Labour turns up heat on Osborne’s planned emergency budget

The Labour party have mocked up a fake newspaper from June 25th, the day after George Osborne’s planned emergency budget if he becomes Chancellor. The website highlights the “backlash” following Conservative tax and spend policies as well as more light-hearted stories, including a radio report featuring Alistair Campbell as a sports reporter at the World Cup.

At the press conference, Gordon Brown said, “The Big Society means big cuts in public services”. Alistair Darling presented a slide pack showing how the Tory’s £6 billion of efficiency cuts could cost “20,000 to 40,000 job losses” including 14,200 fewer teachers, 2,400 fewer police officers, and cuts to family friendly policies like the child tax credit and child trust fund.

The pack went on to detail George Osborne’s £38 billion election tax giveaway over five years including a number of areas that Left Foot Forward has examined including their proposed marriage tax break, inheritance tax cuts, National Insurance cuts, freezes to council tax, and the tax rises they opposed during “wash up“.

The pack ends with the warning “If you vote Tory in May, you’ll be stung in June”.

UPDATE 11.34:

Related to Labour’s press conference this morning, a Comment is Free article by Howard Reed details how “National Insurance is not a ‘tax on jobs’”. It goes on to outline that:

“A paper published this week by the Progressive Economics Panel adapts work by top US academics, the Federal Reserve and the IMF to the UK situation. Applying the paper’s calculations to the current debate suggests that an immediate £6bn cut in UK public spending could lead to job losses of around 75,000 across the whole economy.”