The Labour Party has published an attack ad targeting Rishi Sunak’s family as part of a controversial campaign in the run-up to England’s local elections.
In the ad, the Prime Minister is shown next to text that reads: “Do you think it’s right to raise taxes for working people when your family benefitted from a tax loophole? Rishi Sunak does.”
Labour said the Tories have raised taxes 24 times since 2019, “leaving the British people facing the highest tax burden in 70 years”.
“And they refuse to close the non-dom tax loophole,” the ad continued.
The party pledged to freeze council tax and end the special tax status, writing: “A Labour government would freeze council tax this year, paid for by a proper windfall tax on oil and gas giants.
“And we’d scrap the Tories’ non-dom tax loophole.”
A Tory source hit back at the ad, saying: “This is the height of hypocrisy from a party which has already made £90bn of unfunded spending commitments and whose leader stands to benefit from a bespoke, tax-unregistered pension scheme unavailable to others.
“Rishi Sunak has a plan to halve inflation, grow the economy and reduce debt.
“Sir Keir only has a plan to play politics on Twitter.”
Non-dom is short for non-domiciled individual, which is a term used for a UK resident whose permanent home is outside of the UK.
People with the special status don’t have to pay UK tax on foreign income.
Last year, it was revealed that Sunak’s wife Akshata Murty held the non-dom status, which reportedly saves her millions of pounds.
Since the revelation, she has committed to paying UK taxes on her global income.
The attack ad marks the latest instalment of a controversial campaign by the Labour Party that has caused backlash among some in its own rank.
Last week, the party published a similar ad which accused Sunak of not wanting adults who sexually assault children to go to prison.
Former Scottish Labour leader Richard Leonard, along with other MSPs, urged the party to delete the tweet.
Other senior figures, such as Lord David Blunkett, accused Labour of entering “gutter politics”.
But Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer said he made “no apologies at all” for the campaign, which will move this week from the Prime Minister’s record on crime to the cost of living crisis.
Refusing to back down, Starmer has urged his frontbenchers to “continue to focus relentlessly on exposing the failures” of the UK Government in the run-up to May’s local elections in England.
STV News“Rishi Sunak is the chief architect of choices prioritising the wealthiest and of the UK Government’s failure to get a grip of the economy and get growth going,” the Labour leader wrote in a letter to his colleagues.
He accused Sunak of “supplying the touchpaper for another Conservative government to blow up the economy” as chancellor and then continuing in No 10 to “make choices which loaded the costs on to working people”.
“The voters must know that Rishi Sunak’s fingerprints are all over their struggling household budgets.”
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