The shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, has ramped up his attack on the super-rich, describing their wealth as “obscene”, as Labour unveiled research showing one in three billionaires in the UK have made donations to the Tory party.
McDonnell is due to take a swipe at the richest people in the country in a speech on Tuesday and will also set out the tax breaks billionaires have benefited from under successive Conservative governments.
He will claim that the party’s latest analysis showed that 48 of the country’s 151 billionaires have donated to the Tories since 2005 while the government is on course to hand out £100bn in tax breaks and other giveaways by 2023/24.
McDonnell is expected to say that Labour will “rewrite the rules of our economy” at a campaign event in central London.
“Someone on the national minimum wage would have to work 69,000 years to get paid £1bn and a newly qualified nurse would have to wait 50,000 years. No one needs or deserves to have that much money, it is obscene.
“We know whose side Boris Johnson is on – the billionaires, the bankers and big business,” he will say.
The details of the Tory party’s billionaire donors are released in Labour’s latest report, In the Pockets of the Few, in which the individual donors that have given money to the party are highlighted.
They include former Tory party treasurer Michael Spencer, businessman Michael Hintze, who has given more than £4m, theatre producer John Gore, who was the party’s biggest donor in 2018, and Zameer Choudrey, the chief executive of the Bestway Group, who was given a peerage in Theresa May’s resignation honours. Donations from various Bestway entities add up to £967,213.55, according to the report.
Altogether the 48 billionaires analysed by Labour have given £50m to the Conservatives. Labour has attempted to highlight that billionaires and corporations have been handed significant financial benefits by the government over a similar time period.
The claim is that since 2010 they have been given £86bn through successive cuts to corporation tax, which is now the lowest in the G7 set of countries. They have also saved £5.5bn from cuts to basic and main rates of capital gains tax, £5.6bn through inheritance tax that allows couples to pay no tax on a primary residence worth up to £1m and £1.2bn from reducing the additional income tax rate to 45p in 2013-14.
Treasury minister Simon Clarke said Labour’s general election tax plans would not hit billionaires at all but hard-working families.
“The top 1% are actually paying a greater share of taxes under the Conservatives than at any time under the last Labour government. Tax receipts from businesses are also at an all-time high – meaning more money for public services,” he said.
The Tories have said Labour spending pledges would hit people with £2,400 in extra taxes every year.
New research from YouGov showed that the public overwhelmingly backs increased taxes on the super-rich in the UK and four in 10 believe an increase in billionaires is a sign society is getting worse.
The battle over tax and spending between the two parties raged throughout Monday after the Tories released their own dossier on Jeremy Corbyn’s economic plans and how they would specifically hit pensions.
They claimed that his intended reforms, which includes nationalisation of services, would mean 10 million savers potentially losing an average of over £11,000. They also suggested people could be forced to delay retirement by almost three and a half years.
Peter Dowd, the shadow chief secretary to the Treasury, said: “The truth is that everyone will benefit from Labour’s plans to broaden ownership and make the UK a home for long-term, patient capital.”
