it only takes a consultant or two to go off sick – there’s a lot of Covid and flu, norovirus, other winter viruses around at the moment and a couple may go off sick – then that is going to put the entire plan in jeopardy, which is why the leaders across the NHS are so concerned that this is skating on thin ice.
Good morning. When Dominic Cummings met Rishi Sunak in secret last summer to offer his advice on how Sunak might win the election, he said the prime minister should settle the NHS strikes (presumably by paying staff more). Sunak decided against employing Cummings as his campaigns supremo, but NHS staff were offered better pay deals and by the end of the year nurses, consultants and other health workers had ceased, or at least paused, strike action. But Sunak has not done enough to satisfy junior doctors in England and this morning they started a six-day strike – the longest in the NHS’s 75-year history.
As Denis Campbell reports in his overnight preview, this strike is taking place during what is seen as the busiest week of the year for hospitals.
Andrew Gregory has a Q&A about why the strike is taking place here.
And Archie Bland has an explainer that assesses some of the claims and counter-claims being made by people on each side.
The BMA, which represents junior doctors (hospital doctors below consultant level – most of them have considerable experience, and would not be considered “junior” in another workplace), says the junior doctors want a 35% pay rise to compensate for the extent to which their pay has fallen in real terms over the past 15 years.
But, in an interview on the Today programme this morning, Dr Vivek Trivedi, co-chair of the BMA’s junior doctors committee, said that his members were not expecting a 35% increase immediately. He said:
We’re not asking for any uplift or pay restoration to happen overnight. We are not even saying it has to happen in one year. We’re very happy to look over deals that would span a number of years.
But what we need to do is to start a way towards that, and especially not further the pay erosion. That average 3% pay uplift [the latest offer from the government, on top of the 8.8% offered last summer] would still have amounted to pay cuts for many doctors this year.
The government says it will not negotiate with the BMA while the strike is taking place. But Trivedi said this was an unnecessary condition which the government had ignored in the past. He explained:
That’s a rule of their own making. There is no law that prevents them from talking to us while strike action is happening. And in fact we saw this same government adopt a different approach when they were dealing with the criminal barristers. They negotiated with the barristers and stopped them from striking while they were striking by coming up with an offer that was appropriate to put to their membership.
Trivedi said that, if the juniors doctors were not on strike, they would just be ignored by the government.
The Commons is still in recess, and Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer are expected to hold their first public events of the year tomorrow, not today. But Reform UK is holding a start-of-year press conference at 10.30am, and Ed Davey, the Lib Dem leader, is also holding a campaign event in Guildford, where he will be highlighting his party’s prospects of winning seats in the Tories’ “blue wall”.
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