Labour or Liz? The taxing question that could come back to haunt Sir Keir Starmer

28 December 2024, 14:43 | Updated: 29 December 2024, 00:35

Who fancies a festive game of Labour or Liz?

The rules are quite simple - I'll set out some quotes and you guess whether they came from a member of the current tax-raising and workers' rights improving Labour administration or from the right-wing scourge of the anti-growth coalition and former prime minister Liz Truss.

So put down your turkey sandwiches, off we go:

1. "We are rolling up our sleeves and removing red tape"

2. "A red tape bonfire will encourage business investment and boost growth"

3. "[Regulation of financial services] has gone too far"

4. "Where [regulation] is stopping us building… then mark my words - we will get rid of it"

5. "We needed to stop drifting in the direction of… more regulation, which was causing sluggish growth"

That's your lot. Think you've got them all? Well, here are the answers.

Numbers 1, 3 and 4 are Labour, while 2 and 5 are Liz Truss.

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Okay, Trivial Pursuit this may not be. But there's a not-so-subtle point I'm attempting to sketch out here.

Many of the noises the current government is making on growth and regulation are not so different to the ones that emanated from our shortest ever serving prime minister - a politician most in the Labour Party view as the antithesis of everything this administration stands for.

We see it again in Sir Keir Starmer's Christmas Eve letter to regulators setting a mid-January deadline for them to put forward ideas for removing "barriers to growth".