Phil Aldrich

I mean, I can imagine him increasing inheritance tax, for example, because unpopular as it is,

It doesn't touch you immediately.

It's something for the future.

But the spending stuff, there's talk about the triple lock to try and restrain pensioner spending.

Again, it would be hugely unpopular because we saw that with the winter fuel allowance.

Then you've obviously got the health benefits, which have reached reaching about 100%.

160 billion a year at the moment, going up to 190 by the end of the parliament.

I mean, Jim O'Neill, who's one of the advisors to Burnham at the moment, he was even saying, you know, you've got to touch these shibboleths.

You've got to say, you know, NHS spending, there has to be some constraint on NHS spending.

And Burnham is a former health secretary who has said he, you know, he...

He would die in a ditch just to prevent prescription charges, etc.

But there's people within the NHS talk about rationing some services because it's unaffordable.

You've got this Baumol cost disease, which is developments in technology end up not leading to productivity gains, but end up just being new technological costs to the service.

So it's just...

You have this mushrooming NHS state.

The one thing that I was thinking that he can do is just to raise tax.

If he's going to raise tax, he's just going to raise tax on everyone.

And then that would require him to say special measures.

Everybody, everyone who is paying tax is going to have to pay an extra 2% on the basic rate.

And make it a national project where you're not going to be singling out sections of society and saying, we're picking on you because we need to fix this country.