POLL: The BIG bribe – Cameron promises tax cuts for 30 million people; the deficit and public services can go hang

Call-me-Dictator-Dave: Cameron has announced tax cuts which will necessitate further service cuts, at the end of the most fascistic Conservative Party conference yet seen [Image: Telegraph].

Call-me-Dictator-Dave: Cameron has announced tax cuts which will necessitate further service cuts, at the end of the most fascistic Conservative Party conference yet seen [Image: Telegraph].

Here we are, then – the big offer to bribe the UK’s citizens into voting Conservative, despite the hammering he has given them for the last four and a half years.

To persuade you to let him keep hammering you for another five years, David Cameron is offering to:

  • Raise the tax-free personal allowance for the lowest earners from £10,500 to £12,500
  • Raise the threshold for the 40p rate of income tax from £41,900 to £50,000

He said raising the tax-free allowance would help one million people and cut taxes for 30 million more.

Perhaps he thinks we’re stupid. These plans are hasty, back-of-a-fag-packet responses to UKIP’s tax plans, announced at the Purple Party’s conference last Friday. Farage stole his thunder and now he’s trying to claw something back – at the expense of the economy. How is he going to get the deficit down when there’s no tax money coming in? Even if his policies killed every single benefit claimant – and they’re well on the way! – he would not save enough to balance the budget.

Not only that, but paying less tax means more public services will be sold off, and private citizens will have to pay for them, privately, out of their own pockets. We all know that publicly-provided services are cheaper, meaning that this move will cost us much, much more in the long term.

Cameron knows that but his business buddies will benefit so he doesn’t care.

Other promises included:

Protecting the NHS budget for the next Parliament. If he intends to do this the way he raised real-terms spending on it in the current Parliament, there will be no NHS left by 2020. Yet again, he played on the memory of his own disabled son Ivan, who died in 2009 – turning on the water-works when he said, “For me, this is personal”. It is personal for him – he personally wants to be the man who destroyed the NHS altogether – and you can tell what kind of man he is from the way he used a family tragedy in a cynical bid to play on your emotions.

The UK will go to war with Islamic State extremists. Because another war is what we all want – right?

Getting “what Britain needs” in EU negotiations. What Britain needs, or what the Conservative Party needs? And what about the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, which would condemn British workers to a race to the bottom in terms of working conditions and products available, while also locking privatisation of services into our economy, just as the Conservative’s want.

Scrapping the Human Rights Act – wrong for all the reasons mentioned in Vox Political‘s article earlier this week.

Offering every teenager a place on the National Citizenship Service scheme. Is this Cameron’s version of the Hitler Youth?

Planning to build 100,000 new affordable homes for first-time buyers – because the Tories have been hugely successful getting them built in the current Parliament, haven’t they? (House building hit its lowest point in more than 70 years under the Coalition). And why only 100,000? Labour is offering five times as many.

Cameron described the Tories as “the real party of compassion and social justice”, but in the same speech said people would have to “work a bit longer and save a bit more” – glossing over the facts of life under Conservative governments, that people can’t work when they don’t have jobs, and those who do can’t save when their jobs don’t pay enough.

Notice that he said nothing about social security. On the £25 billion of cuts previously announced by George Osborne (and this was before Cameron decided he was going to do another tax giveaway bribe on the eve of the election), he said, “That’s a lot of money, but it is doable.” It certainly is, if you are willing to cut the state down to the bone, sell everything off to anyone who’ll buy it (China, perhaps?), and don’t care that it will cost millions of lives because the only people to suffer will be poor.

When the history of this period of UK politics is written, David Cameron will appear as a wretched little smear of scum.

Or do you disagree? Let’s have a poll.

[polldaddy poll=8344337]

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9 Comments

  1. leonc1963 October 1, 2014 at 1:25 pm - Reply

    The Tax bribe means jot with the cost of living and cuts to tax credits and as for the NHS wow he is going to support it after sending it into the Abyss and as for ring-fencing it’s budget only means it will get no more public investment so in short he has offered nothing

  2. Tony Dean October 1, 2014 at 1:26 pm - Reply

    I would rather excrete a porcupine backwards than vote Tory.

  3. Damien Willey October 1, 2014 at 2:54 pm - Reply

    You missed a trick in that poll Mike, where’s the option for ‘never’?? :)

  4. Jim Round October 1, 2014 at 4:08 pm - Reply

    So then, another one of my questions, what do readers (and your goodself Mike) think a fair tax take for someone working full time earning the LIVING wage, don’t forget they will be paying Council Tax, VAT and possibly IPT?
    What should the tax free allowance be, how should it be allocated?
    What, if any, thresholds should there be?
    What should the rates be?
    How do you tax the varying sizes of businesses fairly?
    I have asked this before, nobody had any answers.

  5. Robert Fillies October 1, 2014 at 4:08 pm - Reply

    Certainly would never vote tory, my experience of the nhs is that twice in my life they saved my life, the most recent occasion earlier this year when I had pneumonia and clots in both lungs, don’t think the private health providers that want to extract tax payers money from our nhs would have wanted to spend the money on a patient that it must have cost to save my life. I don’t believe a word that Cameron speaks about the nhs, think the main reason he used the nhs for his poor son was that it was where the expertise was.Ordinarily I would suspect he and his family would go private.

  6. joanna may October 1, 2014 at 7:01 pm - Reply

    The two votes for yes was probably cast by Gideon and RTU!!!

  7. Paul Delaney October 1, 2014 at 8:09 pm - Reply

    I’m suprised the lying sods nose isn’t a foot and a half long.

  8. Tony Turtle October 1, 2014 at 11:53 pm - Reply

    As I have said since Day One of this abomination of a government, why is a history student in charge of the National Purse? If you need money to pay for stuff, you don’t say to the people paying into the system “We want less of your money” on the contrary, you raise taxes to pay for things, tax the higher earners more and stop the fiddling by big business.

  9. robert fillies October 2, 2014 at 1:03 pm - Reply

    Referring to Cameron’s speech again, how dare he mock Mr Miliband for forgetting to mention the deficit in his speech when he forgot his daughter and left her in a pub, I know what I would regard as the most important lapse of memory, and it would not be forgetting the deficit.

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