After 13 years of Austerity, the list of areas desperately in need of investment is long and getting longer. As the party of public services, the Labour Party is of course desperate to get to work undoing the damage, but not unreasonably people will want to know where the money will come from.
The party has presented a fully-costed manifesto at all recent General Elections and I am confident will do the same again whenever he next election is called (although we will need to wait until the Clause V meeting to see exactly what it looks like), frontbenchers are going to considerable effort to avoid making commitments where they cannot explain how it will be funded.
One potential new source of revenue is ending ‘Non-Dom’ status, a tax break which enables those who claim to be domiciled outside of the UK to avoid paying tax on income made overseas. Whatever the arguments made around the status, it has been heavily abused over the years by the ultra-wealthy to reduce the amount of tax they pay, a direct cost to public services.
It was George Osborne who initially committed to ending ‘Non-Dom Status’ and while greater restrictions were put in place, the reality is that there are many people who continue to have the status today, including the wife of our current Prime Minister.
Research by the London School of Economics has shown that far from reducing investment in Britain by the wealthy, there would be a net benefit to the Treasury of £3.2bn by abolishing the status, money which would be better spent on public services than subsidising the incomes of the ultra wealthy, and money which Labour has committed to invest in the NHS.
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Peter Lamb for Crawley 