Labour has greeted the Budget with its now-familiar trick of accepting 90 per cent of its changes and then railing against one high-profile measure to attack those beastly Tories. This time, it’s Jeremy Hunt’s abolition of the £1.07 million lifetime tax allowance on pensions from April to prevent doctors going into early retirement.
The party’s attack dogs have been frothing about how deeply unfair all this is, with Rachel Reeves labelling it a ‘tax cut for the richest one per cent.’ She thundered on ITV that it was the Chancellor’s 45p tax rate moment and declared that Labour will force a vote on it next week. All good and laudable but if the abolition of the lifetime tax allowance is so terrible then why on earth did Reeves’ Shadow Cabinet colleague Wes Streeting propose it back on September?
The Shadow Health Secretary told the Telegraph that he wanted to abolish the ‘crazy’ pensions cap that deters many experienced doctors from working late into their careers. He said then that:
I’m not pretending that doing away with the cap is a particularly progressive move. But it is one that sees patients seen faster, and will inevitably save lives. I’m just being hard headed and pragmatic about this.
Labour spinners are now furiously briefing that they would introduce a ‘targeted scheme’ for doctors rather than the whole scale abolition of the lifetime allowance. But if that was the case then why didn’t Streeting say that in his interview with the Telegraph? Surely Labour didn’t just perform a screeching U-turn after seeing Hunt do, er, exactly what they had called for?
Summer hasn’t arrived but the flip-flops are out already…
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