Tax promises but nurses pledge unravels under scrutiny
Boris Johnson has launched his party’s manifesto at an event in Telford in the West Midlands, pledging £2.9bn in public spending – just one pound for every £28 committed by Jeremy Corbyn.
The 60 page document is full of big pictures and light on detail, perhaps to minimise controversy. It includes a promise not to raise income tax, national insurance or VAT, as well as a rise in the national insurance threshold to £9,500 next year with an ultimate ambition of £12,500. It does not include a raise in the higher rate tax threshold, as promised in Johnson’s leadership campaign.
The document also commits the party to ending the Brexit transition by 2020, scrapping the fixed-term parliaments act and ending car-parking charges for the terminally ill and NHS staff on night shifts.
Theresa May’s 2017 manifesto launch is widely seen as having been a turning point for her disastrous campaign, with proposals to make people pay more of the costs of social care dubbed “the dementia tax”. This year the party avoided proposing a policy on how to tackle the social care crisis, instead saying that they would seek to find a cross-party consensus on the way forward.
One of the manifesto’s most eye-catching polices – a promise to “deliver 50,000 more nurses” in the NHS – quickly unravelled under scrutiny. Conservative sources said that 18,500 of the nurses would actually be “retained”– ie ones who would otherwise have left – though there was no detail about how the government would persuade these nurses to stay. Labour branded the announcement “deceitful”. “First we had Johnson’s fake 40 new hospitals, now we have his fake 50,000 extra nurses’,” said shadow health secretary Jonathan Ashworth.
While the verdict on Labour’s manifesto spending commitments from the IFS’s Paul Johnson (that they were “not credible”) was damaging to the party, his assessment of the Tory manifesto today was not necessarily helpful. “If a single budget had contained all these tax and spending proposals we would have been calling it modest,” he said. “As a blueprint for five years in government the lack of significant policy action is remarkable.”
Meanwhile
The SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon has said she would press Jeremy Corbyn to scrap the UK’s nuclear deterrent in any talks on Scottish National party support for a minority Labour government.
Shadow chancellor John McDonnell said he would not stay neutral in a second EU referendum vote and that fellow cabinet members would be able to campaign for either side in a referendum if they form the next government. Earlier, Labour announced it would spend £58bn on compensating women who have been financially hit by the decision to raise the pension age from 60 to 66 (see full story here).
Lib Dem leader Jo Swinson acknowledged that her party was being “squeezed” in the election. In a departure from her earlier position – that she had a shot at becoming prime minister – she said that the Tories were on course for a majority and that the Lib Dems were the only party who could stop them”
Latest polling suggests Labour is set to lose all but one of its seats in Scotland. A Panelbase study for the Sunday Times suggested that only Ian Murray, a frequent critic of the party’s leader, Jeremy Corbyn, would be returned to the House of Commons. The poll, which surveyed 1,009 people in Scotland, found that support for Labour in Scotland could dip from 27% to 20%.
The DUP leader, Arlene Foster, has given an interview to PA Media in which she has indicated her party could potentially do business with Labour in a hung parliament if Jeremy Corbyn was not leader.
First-time voters could unseat their MP in 56 marginal seats across the country, according to analysis of the 1.2m new electors who have come of age in England and Wales since the 2017 general election.
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