THE director of Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) has dismissed a claim made by a senior Labour Party candidate that the financial situation of the UK may be worse when they “open the books”.
During an interview with Times Radio, shadow cabinet office minister Nick Thomas-Symonds said that if the party wins the General Election they may discover the public finances are “even worse” than expected.
When asked about the IFS’s claim that both the Tories and Labour were not being honest about the economic choices they will have to make if they form the next government, Thomas-Symonds said:
“Obviously the government is in a very different position from us, because, as the Institute for Fiscal Studies set out, there are no specific departmental spending plans beyond March 2025.
Oh dear, oh dear. The old "we may open the books and discover the situation is even worse..."
— Paul Johnson (@PJTheEconomist) June 25, 2024
The books are wide open, fully transparent. That really won't wash... pic.twitter.com/EnQpZdano7
“That’s because the government hasn’t conducted a spending review.
“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."
Paul Johnson, the director of the IFS, said Thomas-Symonds concern about the “the books” were entirely unwarranted.
“Oh dear, oh dear,” he said on X/Twitter.
“The old ‘we may open the books and discover the situation is even worse’.
“The books are wide open, fully transparent. That really won’t wash…”
Earlier this month, Rachel Reeves admitted that the excuse of not being fully aware of the financial situation and immediately raising taxes wasn’t legitimate due to the creation of the Office for Budget Responsibility in 2010.
“We’ve got the OBR now,” she told the Financial Times.
“We know things are in a pretty bad state. You don’t need to win an election to find that out”.
Health Secretary Neil Gray said Thomas-Symonds comment revealed that Labour were actively “choosing Tory austerity plans”.
“Labour had access to civil service for ages to make plans, so any sense of ‘we don’t know what we will find’ on funding anti-poverty or anti-austerity measures is nonsense,” he said on X/Twitter.
“These are informed choices: choosing to keep 2child cap, choosing Tory austerity plans."
It comes after leading economic experts tore into Labour’s manifesto for its failure to address cuts to public services.
Johnson said the party’s manifesto promised a “dizzying number of reviews and strategies” but warned that “delivering genuine change will almost certainly require putting actual resources on the table”.
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