Labour’s manifesto is a fiscal fantasy land – but the Tories would be wrong to ignore it

Labour’s leaked manifesto is, predictably enough, a fiscal fantasy land with lots of spending pledges and rather few tax rises to pay for them –  higher taxes for the top five per cent of earners would not necessarily earn an extra penny in revenue if they encouraged more avoidance or flight to tax havens. But does that mean it is all rubbish? Not at all. Conservatives would do well to refrain from the dismissive talk about the manifesto being a suicide note and recognise that there are some good ideas which they should emulate.

No conservatives, for example, should be sneering at a promise to scrap the plan to force small businesses to fill in quarterly tax returns, nor to base increases in business rates to CPI rather than RPI – the latter which tends to be higher and which the government several years ago scrapped as its preferred measure of inflation.