Is Labour...er... Labour enough? It is a question the party’s MPs, especially the 218 newbies who arrived in the Commons for the first time last year, have been asking ever since Keir Starmer became PM.
Since then Labour has been doing a lot of unlabourite stuff - taking money off pensioners, farmers, distressed people overseas and now, in the latest cash-saver, the disabled.
None of this was in their manifesto and the MPs who stood on it are now wondering whether they came into politics to make the poor poorer.
But then the world is a different place to the one they were campaigning in last Summer. For starters Chancellor Rachel Reeves is soon going to have to spend as much on defence as education.
The money has to come from somewhere and if not here and there, where? She may well be regretting backing herself into a fiscal corner by promising not to raise income tax, VAT or employee national insurance.
Rachel Reeves may have to break manifesto commitments to find extra money for our cash-strapped nation.
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There are increasingly fewer pots to raid for cash. So she will either have to break her manifesto commitments or find another way of getting her hands on extra money.
We should find out next week in her Spring Statement whether there is any more moolah down the back of the national sofa she can snaffle.
She could raise £18billion by legalising drugs and taxing them, but, no, no, no, there is no one who seriously proposes that as an option other than those already off their heads.
Which is why disgruntled Labour MPs have been mumbling about a wealth tax, arguing that if the nation’s purse is empty it should be the super rich who fill it.
Time then perhaps for the Chancellor to look at proposals from the wealth tax campaign group Patriotic Millionaires, a band of very rich people who think they should pay more.
They are now touring the country in a battlebus with the figure "£460million a week" emblazoned on the side of it. And unlike the one Boris Johnson used during the Brexit referendum they insist their arithmetic is accurate.
Patriotic Millionaires claim a 2% tax on the richest 20,000 people in Britain would fill the £22bn black hole.
Patriotic Millionaires UK
Patriotic Millionaires say this is the amount which could be raised if a tax of two per cent was slapped on the 20,000 people in this country worth more than £10million.
That would plug the £22billion black hole Ms Reeves claims the Tories left behind while having enough left over to pay for all those missiles, warplanes and drones the MoD says it needs to hit 2.5 per cent of military spending.
The group’s Julia Davies said: “Fix our country. Tax us, the richest. Cuts are not the solution. They will only inflict more pain on people who have suffered years of austerity and hardship.
“As patriotic millionaires we would be proud to pay more, to give our country the investment needed to create a stronger, fairer Britain, where our services, businesses and communities thrive and everyone can succeed.”
She claims that seven in 10 British millionaires support this plan along with, and no surprise here, three quarters of the public.
Jane Atkinson of Tax Justice UK added: “Tax and spending is a political choice. The Chancellor must side with those waiting for housing or healthcare rather than the super rich.
“Cuts are not necessary when the UK is home to lots of very rich people who continue to get richer while inequality grows.”
Which it clearly has since the Sunday Times Rich List was first published in 1989. Back then the Queen was the wealthiest person in Britain. Now the King is in 258th place. And the wealth of the 200 richest families has grown from £42billion to £711billion.
Tory economic policy of wealth trickling down doesn't work if the super rich hoard it for themselves.
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The Tory argument has always been that national prosperity relies on the wealth creators, whose money trickles down to everyone else in the form of jobs. So Conservatives believe in looking after the wealth creators with tax breaks.
That is a sound economic policy if it works. But it doesn’t if the wealth creators keep the wealth they create for themselves.
According to the High Pay Centre top people’s pay was 20 times that of average earnings 40 years ago. That rose to 50 times 20 years ago. And by 2020 it was 79 times. Now it is 109 times a worker’s pay.
Meanwhile TUC research shows the average worker would be £10,400 a year better off had wages grown at the rate they did in the 16 years leading up to 2008.
Adjusting some of these imbalances would be a very Labour thing to do.
