A private Treasury attack dossier circulated to critique Labour’s economic policy includes detailed figures in the small print that highlight difficult statistics on the public finances under Conservative governments. Labour said the figures in the dossier, seen by the Guardian, were “embarrassing” because they showed Labour’s favourable record on budget surplus compared with the Conservatives’. The detailed rejection of Labour’s spending plans has been sent to Tory MPs , as well as to broadcast journalists. Labour has circulated its own document to counter the claims.
In the appendix of the document, the figures reveal several difficult statistics for the Tories, including that a Labour government presided over the last budget surplus, that Labour governments presided over nine budget surpluses compared with five under Conservatives, and that the highest peacetime deficit came under the Tories – though that was during the Covid pandemic. The document says Labour has “failed to set out how they would pay for a number of new spending measures” – including cancelling the rise in national insurance, not reducing international aid and supporting the full schools catch-up package proposed by the government’s education tsar Kevan Collins, who quit when it was not accepted. Some of the measures listed by the Conservative document are not accurate descriptions of Labour policy, such as “scrap business rates” costing £25bn, when the opposition party has said it would replace the rates with a different taxation system. The shadow chief secretary to the Treasury, Pat McFadden, said the Conservatives could not highlight Labour’s record without showing other difficult statistics about their time in government. “The recent Tory attack document on Labour bore no relation to reality, except in one respect – it revealed their own appalling record on tax, debt and waste,” he said. “Instead of releasing fiction about Labour’s plans, ministers should be focused on helping people with ever rising inflation and sorting out the delays which are affecting public services.”
The shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, published a new document over the weekend, called Labour’s Plan for the Economy, to lay the foundations for the party’s summer economic campaign. The document is seen by some in the party as a retort to internal criticism about a perceived lack of strategic direction. The plan pledges emergency support for the current crisis, security for families facing a winter of rising bills, including policies on bills and insulation, as well as long-term policies for jobs and economic growth via strengthening supply chains and developing a hi-tech industrial strategy. A Conservative source said they stood by the claims in the document. “Everyone remembers Labour’s reckless approach to the public finances, which left them in tatters. When Labour left office in 2010, they left behind the third highest deficit ever recorded, after the second world war and the pandemic. And it’s clear they haven’t changed.”