John McDonnell – No tax rises for those earning under £80,000
Appearing on the Andrew Marr Show, Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell gave his first major interview since Labour’s disappointing performance in Thursday’s local elections. With the party now fully focused on the general election, he outlined his pledges on tax, claiming that a Labour government would not raise tax on any worker earning less than £80,000 a year:
JM: What we’re saying today, anyone earning below £80,000, we’ll be guaranteeing you will not have an increase in income tax or VAT or National Insurance contributions, and for those above £80,000, we’re asking them to pay a modest bit more. Why? To fund our public services. You had Theresa May on last week… you put that very good question to her about nurses. An 11% cut in wages over the last 7 years, some of them having to go to food banks – our nurses – that cannot be right. So we’re going to ask those higher earners just to pay a bit more.
AM: Are we talking about a new rate of tax? Because [there’s] the 45p rate and the 50p rate possibly under Labour….
JM: What will happen over this next week is that – the Labour party is a democratic party – we will be consolidating and confirming our manifesto. We’ll launch it the week after next and then identify the very specifics of this…
AM: You’ve said very clearly that people [earning] over £80,000 will be paying more…
JM: A bit more, a modest bit more but… the reason I’m saying this is I want middle and lower earners to be assured that under Labour they will not be paying more taxes because I’ve seen some of these ludicrous figures that the Tories have been bandying about, and I wanted them to have that assurance.
McDonnell added that ‘There will be no stealth taxes either’, ruling out a rise in National Insurance contributions for employers, and said that Labour has ‘no plans’ to raise VAT. When questioned by Marr about how much Labour intended to borrow over the next Parliament, McDonnell was far less committal. He denied that he was a ‘Marxist’, instead stating that he was going to be ‘the first socialist [Chancellor] in the tradition of the Labour party’ but he did drop in that there was ‘a lot to learn from reading [Das] Kapital’.
Emily Thornberry – It’s not about Theresa May’s hair
Shadow Foreign Secretary Emily Thornberry, who is fast becoming a regular feature of these round-ups, has once again cause a stir on social media — with comments that the Sun has described as ‘sneering’. Telling Robert Peston that ‘there is a choice’ at this election and that ‘not a single vote has been cast yet’, Thornberry blamed Labour’s poor showing on the public’s obsession with the Prime Minister’s hair:
ET: ‘It does not need to be this way. There is no alternative vision that the Tories are offering, and it is not good enough for people to simply say ‘I like Theresa May’s hair’ or ‘I like that shade of blue’. Politics is not about that. Politics is about how you change people’s lives.’
Jeremy Hunt – UK mental health care is ‘not good enough’
Appearing on the Robert Peston show, Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt attempted to elaborate on Conservative plans for an overhaul of mental health care in the NHS. In doing so, Hunt acknowledged that currently, people with mental health issues are not treated as well as those with physical injuries:
JH: If you look at the actual facts in terms of the money, an independent NHS report a couple of months ago said that there’s £1.4 billion more being spent on mental health compared to three years ago…
RP: It’s been allocated, but is it getting through? As I say, I talk to mental health doctors and they say their resources are not increasing.
JH: This is actually what’s being spent and we’re actually treating around 120,000 more people a year. But what this is really about today is, if you are a parent who has a child with some really serious psychological illnesses, what you want is for that child to be treated by the NHS, but too often what happens is that the first line of help you get is from the police service and you can end up being in a police cell and that can make the condition worse. It’s obviously bad for the police and so what we need to do is to improve what we call in the NHS, our crisis care response…
RP: So how quickly will you be able to provide alternative facilities so that the police do not lock up vulnerable people??
JH: We are making good progress… we said that between now and 2020 in order to deliver this commitment we will recruit an extra 10,000 professionals because it’s not just about money, it’s about having the people who can deliver the services you need, but this will mean that we have to do crisis care better. And this is part of what’s called ‘parity of esteem’, so we changed the law in 2012 and we said that mental and physical health should be treated equally. But at the moment, if you have a mental health crisis, you don’t get as good care.
Hunt went on to say that at any given time 1 in 6 of us has a mental health condition such as depression or anxiety. He continued ‘if you have mental health problems, we are not doing as well as we would like to. Although it has to be said that many people would say we have some of the best mental health care provision in Europe, but it’s still not good enough.’
Nigel Farage – Ukip will survive
Following on from Ukip’s distinctly underwhelming performance in Thursday’s elections, where in the end the party only managed to return one councillor, you might have expected Nigel Farage to be a little deflated . However, speaking to ITV’s Robert Peston, the former UKIP leader remained positive about the party’s prospects – at least for the moment.
NF: I led the party 4 years ago in these county council elections in England on a manifesto – we’re bringing back grammar schools, getting Britain outside the European Union, controlling immigration and helping small businesses – and four years on the British Prime Minister was running on exactly the same ticket and swept the board.
RP: You got 4 million votes in 2015. What are you going to get this time?
NF: That depends. I mean, when [May] launched this campaign and she said ‘trust me, I will deliver Brexit, but if I don’t win we’ll have this coalition of chaos that will effectively stop Brexit from happening’- the number of Ukip supporters that contacted me and said ‘Do you know what Nigel, this time, we have to support Theresa May’. Now, fast-forward a couple of weeks, when people realise actually, this election’s a non-contest, that she’s going to win by a country mile anyway, then I think the squeeze you tend to see on small parties that you tend to see at the end of a campaign, in this case will be the other way around.
RP: Can Ukip survive though if it gets wiped out in a general election
NF: Ukip’s going to survive. It has to survive.
RP: How?
NF: It’s rather like – we all pay the house insurance every year, not because we want there to be a fire, but just in case there is one. And I think it’s all well and good for Mrs May, who gives wonderful speeches and sounds very reassuring, but the truth of it is as Home Secretary she did the same thing on immigration and other issues and didn’t deliver and Ukip needs to be there in case there is backsliding on Brexit.
When Peston asked if he supported Theresa May, Farage shot back: ‘I don’t tend to support Remain voters.’ However, he added ‘If, in two and a half years time, Mrs May has delivered the kind of Brexit voters that voters wanted, then I think you can ask the question ‘What is Ukip’s future? Where does it go from here?’
Neil Hamilton – Ukip has to become more professional
The leader of Ukip in Wales, Neil Hamilton appeared less cheerful when confronted with the news that Ukip had gained as many seats in the local council elections as the ‘Rubbish Party’. Interviewed by Andrew Neil on the Sunday Politics, Hamilton suggested that Ukip’s misfortunes were the result of ‘cosmic forces’ beyond their control and that UKIP would have to become ‘more professional’ in response.
AN: I’m struggling to see the way back for your party because you’re no longer a threat to Tories in the South – indeed UKIP voters are flocking to the Tories in the South. You’re no longer a threat to Labour in the North, it’s the Tories who now look more of a threat to Labour in the North. So there is no route to progress is there?
NH: The reality will be that once we’re back on the domestic agenda again and the Brexit negotiations are concluded, we’ll know what the outcome is and the focus will be upon bread and butter issues. We have all sorts of policies in our programme that the other parties can’t match us on. The talk today is all about putting up taxes to put more money into the health service. We would scrap half the foreign aid budget and put another £8 billion into the health service. No other party is saying that. I think these are policies which will be popular with ordinary working people.
When asked about whether Paul Nuttall was to blame for the poor performance in the local elections, Hamilton replied:
‘I think we’re seeing what you might call cosmic forces beyond the control of any individual at the moment. It’s certainly not Paul Nuttall’s fault.’ He went on: ‘UKIP has to beef up its organisation and UKIP has to become more professional than we have been recently… but I think that our prospects in the future are certainly very rosy because I don’t believe the Tories will deliver on many of the policies they are now making.’
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