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It's been pointed out before, especially re the Waspi £58 billion, but it really is striking when you peer into the detail how slapdash Labour's numbers are. (1/?)
For example, it got a bit lost amid the antisemitism/Andrew Neil clustershambles, but as @sajidjavid pointed out on Tuesday their 'fully costed' manifesto only makes the numbers add up by leaving out literally dozens of commitments
The Tories have published their list as a part of a document called 'The Twelve Taxes of Labour' (catchy!). You can find it on their 'Cost of Corbyn' site https://www.costofcorbyn.com/
But even before that I'd started going through a printout of the Labour manifesto, underlining all the things that would probably or definitely cost money. I was genuinely scandalised how few of them were in the ‘grey book’.
Now obviously I'll be accused of being parti pris, because I volunteered for the Tories and believe in capitalism and that. But you can do the exercise yourself.
Here is Labour’s own list of costed policies – which already takes us up to £83 billion a year.
And here are the Tories’ list of the additional Labour policies in the manifesto they could find costings for - and an even longer list of policies they couldn’t.
It’s important to stress here that this exercise doesn’t require you to take the Conservatives at their word. It just requires you to actually read the Labour manifesto and compare it to Labour’s own costings document.
The reason I was doing this, by the way, is because this is exactly the same trick Labour pulled in 2017, and I was jumping up and down about it then too.
I counted at least 78 separate ‘expensive things’ in the manifesto, of which only a handful made it into the costings doc – compare and contrast the list in this CapX piece… https://capx.co/labours-manifesto-takes-the-voters-for-fools/
…with the list they costed. (The assumptions about how they’d raise the revenue to pay for it were pretty dodgy too, but that’s another story.) https://labour.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Funding-Britains-Future.pdf
And all of this isn’t without considering all the off-budget borrowing. The £58 billion for the WASPIs is a great example – appearing as if by magic, days after the manifesto was published.
Or today's plans to plant enough trees to cover Wales. I love trees too. But this 'Plan for Nature' will cost £3.7 billion, paid for from the £250 billion Green Transformation Fund.
Except - the Tories argue - the Green Transformation Fund is already £44 billion over budget for this Parliament (it's over 10 years, so they've split the total in two).
Then there’s renationalisation. Even if you argue that the £306 billion cost of acquiring the assets pays for itself – because you then have the assets – you have a whole range of other questions to consider.
How will you cover the borrowing costs out of the profits while also investing massively in infrastructure, raising wages, and cutting bills for consumers? Have you factored in borrowing and operating costs as part of your ‘full’ costings?
When the CBI did a costings exercise, Labour went for them over the fact that they'd included the rail rolling stock, which they hadn't explicitly promised to renationalise (even though it was a tiny proportion of the total).
So are there any costings in Labour's plans for leasing this private rolling stock, or buying more over the next few years? Reader, there are not.
(Thread continues here https://twitter.com/rcolvile/status/1200060285429714944)