Labour will put your taxes up in four simple steps – and they’ve already told us how

Labour keeps nobly insisting that it won’t raise taxes for “working people”. Call me a pessimist, but I can’t help feeling this is a promise that won’t be kept.

This suspicion was only reinforced by a remark on Tuesday by a senior member of Labour’s top team.

During a radio interview, Nick Thomas-Symonds – formerly shadow home secretary, now shadow minister without portfolio – suggested that, once he and his friends get into office, they may find that the public finances are in a more parlous state than expected.

As he put it: “We’ve always been open, always, that we may open the books and discover the situation is even worse than it is at the moment.”

Mulling over this comment, a cynical listener might have inferred that Labour’s plan is as follows.

Step 1: Spend election campaign promising not to put taxes up.

Step 2: Having successfully reassured voters, win election.

Step 3: Immediately cry, “Oh my goodness, we can’t believe it. We’ve just opened the books, only to discover that the public finances are in a far worse state than the useless, lying Tories let on. This is an emergency. So, to protect public services from imminent collapse, we have no choice but to take drastic measures.”

Step 4: Put taxes up – while telling voters that it’s actually all the Tories’ fault, for a) leaving the public finances in such a mess, and b) covering it up, so that Labour simply had no way of knowing that tax rises would be necessary. So, when you think about it, you can’t blame Labour for breaking the promise it made, can you?

Still, if that is indeed how things pan out, it should at least have one benefit – because it will help to settle a long-running argument.

For several years now, Left-wing commentators have been earnestly telling us that the British public would actually be happy for taxes to go up. In the past, voters might always have been attracted to tax cuts, and terrified by warnings of “tax bombshells”. But nowadays – or so these Labour-supporting thinkers claim – voters think differently, because, after 14 years of cruel and heartless Tory austerity, they’re desperate for our struggling public services to be better funded.

It’s an interesting view. Personally, though, I’m afraid I have my doubts about it. Again, perhaps I’m just an appalling cynic with a miserably jaded view of human nature. But I tend to suspect that, when voters say they’re willing for taxes to go up, they specifically mean other people’s taxes. Were their own taxes to go up, we might find that their enthusiasm for bailing out our beloved public services somewhat dissipates.

Just my own little personal theory, of course. A mere hunch. But, when the inevitable Labour government introduces its inevitable tax rises, we’ll finally get to find out who was right.