Your guide to Labour's latest attack

Ctesibius

Actually even in this you are using Liebour's terminology when you say "£6 billion: This is the roughly how much the Tories think their national insurance cut will cost."

NOT increasing tax (NI is a tax) doesn't COST anything.

Sally Chatterjee

Labour have no authority when it comes to the public finances. Here them trying to analyse the numbers is like inviting a McDonalds kitchen hand onto Masterchef. Brown's wrecking of the once-prosperous British economy means he simply can't open his mouth on matters fiscal.

Pete Hoskin

Ctesibius: I've clarified it now.

Charles Flaccidwidger

I'm just wondering if Pu Hui above is actually Richard as he/she makes just as much sense.

glenlivetguy

I cant understand why the interviewers just say..."MR BRown this year alone following your stewardship of the economy these last 13 years,you are going to spend £170 billion more than you are collecting in tax i.e.28 times more than you will collect in the 2011 NIC hike...whats all the fuss about negating this £6billion in the context of these figures"

Dorothy Wilson

On the World at One Liam Byrne seemed to be jumping from one figure to another.

But as glenlivetguy points out the key figures are the deficit and the debt. The Conservatives should have posters with those on - noughts and all - informing the public the true extent of Brown's legacy.

JohnAnt

In any case, what the Tories are saying is that not increasing NI is so important that it will ensure efficiency savings are made to avoid the rise.
They don't have to propose and cost their budget in detail, ahead of occupying the Treasury.
Voters see through all this. Brown's made a serious mistake, and as usual (e.g. with the abolition of the 10% rate) it'll take him several days to calm down enough to see that it's in his interests to reverse it. By then the damage to Labour will have been done.
Calloo Callay.

toco

None of this matters too much.Brown is the most loathed PM in 100 years and will lose badly come 6th May as nobody would ever admit to voting for him.

Walsingham's Ghost

'Efficiency Savings' under a Labour Government are a complete myth.

I worked in the Civil Service when they implemented Peter Gershon's last Efficiency Review. All that happened was that when I went home on a Friday night I was a 'Senior Adviser' and when I came in on the following Monday morning, I had suddenly become an 'Executive Adviser' - same job, same desk, same salary, same pension rights - but my 'post' of Senior Adviser had been ‘cut’.

This ruse was used to great effect across the Civil Service so that Departments could state publicly that they had ‘cut posts’, when in effect all that had happened was that job titles had been changed.

At the time, the media never picked up on the fact that when Ministers spoke about their Department successfully ‘cutting posts’, they were never referring to people losing their jobs. Indeed, at the time most Departments were actually increasing their headcount, not reducing it.

Add to this the amount of interim contracts handed out to independent Consultants (which was favoured since these individuals were never included in the Department’s official employee headcount) and Gershon’s Efficiency Review might as well never have happened.

Hopefully under a Conservative Government, Gershon’s identified savings will be implemented properly.

When I joined the Civil Service there were around 900,000 civil servants – when I left post-Gershon Efficiency Review, there were 1.7 million of us and growing.

Posts not people – it worked every time...

WG

charles hercock

That photo of GB's false smile is as nauseaing as their fake statistics

Viv Evans

Can someone explain how and especially why these 6 billion Gord et al keep talking about will affect schools/teachers/police/armed forces?

I am probably naive, but I thought the NI was meant for the NHS exclusively?

Alternatively, it would seem that Gord thinks he can grab anything out of our pockets as long as it has got a nice, emotive label on it, like NIC, and then waste it anyway to his own heart's content ...

The Man

The most astonishing thing is that Brown/Labour would rather spend - sorry, invest - £6bn on public services, than stimulate the wealth generating private sector by forgoing the NI rise.

Sebastian

Please will somebody ask Brown why he keeps insisting that the non-increase of NI will cause £6bn to be removed from the "economy"? Let us see if he will admit that he thinks the economy is only govenment money. Surely this admission that he does not believe that we should have our own money should make even the most hardened labour supporters think twice!

Simon

National Insurance (from Directgov Website)

"You pay National Insurance contributions to build up your entitlement to certain social security benefits, including the State Pension. The type and level of National Insurance contributions you pay depends on how much you earn and whether you're employed or self employed. You stop paying National Insurance contributions in the year you reach State Pension age."

So we are being told by the Government, that if NI contributions are not raised by 1% for employees and employers police nurses and teacher numbers will be cut.

Surely NI contributions do not pay for the teachers, nurses and police.

Why are Brown etc trying to cloud the issue, and suggest cuts would follow?

This is supposed to be a tax for pensions and social security payments.

Naomi Muse

Labour wingeing sounds like sour grapes.

Means they might not have any ideas as to what to say on a positive note other than 'growth' and being 'the right person' to be in the driving seat of the economy.

The £6bn is money not going into the exchequer on Labour's partially disclosed figures. Some of it would have been part of the revolving credit of the public sector, taxation, treasury, public sector, taxation, etc etc

Therefore the tax on jobs will allow the private sector to have more people in employment, but will also enable the public sector to grow more too.

Tom Pride

Regarding the £6 billion efficiency savings to be made this year. This will reduce Government spending and thus borrowing this year I.E. 2010/11, so reducing the “stimulus” (anti-cyclical government spending financed by borrowing). This may well be a sensible course of action to take which will not have an adverse impact on the “recovery”– particularly as implementing these savings will prevent a tax on jobs to be implemented in 2010/11. It may even be essential to placate Gilts buyers and unplanned emergency cuts which would follow a buyers strike.

Darling has already started withdrawal of the stimulus with the restoration of VAT to 17.5% back in January and with the tax increases this month. So, why should another £6 billion withdrawal by cutting wasteful spending (from a total current expenditure spend of £644 billion and projected total deficit of £163 billion) spread over the next nine months mean the end of the world?

Politicians should be able to discuss rationally the pros and cons but the reality is that because Brown is not a rational adult with normal standards of truthfulness, the debate consists of a Brown shouting match with his ranting of dodgy Tractor stats.

It seems he never heard that story about the Boy crying Wolf. Too many lies, too many deliberate deceits told too many times – the man has no credibility, let alone integrity, left at all. Pray that he departs the body politic soon after 6 May. He and his Forces of Hell have wrought dreadful damage.

Chris lancashire

With a total government annual expenditure of £650bn I find it astonishing that anyone thinks savings of £27bn CAN'T be obtained.

Tiresias

@Viv Evans

NI was originally a contribution intended to secure entitlement to specific benefits, but unemployment benefit and pensions, I think, not health care. But it has long since lost any distinction from ordinary tax.

Does anyone know how the National Insurance take breaks down between the amount paid by employees and that paid by employers? The budget report shows an expectation of £97bn in revenue from this source in 2010/11 but does not - at least at the simple level I am looking at - distinguish between what is essentially an income tax and what is a levy on employment paid by employers.

Victor Southern

Meanwhile London NHS faces a £5-billion cut in its budget this year - under Labour's detailed plains.

The state spends £700-billion a year. Saving £6-billion is less than a 1% efficiency improvement. Put that in its context - the median household income is £26,000 a year. To save 1% of that it would be necessary to reduce household expenditure by £5 per week or about 60P a day. Saving £27 billion is more difficult as that would involve reducing costs by over £20 a week - so a cheaper holiday, fewer cinema trips, less drink in the house, switching off lights when a room is not in use.

Percy

The truth is Broon thinks he knows how to spend OUR money batter than we do.

TGF UKIP

I read somewhere very recently (DT I think) that the Bottomless Pit had actually increased headcount in Q4 09 by over 20,000.

Even Calamity's sorry bunch should be able to make waste stick, but I ain't holding my breath.

Nicholas

"Can someone explain how and especially why these 6 billion Gord et al keep talking about will affect schools/teachers/police/armed forces?"

Socialist emotional blackmail. Pay more tax or babies will die. Milliband was doing it on QT last night. The NI "cut" means less nurses in hospitals and less police on our streets.

In reality it is simplistic, dog whistle tripe that they should be called out on every time. But they won't be because 90% of modern Britain is brain dead or female or both.

Paddy

Lord "don't touch me" Mandelson is becoming more and more detached from reality.

Holly ......

Three men in a boat.

El Sid

Don't forget :

£167bn - Labour's unfunded spending commitments in 2009/10. About half of that is structural, nothing to do with the recession

£500bn - Labour's unfunded spending since 1997

£1020bn - Darling's forecast of unfunded spending between 1997 and 2013/4.

What was that about £6bn again?

Personally I'd like to see NI merged into income tax and have done - it would also allow the Tories some wiggle room to reduce the 50% band by stealth. At least rebrand it as the labour tax, which is what it is.

Sharka

@ Vivian and Simon:

National Insurance gets paid into a fund which is invested in UK gilts. The money is therefore available for general expenditure, and the funds are all subject to government risk (there is no separate fund per person). It is not just for the NHS or any other purpose.

There is no hypothetication, and the "entitlement" to benefits that you accrue is a minute fraction of the amount taken, especially as NI is now uncapped.

It is a tax, but one conveniently obscured by the "benefits" one accrues. It is worse than a tax, in that you cannot take deductions against it, nor offset losses.

Of course, it is more politically acceptable to state things in this manner. Stating that the true rate of basic rate tax is over 30% (20% income tax plus 12.8% NI - and that excludes employer taxes) would destroy the fiction that the UK is a relatively low tax environment.

2trueblue

Tractor statistics. And didn't old Gordo get his figures wrong recently? Lets get them out.