Labor to relaunch plans to raise corporation tax, says Rachel Reeves

Jonathan Reynolds, the shadow business secretary, said other countries had higher corporation tax than the UK and attracted more investment.

“For us, we don’t accept the position of the government in terms of what they said about what was in this mini-budget,” he said at a conference side event. “We do not accept the government’s argument that the overall corporate tax rate alone is the primary driver of business investment, because it has not been and will not be.”

Ms Reeves has also unveiled plans to use money raised from the reinstatement of the top 45p to pay for an NHS recruitment campaign.

The shadow chancellor said the move would bring in £2billion a year, which she would deploy to fund an additional 10,000 nursing and midwifery placements.

She pledged to double both the total number of medical students in the UK and the number of district nurses qualifying each year and said Labor would train more than 5,000 additional medical visitors, who provide advice to parents of young children.

Ms Reeves said the package represented the ‘biggest expansion of medical school places in British history’ and would ensure the NHS has the ‘doctors it needs’.

There were question marks over how the additional hiring spree complied with its pledge to make no unfunded spending commitments.

In her speech, the Shadow Chancellor ripped Kwasi Kwarteng, the Chancellor, for funding the abolition of the 45p tax rate through borrowing, but went on to suggest Labor would pay for its NHS policy in the same way . In an apparent softening of the original line, she said it was the “scale” of government borrowing that Labor opposed.

She accused Ms Truss and Mr Kwarteng of being like ‘desperate gamblers in a casino’ and accused the Chancellor of ‘fanning the flames’ of the plummeting pound by hinting he would go further and reduce more taxes in the near future.

“They’ve lost credibility, they’ve lost confidence, they’re out of control,” she said, adding to cheers that Labor was now the party of economic skill.