Hunt snaffles Labour’s revenue raisers

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Good afternoon. The Conservatives are still raising taxes to a record high. However, they are doing so at a slightly slower rate than they were, owing to the Budget.

That’s what Jeremy Hunt is doing underneath the spin. It also presents us with the real choice between Labour and the Conservatives in this year’s election: taxes will rise regardless of who wins it, but they will go up at a slower rate if the Tories win.

I also think it’s a pretty good guess that the question of who pays those higher taxes will change quite a lot, as part of the game of politics is to get the other lot’s voters to pay for things. Both parties will want to talk as if their revenue raisers are levied only on “the rich”: asset-rich retirees will have a worse time of it under Labour, higher working-age earners will have a worse time of it under the Conservatives. Taxes are going to go up regardless.

For different reasons, neither party wants to have that conversation openly. For Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt, that would risk their election campaign devolving into a loud, intra-Tory squabble about whether or not they are abandoning the principles of “proper conservatism” (though there is a risk of that in any case).

For Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves, an open conversation about tax runs the risk of scaring voters off, thanks to fear of Labour’s tax rises. Hunt’s political aim today was simple — to avoid a Conservative election campaign that forces him and Sunak to talk about the tax rises that they will oversee in the event of a Tory victory, and to try to shunt Labour into talking about its tax rises.

That’s why in a lot of ways the biggest and most significant things Hunt did, politically speaking,…