SpinningHugo wrote:You know these £gotcha" numbers questions that have been asked of McDonnell, Thornberry and now Burgon today. Journos never tried these with Brown and Balls.
Have a guess why not?
(Clue: not because the MSM used to be pro-Labour).
To be fair Burgon is thick, asking him the time of day is going to seriously tax him.
The manifesto is really a program for feel good opposition, it doesn't have to stack up because nobody is really worried about Labour winning. In those circumstances, faced with any sort of questioning even Einstein is going to struggle.
It does at least show there are alternatives if you choose to go there. It can be used to attack May on that basis.
It is annoying though that they have succumbed so badly to shambolic amateurism. It looked decent but chucking in the water thing at the back end is just stupid, sort of the uncosted shit load of bricks that caused the whole thing to collapse.
They have also fallen into the trap of wanting to massively raise tax but not asking people to pay more, except for the top 5% (who clearly can't pay for it all). The corporation tax won't raise what they expect and people will read between the lines and work out taxes will be raised for middle income earners as well. Having no figures to quantify this they will probably assume the worst.
Also that 73% tax band looks bad from a PR perspective, they could have fixed that at relatively little cost and shown fairness.
I am not sure though this matters beyond 2017, and it probably doesn't really matter now. There may not be a viable Labour Party in 2022, and if there is the post Brexit economy will be completely different, and possibly completely broken.
Labour's one hope is a competent center left leader emerges and benefits when May collapses the economy with her car crash Brexit. Right now only the car crash Brexit seems likely.
Release the Guardvarks.