If Keir Starmer’s words lose their meaning, how can voters believe what he says?

Labour’s use of the term ‘working people’ was slippery and bound to lead to trouble. The moment of truth is about to arrive in the Budget, says John Rentoul

In the white noise of speculation, briefing and leaks about the Budget, one story stood out in the past week. Rachel Reeves has asked Treasury officials working on possible tax rises to protect the incomes of the lower two-thirds of earners, according to Sam Coates of Sky News.

This would mean, in effect, defining “working people” as those who earn less than about £46,000 a year. Only they would be covered by Labour’s manifesto promise not to increase taxes. The better-off one-third of the working population would be defined as non-working people for the purposes of that pledge.

In the make-believe world of Labour’s promises, experienced nurses, police sergeants and deputy heads of primary schools lie around all day eating peeled grapes.

This is the trouble that politicians get into if they try to make words mean what they say they mean. The term “working people” was slippery from the start. It was meant to send a signal to the working class that Labour would stand up for them, without offending the party’s middle-class support. But it was not so much a dog whistle as a battle trumpet of the class war – and thus sounded the wrong note for a party whose voters were, at the last election, just as middle class as those of the Conservatives.

It offended pedants because it excluded retired people and those on out-of-work benefits. And it was meaningless because the actual number of people of working age who do lie around all day eating peeled grapes is quite small.

It was code for “not rich” people, with “rich” left undefined. Except that now “rich” has been defined as the better-off one-third of earners, which makes the declaration of class war even more foolish because so many people will find themselves on the wrong side of it.

It wasn’t just the “working people” phrase, though. What was unforgivable was the sloppy and ambiguous wording of the tax pledge in the manifesto. The manifesto should have said something like: “We will not increase taxes on middle Britain.” But it is too late now.

What it said was: “We will ensure taxes on working people are kept as low as possible.” Even ignoring the “working people” phrase, this meant little, and the little it did mean turned on the meaning of the word “possible”.

But the next sentence said something different: “Labour will not increase taxes on working people,” it said, which made the definition of “working people” crucial, but throughout the election campaign it was never defined, apart from some imprecise words about people who live off stocks and shares or property. And the sentence went on, after a comma, to say: “... which is why we will not increase national insurance, the basic, higher, or additional rates of income tax, or VAT.”

Last year, this involved Labour in hair-splitting about the rise in employers’ national insurance contributions, which are not a deduction from employees’ pay, but the burden of which is ultimately borne by “working people” – because there is nobody else.

This year’s exercise in making words mean what ministers want them to mean is more fraught because there are no hairs left to split. Reeves is going to have to put up a forbidden tax – the other one is corporation tax, which another part of the manifesto promised to “cap … at the current level of 25 per cent, the lowest in the G7, for the entire parliament”. She can raise bits and pieces by “closing loopholes”, freezing thresholds and increasing “sin taxes”, but not enough to bridge the gap.

Hence, the cabinet is split between those who want to put up income tax and come clean about it, and those who want to put up income tax and inflict further damage on the English language.

Those ministers in the first group think that honesty is the best policy, although they would not be averse to blaming Brexit for the manifesto breach (yes, Brexit cost us, but no, those costs have not unexpectedly escalated since last year’s Budget). Those in the second group are aghast at their colleagues’ naivety. Do they not realise how damaging it is to break a promise of that kind, they ask. Do they not remember George Bush Sr, destroyed by his words: “Read my lips: no new taxes”?

I agree with the second group. The cabinet faces a choice between an utterly disastrous policy and a disastrous policy. It should go with the disastrous policy of putting up income tax on the better-off third of earners – and pretending that they are not “working people”.

It is a truly terrible idea, but ministers have boxed themselves in by trying to make words mean what they do not mean. They only have themselves to blame, a word from Old French blasmer, meaning “to find fault with”.