Keir Starmer has accused the Tories of dreaming up a “Jeremy Corbyn-style manifesto” – and warned “the money isn’t there”.
His attack comes as Rishi Sunak was poised to set out the Conservative offer to voters. Speaking to reporters on the campaign trail in Middlesbrough, the Labour leader took a swipe at his predecessor which will enrage left-wingers and raise eyebrows as he served in Mr Corbyn’s shadow cabinet.
Mr Starmer said: “If you look at the plans, if you look at the election campaign so far every day you’ve had a new commitment from the Tories which is unfunded and you’ve had some of the funding streams being spent several times over.
“So tax avoidance, they’ve used for at least four different propositions without explaining why, one, they haven’t been collecting it for the last 14 years. If this tax avoidance money was there, why have they not been collected? Secondly, they say they’re going to change the position on tax avoidance without investing any money or changing anything.
(
PA)
“So they’re just going to hope it’s suddenly going to stop. They just – it’s a hopeless – that’s why I say it’s a Jeremy Corbyn style manifesto, which is load everything into the wheelbarrow, don’t provide the funding and hope that nobody notices. And the money isn’t there. It is a recipe for five more years of chaos.”
Mr Starmer said he had changed the Labour party when pressed on having backed Mr Corbyn as leader. “I changed the Labour Party from top to bottom after the 2019 election because if you lose that badly, you don’t look at the electorate and say: ‘What were you doing?’ You look at your party and you say you need to change,” he said.
“That’s why we are absolutely clear, with Rachel Reeves, that there will be no unfunded, uncosted propositions in our manifesto. We’re not going to make promises we can’t keep.”
The Labour leader said: “But people are still paying the price for the unfunded commitments that Liz Truss made. She tested the proposition that if you don’t properly cost and fund things what happens to the economy.
“She then put her advisors – Sunak put them – into the House of Lords as peers, whilst many families across the country are still paying more on their mortgages because the damage it’s done, and that’s the core issue here. If you lose control of the economy, it’s working people who pay the price, they’re still paying the price. I’m not prepared to ever let that happen under a Labour government.”
A spokesperson for Momentum said: “Labour’s 2019 manifesto was fully costed. Keir should know, he stood on it as a member of the shadow cabinet. But instead he insists, inexplicably, on attacking his own side during an election and spreading misinformation in the process. Perhaps what Keir doesn’t like about 2019 Labour policies like public ownership and wealth taxes was that they offered real change, not just the illusion of it.”