Firstly, if you’re wondering whether the sums in the Liberal Democrat manifesto add up and – to adopt the phrase leader Sir Ed Davey used a lot today – are “fully funded”, the answer is: well, yes, sort of.
If you have full faith in all the figures published in the costing document published alongside the Lib Dem manifesto, so they are indeed fully funded. For the around £27 billion in additional spending commitments is paid for with around £27 billion in additional taxes and money-raising. Alive!
It’s just not that simple, because it’s not entirely clear whether we should have full faith in these numbers.
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To give an example: the liberal democrats say they are planning to raise £3.62 billion (note the two decimal places) through aviation tax reform. However, when you ask how high they are actually planning to increase aviation taxes, they don’t have an answer. They want to raise a certain amount of money; they simply don’t have a detailed plan on how to raise that amount of money.
Or take your plans to tax share buybacks. It’s very likely that this won’t raise anywhere near the £1.4 billion they think – largely because most businesses will simply change their behavior in the face of the new tax.
Then there’s the fact that the main revenue generator in the Lib Dem manifesto is not actually a new tax, but the assumption that they will be able to squeeze tax avoiders even more than the last batch, raising £ 7 billion extra in the process. . Lib Dem party officials say this ambitious figure (higher than the £5 billion Labor thinks they could gain from the Conservatives’ £6 billion) will be achieved by investing £1 billion in processes HMRC. It would be nice if this worked; but it is not entirely clear whether this will happen.
These are not the only question marks. I’m a little skeptical that the Liberal Democrat plan to resolve the asylum crisis by allowing asylum seekers to work after three months would actually bring in a whopping £4.3 billion, as the costs document indicates.
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Authorities such as the Nuffield Trust question whether spending on health and social assistance increases included in this manifesto (£8.4 billion – or around £10 billion when you include the promise to reward unpaid carers) will make a big difference. They say this will equate to increases in real terms well below the long-term average.
Then there is the bizarre case of the lack of net zero investment. In 2019, the Liberal Democrats committed to achieving net zero carbon emissions by 2045, rather than 2050, and said they would invest £86 billion to achieve this. This time, the manifesto commits once again to achieving net zero emissions by 2045, but only promises to spend just £8.4 billion on the process. And no, that decimal place is actually in the right place.
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Maybe you think this is a criticism. And to be fair, all the major parties play similar games at election time. In the absence of an institution like the Office for Budget Responsibility that records the functioning of each party, they can get away with lump sums like this.
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Perhaps the most instructive conclusion from today’s manifesto is to note that it is much, much less ambitious than the one that preceded it. When Jo Swinson was leader of the Liberal Democrat Party in 2019, his manifesto involved spending plans of around £63 billion a year. The spending plans in today’s manifesto are basically half that size – even less when adjusting for inflation.
Whether you conclude this is because of the times we live in, with tighter public finances, or because the Liberal Democrats have changed considerably since then – it’s certainly a less radical view than last time.
This story originally appeared on News.sky.com read the full story
