Keir Starmer drops another heavy hint that he WILL raise national insurance in Budget… but claims it WON’T break Labour manifesto [Video]

04:05 EDT 15 Oct 2024, updated 09:26 EDT 15 Oct 2024

Keir Starmer has insisted that hiking national insurance for employers in the Budget would not break the Labour manifesto.

In a heavy hint at the pain to come in the fiscal package, the PM said the election document was ‘very clear’ that the promise in the levy only applied to ‘working people’. 

The defiant stance comes despite growing alarm from business at the ‘tax on jobs’, and the respected Institute for Fiscal Studies think-tank warning it would be a ‘straightforward breach’ of Sir Keir’s pledges. 

Sir Keir told the BBC: ‘We were very clear in the manifesto that we wouldn’t be increasing tax on working people and we expressly said that that was income tax, that was NICs etc.’