no increases in rates of income tax, NI, VAT, or corporation tax.

The positive ones were small: permanent measures scored as raising just over £7 billion per year.

Most of that would, according to the plan, come from reduced tax avoidance—a theme common to the manifestos of all three main UK-wide parties.

As ever, this should be considered an uncertain revenue source.

It will be particularly hard to get the desired revenue if Labour really means that they want to raise all of the additional money from limiting (legal) avoidance opportunities, and not (illegal) evasion, which isn’t mentioned in the manifesto.

Labour has committed not to increase NICs or VAT, the basic, higher, or additional rates of income tax or the main rate of corporation tax.

While choosing not to increase tax overall is a legitimate political choice, pledges not to increase a wide range of specific taxes are problematic: they restrict a government’s ability to respond to changing circumstances and can seriously hamper tax reform.

At least Labour didn’t tie their hands any further.

And the wording of the income tax pledge leaves some room for measures that would increase income tax revenues, or for reform to parts of income tax, if desired.

Other than a pledge to replace business rates with an unspecified new system, the manifesto sets out no vision for substantive tax reform.

There is no shortage of opportunities to make the tax system fairer and more conducive to growth.

The hope must be that, if elected, the Labour party in government would be more ambitious than this.

Labour’s manifesto did promise some changes to planned day-to-day spending on public services, topping up planned spending totals in 2028–29 by almost £5 billion.

But these funds are paying for a range of specific commitments, largely in health and education.

Absent money found for unprotected services—areas like further education, prisons, and criminal courts—these areas are still likely to be seriously squeezed, facing real-terms cuts that look inconsistent with the manifesto’s stated ambitions in these areas.

The manifesto confirmed Labour’s green investment plans, which represent a genuine boost to public investment compared to existing plans.

But even these will leave non-green investment falling in real terms and as a share of national income.

The Labour Party manifesto commits to improving NHS performance substantially, with a focus on eliminating elective waiting times above 18 weeks by the end of the next parliament.

If achieved, this would represent a major improvement, undoing nearly a decade of worsening in NHS waiting times in just five years.

The manifesto also promises to deliver the NHS Long Term Workforce Plan and the New Hospitals Programme.

But delivering on all these promises would be expensive: it would almost certainly require real-terms funding growth upwards of 3% per year.

Beyond some small amounts of ‘additional’ funding, the Labour manifesto provides no detail about the overall funding the NHS will receive in the next parliament.

This makes it impossible to judge whether meeting these commitments is credible.

New Labour governments improved NHS performance dramatically in the 2000s, but this was alongside rapid funding growth, of about 7% per year in real terms, delivered in a very different fiscal climate.

The Labour manifesto identifies a whole series of challenges on education: burnt-out teachers, skyrocketing school absences, deficiencies in the special needs system, challenges with childcare availability, widespread skill shortages, and a higher education system in crisis.

But the resources offered up to deal with these issues were mostly small, and targeted at specific new proposals.

Key details on core spending were missing.

The biggest commitment was to recruit an additional 6,500 secondary school teachers, but this is only about half of the 13,000 shortfall in recruitment last year.

£315 million for school breakfast clubs will expand existing provision to all primary schools, and make funding permanent.

The £175 million for mental health support in schools will boost spending on young people’s mental health by 15%.

There were no commitments on core school and college funding, nor on higher education funding.

This offers even less certainty than the Conservative or Liberal Democrat manifestos (which promised to at least protect per-pupil spending in real terms).

We don’t know anything about how a Labour government would change the higher education funding system, even though Labour state that this system doesn’t currently work for taxpayers, students, or universities.

Like many other areas of Labour’s manifesto, there is a bold statement of ambition to reduce poverty alongside policies that typically imply little cost to government—in this case, higher minimum wages, more labour market regulation, and promises to review things.

Contrastingly, there is no mention of reversing specific benefit cuts that Labour have in the past opposed, including the two-child limit, whose effects are very tightly targeted on low-income families.

There’s nothing wrong with looking at a broad range of policies—and it is certainly sensible not to fixate only on benefits—but it is likely that meeting the bold aims laid out would in reality require extra spending that is not spelt out.