They said they would improve services without increasing tax. Sunak called them out on it and then was brushed off as a liar.
Everyone with any ounce of financial sense knew it wasn't possible though.
There are two universal truths on tax. The first is you can only tax people that can afford to pay the tax. So in general this means the working poor and the middle class. Labour generally see the middle class as the enemy so rinsing them is fine.
The second is the richer you get, the more money you can spend on tax avoidance. And also because you don't need so much liquidity you can tie up your money in things that are harder to tax. Such as overseas property. If you are rich it becomes that much more profitable to pay large sums to accountants to avoid paying tax, to move countries and assets etc.
We need to work harder on tax avoidance. So more property taxes. Property is really easy to tax. It's a pile of bricks and you can't move it, and even if you did the land would still be taxable. More and more tax should be raised off properties, and this is common in other countries. Why is this not done ? Well because some very wealthy and influential people hold large property portfolios and the taxation consequences of this for them would be enormous. So the government doesn't do it.
The second is to tax more unearned income. This is income from asset investment rather than earnt money through wages, officially known as CGT. We need to increase CGT as unearned income is the way in which the wealthy maintain wealth and avoid tax. The problem is that governments always hit the little people. So instead of raising CGT and hitting the wealthy (a small fraction of people on PAYE actually pay CGT) they hit the little persons investments by doing things like restricting ISA contributions.
The finals is to tax pensions more. Yes pensions are important and everyone needs them and should be encouraged to have them. But the wealthiest in this country and many of the middle class build up huge pension pots over their lifetimes. I don't think most people realise just how enormous these pots are, even for people in fairly middling jobs. The government has lost massive amounts of revenue through taxation relief on pension contributions, and to me these need to be clawed back. There is no way 40% tax relief should ever have been given, it's just something to make the wealthy more wealthy at the expense of the nations finances. No one needs they amount of money many people have amassed for their retirement.
I also think there should be a covid clawback tax. Vast amounts of money that was absolutely not needed was shovelled towards the middle class during covid. rather than people just getting sustainance they were given large amounts of extra cash over and above what they needed to survive during lockdown and this really needs to be clawed back. It's completely unfair that the poor should be made to shoulder the burden of paying back debt on this.