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]

Follow me on Twitter: @MidWalesMike

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