‘Gentlemen, please’, said Julie Etchingham, over and over again, as she chaired this ITV debate. She had given Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer both 45 seconds for answers and both had far more to say. ITV didn’t silence one microphone when the other was speaking so both were able to heckle, further complicating the format. Sunak’s tactic was to turn everything into a question for Starmer: ‘What are you going to do about tax / small boats/ taxing pensioners?’ Starmer’s general lack of answers came across, which will have been Sunak’s objective. I’d give the debate to Sunak – but it was closer than I thought it would be. And to win, Sunak had to stretch the truth until the elastic snapped.
Starmer can be fairly wooden at delivering speeches, but his lawyer training came across. He was faster on his feet than I expected, even managing the odd joke. Sunak’s big tactic, quite audacious (not to say shameless) was say Starmer would charge £2,000 more in tax – whereas the Tories would cut taxes. This is untrue. He said the £2,000 cost-of-Labour figure came from the civil service. Not so. The Tories may be cutting some taxes for some people but overall the plan is to raise the tax burden to a postwar high. ‘I’d ask everyone to judge me by my actions’, Sunak said. Quite so. For reference, the below from the OBR shows his published plan to raise the UK tax burden to levels not seen in most people’s lifetimes.
‘I’m going to improve financial security by cutting people’s taxes,’ said Sunak. He intends no such thing. ‘I don’t know why you want to put up people’s taxes,’ he asked Starmer. Why does he? ‘I’m going to be clear that we’re going to be cutting people’s taxes,’ he said. He is not. ‘Mark my words: Labour will raise your taxes. It’s in their DNA. Your work, your car, your pension’ But his published Budget shows the tax burden rise to the highest level since the 1940s. It was a false attack line on a false premise, and he’s lucky Starmer was unable not do a better job. And lucky that ITV wasn't ready to challenge him by (for example) displaying the above OBR graph and asking Sunak to explain it.
It was Sunak's idea for the income tax threshold to be lowered to be below the state pension level. He has now changed this policy - and was castigating Starmer for refusing to say he'd revoke this Tory policy. This was cheeky, but effectively so. Starmer could easily have said "Hitting the pensioners was your idea - why did you propose it in the first place?" But Starmer seemed able to draw only from pre-programmed, pre-rehearsed lines. Again, that will have been Sunak's calculation.
When asked about the ‘climate catastrophe’, Sunak played it quite deftly, saying that his daughters put it in exactly the same way. It didn’t take him long to segue to his real agenda that he would not tell ‘people to arbitrarily rip out your boiler’ whereas Starmer is still signed up to the unreformed net zero agenda. A decent point, especially as it was addressed to those outside the TV studio. Starmer doubled down on his ‘clean power by 2030’ pledge. ‘That’s the promise I made and that’s the promise I’ll keep’, he replied. I’ve met no one who thinks his pledge to decarbonise energy by 2030 is deliverable, but perhaps Labour cannot afford to admit as much when it has the Greens threatening them in places like Bristol.
The audience was with Starmer. They liked his hits on private schools, non-doms and defence of ECHR. There was derisive laughter when Sunak claimed his plan for national service – or compulsory community service – would be ‘transformational for our society’. Starmer then gave one the his best lines. ‘They’ve been in power for 14 years and a few months before the election, they come up with this desperate idea’, he replied, to applause. Sunak replied that Starmer had 14 years to think of ideas, and had none. Which, in general, came across. Starmer had almost nothing to say about his alternative and his agenda.
There was also laughter when Sunak tried to claim that NHS waiting lists are coming down. The waiting list stood at 7.2 million when he made his pledge, said Starmer – now they’re 7.5 million. How is that down? ‘Because they are coming down from when they were when they were higher’, he said. When Sunak blamed the doctor’s strikes, the audience groaned. Below shows the graph – and a waiting list that isn’t, really, going down.
Sunak said a lot of stuff that (to put it politely) just ain’t so. ‘He’s going to put up your taxes as surely as night follows day’, he said of Starmer. But so is he. Sunak claimed that small boat arrivals are down by a third over the last 12 months: the actual figure is 27 per cent, so closer to a quarter. Small points, but if Sunak deploys figures he knows are misleading then it suggests a worrying lack of ammo. His oft-repeated point - that Labour's plans would mean £2,000 extra in tax - was (oddly) not rebutted by Starmer. He will be kicking himself that he did not, or returned with an equally-made-up claim that the Tories would raise it by £4,000.
Sunak’s closing statement was about the man who wasn’t there. ‘A vote for anyone else’ – i.e., Nigel Farage – would be a vote for Starmer. And you don't know what you're getting with Labour apart from higher taxes. ‘Choose lower taxes’, was Sunak’s final plea to the voters. If only we could.
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