One of the reasons members of Liz Truss’s team remain upbeat despite the onslaught of criticism towards government’s tax-cutting budget is that they think it pushes Labour into uncomfortable territory. Will Keir Starmer respond to a Tory programme of mass tax cuts with tax rises? This morning, he offered a partial answer.

Appearing on the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg from Liverpool for Labour party conference, Starmer was pressed on what he would keep and what he would reverse if Labour take power at the next election. After some dithering on Friday, Starmer said a Labour government would bring back into force the 45 per cent rate of income tax for the highest earners (which Kwasi Kwarteng scrapped on Friday): ‘It is the wrong choice. I would reverse the decision that they made on Friday’. Starmer said the tax cut it provides to someone earning a million pounds would be enough to employ a nurse.

However, other measures announced by Kwarteng are likely to stay. He indicated Labour would keep both the reversal of the national insurance rise (something they were calling on the Tories to do early on) as well as Kwarteng’s cut to the basic rare of income tax to 19p. So, with all these tax cuts staying in place, how would Starmer fund all his grand plans if in power? Tellingly, Starmer wouldn’t get into the details – saying such conversations were for closer to the election. He even found some cover behind Kwarteng on the question of how his party would pay for the boost to NHS funding and social care they have backed, given the means of paying for it – the national insurance rise – had been scrapped and they would keep it that way. Starmer pointed to how the Tory Chancellor has said this could be paid through general taxation.

Starmer was keen to hammer the difference between the two parties. He repeatedly accused Truss’s government of having the wrong priorities and helping the rich over the poorest in society – arguing their plan is to ‘make the rich richer’ and then somehow the money trickles down. In contrast, Starmer said his plan for economic growth would ‘grow the economy from the bottom up’.

With Labour ahead in the polls, he spoke convincingly about his party being in a better place than the year before as they gather for the annual conference. He said ‘the hope in a Labour government has turned into a belief in a Labour government’. Yet Starmer still struggled to articulate his own vision for the country – as opposed to simply why the Tories’ one was bad. For all the talk about growing the economy from the bottom up, he would not commit to backing workers calling for pay rises in line with inflation – only saying such demands were ‘understandable’. He was also confronted with footage of striking workers saying the Labour leader had failed to support them. On energy bill help, he did not match the two year offer of support put forward by Truss – saying he would revisit his six month pledge in due course. Starmer appeared most confident when criticising the Tories – and Truss’s unapologetic approach means that he is not short of material to work with. Yet faced with a government which is clear in its aims, the Labour leader still has plenty of questions to answer of his own.