There wasn’t any way he could have communicated this that the Torygraph wouldn’t turn into “Strarmer lied and broke his promises to working people”. Saying it the precise way doesn’t make for good campaign slogans.
I suspect they planned this. If he had said “we won’t raise income tax and we won’t raise employee national insurance contributions”, he’d be giving a massive hint as to what he was planning, and the inevitable interview question would be about employer contributions and he wouldn’t be able to rule them out, and then all the headlines would be about “Starmer promised to not raise national insurance but now he’s let on that he’s planning to after all” and all the news would be about Labour’s tax rises and all this arguing would be happening before the election. A bit of ambiguity and headline management is unfortunately necessary.
There wasn’t any way he could have communicated this that the Torygraph wouldn’t turn into “Strarmer lied and broke his promises to working people”. Saying it the precise way doesn’t make for good campaign slogans.
I suspect they planned this. If he had said “we won’t raise income tax and we won’t raise employee national insurance contributions”, he’d be giving a massive hint as to what he was planning, and the inevitable interview question would be about employer contributions and he wouldn’t be able to rule them out, and then all the headlines would be about “Starmer promised to not raise national insurance but now he’s let on that he’s planning to after all” and all the news would be about Labour’s tax rises and all this arguing would be happening before the election. A bit of ambiguity and headline management is unfortunately necessary.