Ed Miliband hints at tax hikes
By politics.co.uk staff
Ed Miliband has suggested the party would put a larger emphasis on greater taxation rather than public spending cuts.
He told Channel 4 News he would “do more from taxation” than the Labour government’s last chancellor, Alistair Darling, had set out in his deficit reduction plan in the pre-election Budget.
The shift proposed by Mr Darling’s plan would have seen one-third of the deficit cut through tax hikes and two-thirds through public spending cuts.
This is already significantly less than the ratio adopted by the coalition government, which looks to tax rises for only just over a fifth of the total.
Mr Miliband suggested he would go beyond Mr Darling’s plan, however, by taking more from banks and tackling tax avoidance.
“If I was in government at the moment, I would be looking – whether it is a tax on the banks or tackling tax avoidance – to lighten the load and the cuts and the impact that it is going to have on ordinary families,” he said in an interview on Channel 4 News.
“I would do more from taxation than Alistair proposed in his plan.”
It comes amid a debate during Labour’s party conference in Manchester about the opposition’s approach to the government’s spending cuts agenda.
Mr Darling was forced to defend his plan to halve the deficit in four years in his final speech to the conference, as he faced pressure from third-placed Labour leadership candidate Ed Balls and others to reject the consensus that cuts on the scale proposed by the coalition are needed.
