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policies would mean. so what are the facts? well, this is what the conservatives are claiming — that there's a £38 billion gap in labour's spending plans and to fill it, taxes will have to go up. it's worth being sceptical about this figure, though. it's based on treasury calculations, but the assumptions come from political advisers and some of them are questionable. for example, that doing things through the public sector is always a lot less efficient. labour have a claim of their own that we wanted to scrutinise. this one — that the conservatives have £71 billion of unfunded spending commitments. again, a big dollop of caution on this one. it includes an assumption that the conservatives will scrap national insurance. the tories have said they'd like to do that eventually, but not any time soon, and they say they won't do it unless the money is available. so when you hear both of these claims you know politics is at play,