A curious attack from Labour in the Commons this afternoon: shadow work and pensions secretary Liz Kendall used her slot at the regular departmental questions to ask how a policy that the government doesn’t yet have would work. She referred to the statements made by the Chancellor and the Prime Minister about their ambition over the long term to scrap National Insurance as a ‘double taxation’, pointing out:

Labour obviously thinks that talk of abolishing national insurance is a way into the pensioner vote

‘Your NICs record helps determine your entitlement to the state pension. So if that’s scrapped, how will people know what pension they will get?’ 

Work and Pensions Secretary Mel Stride insisted that this was not yet policy, saying:

‘She will know very clearly in her own mind that the Chancellor has not guaranteed that we will be reducing at one stroke national insurance contributions, it is an aspiration, it has been spoken about as occurring over a number of years if not parliaments. The problems that she’s conjuring up to frighten pensioners is nothing short of political scaremongering.’

Kendall accused him of ‘bluster’, and came back with the same question:

‘How will people’s pension entitlement be determined if NICs are scrapped? And if they’re going to merge NICs with income tax, what does that mean for pensioner tax bills? Isn’t the truth their unfunded £46bn plan to scrap NICs is yet more chaos from the Conservatives and Britain’s pensioners deserve so much better than this?’

Stride responded again that this was ‘not the same as a near-term pledge: it is a long-term aspiration’, and added that this was quite unlike Labour’s £28 billion green pledge.

So what’s going on here? Labour obviously thinks that talk of abolishing national insurance is a way into the pensioner vote – which tends to gravitate towards the Conservatives. But one of the reasons Jeremy Hunt and Rishi Sunak have been talking at all about abolishing NI in the long run is that they think it puts Labour in a difficult position of having to say whether it would keep this ‘double taxation’.

Abolishing NI is not the same as reducing the tax burden: you can, of course, just merge it into income tax which affects more people, but if you’ve got a snappy branding like ‘double taxation’, then it sounds like you’re doing people a favour. So Kendall is trying to counter-attack and suggest that the Tory plan they keep talking about doesn’t add up.

What neither Kendall nor Stride wanted to talk about, though, is the extent to which public services might have to be cut – or taxes put up – after the election in order to fund the tax cuts that have been announced. So it’s easier for both to talk about the long-term than it is for either to consider openly what might happen within a year.