Labour ministers can’t make their sums add up. They’ll force taxpayers to make up the difference.
Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves have a numbers problem: they don’t add up (Image: Getty)
Eight years ago, shadow home secretary Diane Abbott famously got her numbers in a twist. She said Labour could recruit 10,000 new police officers for just £300,000, which would have left each officer earning just £30 a year.
In her defence, she was put on the spot in a live radio interview. So what’s Keir Starmer’s excuse? The PM suffered a far bigger mathematical muddle over the weekend, despite having all the time in the world to get his figures right.
On Saturday, the PM proudly declared that Labour’s £3 bus fare cap had already “cut costs for families”.
Trouble is, the cap was £2 under the Conservatives. Labour raised it to £3 on 1 January this year. If that’s a cut, my name’s Pythagorus. As even Diane Abbott could tell you, it’s a 50% increase.
Starmer didn’t blurt this out under pressure. It was in a tweet. That half the Labour Party’s communications team must have seen and approved.
Only in Labour’s parallel universe can a 50% price rise be spun as a cut.
Either Starmer can’t do simple maths or he’s a serial liar. Something doesn’t add up here, but then nothing does with this Labour government.
Which brings me, as ever, to Rachel Reeves.
Last week, the Treasury was forced to quietly correct Parliamentary record Hansard after the Chancellor made a string of inaccurate statements on the unemployment figures and even her own flagship pension reforms.
To pick just one, she said the employment rate was “just over 4%”. It might have been under the Tories, but she’s driven it up to a four-year high of 4.7%. Destroying hundreds of thousands of jobs along the way, but to the Chancellor that’s just a rounding error.
Earlier this year, she was forced to retract overstated claims about wage growth, and of course we all remember her CV fantasies. Or rather, repeated fantasies.
Each error may be small in isolation. But they’re mounting up. As
are the taxes Reeves is about to unleash. When you’re asking taxpayers to stump up as much as £50billion, basic numeracy matters.
Energy secretary Ed Miliband is another one who struggles with simple arithmetic. During last year’s election, he claimed his net zero reforms would slash £300 off the average household home energy bill.
Now it looks like they’ll add £900 instead. In case Ed can’t work it out, that’s £1,200 more than he claims. Which is a lot.
Incredibly, Labour’s mathematical malaise goes even deeper.
It can’t even keep its own party finances straight. In the last financial year, Labour landed £3.8million in the red. That’s despite a healthy jump in income to £90.7million.
Labour also managed to submit its annual accounts late to the Electoral Commission, risking a fine. No other party missed the deadline. Even the Communist Party of Britain made it!
And Labour still claims to be the party of fiscal discipline.
Reeves claims to be “fixing the foundations” but I wouldn’t trust her to price a new bathroom window.
Labour doesn’t understand money. Almost nobody in the party has run a business. Their only instinct is to take other people’s cash and spend it.
If their numbers don’t add up, they just find ones that do. And when that doesn’t work, they get taxpayers to plug the gap.
