Labour Left backs Rayner's demand to tax savers
Left-wing Labour MPs have backed Angela Rayner's push for a new tax raid on savers.
The Telegraph revealed the Deputy Prime Minister sent a secret memo to Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor, in which she proposed eight tax increases.
They included reinstating the pensions lifetime allowance and changing dividend taxes. She also suggested new raids on the million people who pay the additional rate of income tax and a higher corporation tax level for the banks.
The emergence of the memo prompted an immediate backlash from Labour's political opponents but some of the party's MPs supported Ms Rayner.
Andy McDonald, a Labour MP who served as Jeremy Corbyn's shadow transport secretary, told The Telegraph: 'My sense is that a lot of Labour MPs are concerned that the Chancellor's fiscal rules and spending cut proposals hit those on lower incomes.
'Proposals to increase tax revenue from the wealthy would make tax fairer and support public services.
'Ideas outlined such as increasing tax rates on dividend income so they're in line with income tax, something which should be done with capital gains tax too, would target a small number of wealthy people and bring in vital tax revenue.'
Jon Trickett, a Labour MP who was Mr Corbyn's shadow business secretary, told The Telegraph: 'The leadership's fiscal strategy is a stale version of Treasury orthodoxy.
'Attacks on poor communities, pensioners and working people should never be a part of Labour's armoury.
'There needs to be an open debate not a clandestine one in closed rooms at the top but at all levels of the Labour movement which reasserts our Labour values.'
Ms Rayner's memo amounts to a direct challenge to the Chancellor's approach this year of using spending cuts rather than tax rises to fill the black hole in the nation's finances.
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