Some of the most infamous words in politics are ‘read my lips, no new taxes’ – uttered by George H.W. Bush as he accepted the nomination as the Republican candidate for the 1988 US presidential election. It helped him win that year but contributed to his downfall in 1992 as he failed to stick to his promise. We can argue how much of Bush’s defeat by Bill Clinton had to do with the broken tax promise and how much was to do with recession, but ‘read my lips, no new taxes’ should certainly have been on Rachel Reeves’s mind in recent months.
The tragedy of Starmer’s Labour is that it has attempted to emulate the success of Tony Blair’s New Labour, but without anything like the discipline
It is becoming clear that the £40 billion of tax rises in the Chancellor’s first Budget – themselves a breach of an electoral promise not to touch the rate of National Insurance, as she hiked employer contributions – are not going to be the end of it.
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