Labour has given the game away: it isn’t being honest about its plan to increase taxes

You may not have heard of Nick Thomas-Symonds. But if Labour wins the election on Thursday, he will become an important figure in Sir Keir Starmer’s new government. And last week, he let the cat out of the bag. He told us, quite clearly, that Labour is planning to adopt completely different plans to tax and spend than those the party has told the country.

“The Government hasn’t conducted a spending review,” he said during a radio interview. “We obviously can’t do that from opposition, and we’ve also been open, always, that we may open the books and discover the situation is even worse than it is at the moment. We’ve never hidden from that.”

This is, of course, arrant nonsense. As Paul Johnson, who runs the independent Institute for Fiscal Studies, said, “The books are wide open, fully transparent. That really won’t wash.” Starmer and his team have all the data they need to judge their approach to fiscal policy now. Yet Thomas-Symonds was quite openly preparing the ground for a raft of Labour tax rises, starting this autumn.

Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor, has previously admitted that the excuse used by Thomas-Symonds is ridiculous. “We’ve got the OBR now,” she has said, referring to the Office for Budget Responsibility, which publishes detailed accounts of the public finances. “You don’t need to win an election to find that out.”

And yet we know that Reeves is planning exactly what Thomas-Symonds suggested. Sources from the shadow cabinet have already told The Guardian that, if Labour wins the election, there will be an emergency budget towards the end of the year. And in that budget Reeves wants to “take a ‘kitchen sink’ approach in order to raise tax income”. The Labour Party source was frank: “That is not what they are presenting the public with right now.”

There has been precious little scrutiny during this campaign of Labour’s policy positions or true intentions, but it all stacks up. Wes Streeting, the shadow health Secretary, has admitted his party has spending plans that go beyond those set out in their manifesto. Upon publication of the manifesto, Paul Johnson – him again – said Labour “offers no indication that there is a plan for where the money would come from” to pay for its policies.

The implication is always that the supposedly few tax rises Labour wants will hit only the rich and privileged. But this is not going to happen. One of the startling facts of the past 14 years of Conservative government is that, while the overall tax take is up – unsurprisingly given our ageing society and high levels of debt – the average earner has the lowest effective personal tax rate since 1975, lower than the equivalent in any G7 country. In other words, higher earners have already been squeezed enormously. Labour’s tax rises are coming not for the rich – but for you.

The claims simply do not add up. We are promised that the NHS will improve beyond all recognition, all with additional funding derived from the closure of some tax loopholes. We are told that the power grid will be decarbonised by 2030 – at only one fifth of the cost Labour originally said it would take to achieve it.

This policy is particularly reckless. The country’s leading energy experts say the objective is impossible anyway, whatever the budget. But having once said it would require an additional £28 billion every year, Reeves and Starmer are now saying it can be achieved by spending a total of £23.7 billion over the whole five-year parliament.

Darren Jones, the shadow chief secretary to the Treasury, has been recorded saying that even the original £28 billion is a “tiny” sum and that Labour would need “hundreds of billions of pounds” more. Saying that Labour’s changed account of how it would fund the policy “made it sound as if we basically junked the whole thing but we definitely haven’t”, Jones confirmed – like Thomas-Symonds and Streeting – that Labour’s plans to tax and spend are not what they are saying they are.

And tax is not the only way Labour will load costs on to the public. Pressed on what Jones had said, Starmer suggested that the additional funds would come from the private sector. Private investment can achieve many things, but asking investors to decarbonise the grid – which is not something that will unleash huge or early productivity gains – will only mean they earn their returns through higher bills for customers.

According to Bloomberg Economics, Labour has a £20 billion gap in its spending plans, and party sources have told the media that they are effectively planning to reprise the Blair and Brown era policy of the Private Finance Initiative. PFI was abandoned by the coalition government after being described as “one of the costliest experiments in public policy making ever attempted”.

It is easy to see why PFI appeals to Starmer and Reeves in the same way it appealed to Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. PFI borrowing was not included on the Treasury balance sheet, but it allowed immediate cash injections that built up huge long-term public debt. Its use in the New Labour era multiplied by 10 times in 10 years, leading to £200 billion of public debt, or £8,000 for every household in the country. Starmer’s party – which never misses an opportunity to hark back to the Blair years – seems ready to do it all over again.

This is Labour’s fatal flaw that it cannot escape. Every Labour government in history has ended with unemployment higher than when it started for the simple reason that it always taxes and spends and borrows too much. Even the tax rises that Labour is honest about mean Starmer and Reeves would take Britain’s overall tax burden to the highest it has ever been.

But we know that the party is not telling us the truth because – incredibly – it has been open about its dishonesty. A Labour government will risk another debt crisis – and plans to rinse ordinary families with tax rises.