Sir Keir Starmer failed to name one tax he would cut if Labour takes power at the next general election. The Labour leader was repeatedly asked which tax he would slash first during a grilling on Sky News.
Sir Keir insisted he wanted to bring down the tax burden for working people but failed to highlight one in particular.
Asked which is the first tax he would cut, he said: “The burden on working people is too high when it comes to tax so that’s where we would be looking to reduce that burden.
“Frankly the sooner we can do that the better. But we do have to recognise that we now have the highest tax burden since the Second World War under this government. So we’ve got very, very high tax.”
Pressed again which tax he would look to slash first, Sir Keir repeated that he would be looking at the burden on working people.
The Labour leader added: “But just hear me out because we need to assess why is it that we’ve got such high tax. Now I think it’s because we’ve got a low-growth economy because we’ve had stagnation effectively in the economy for 14 years.
“Therefore we’ve got to do more than have a discussion about tax, we’ve got to have a discussion about how we grow the economy.
“That’s primarily why I’ve set out the idea of mission-driven government, purpose-driven government, and made the number one mission, if we are privileged to come in to serve, to grow the economy and to make sure that living standards across the whole of the country are going up.”
Asked a third time if he could list a single tax which would definitely be lower after five years in power, he said: “Well I want to reduce the burden on working people. The only way to do that in the long term is to grow the economy.
“What you are seeing at the moment from the Prime Minister is he is floating tax cuts.
“But he is doing that in his own self-interest. He has run out of ideas. They are desperately thrashing around and trying to find the dividing lines to go into the election.
“It is not part of a strategy for growing the economy, it is simply picking tax cuts that the Prime Minister thinks might create a dividing line going into the election. That is the wrong way to govern.
“Whichever party you are in, it doesn’t matter whether you are Conservative or whether you are Labour, to simply go down the road of desperately picking anything that creates a divide rather than having a strategy for the country is characteristic of what has gone wrong over the last 14 years.”
