Prime Minister David Cameron and his wife Samantha are pictured after his keynote speech on the final day of the annual Conservative Party conference in Birmingham yesterday.
London Evening Standard/London
David Cameron fired the election starting gun yesterday by promising a big tax cut for the middle classes paying the 40p higher rate.
He announced plans to raise the threshold from £41,900 to £50,000 over the next Parliament if the Tories win in May, cutting the bills for 800,000 people including senior teachers and police officers.
The return of Tory tax-cutting for “Middle England” after years of austerity and squeeze delighted the Tory conference in Birmingham.
At the same time, Cameron audaciously stole Nick Clegg’s policy of tax cuts for low-paid “white van man” workers. The tax-free personal allowance will be raised to £12,500 in the next Parliament.
Cameron boasted that someone working 30 hours a week on the minimum wage would pay “nothing, zero, zilch” in income tax if he was re-elected. “If you work hard, we will cut your taxes,” he promised.
Some 30mn people would benefit from the tax changes over the next five years, at a cost to the exchequer of £7.2bn extra by 2020, Tories claimed. Londoners would gain the most benefit from the 40p threshold.
Senior Tories said the move would be paid for by bigger cuts to public spending, with benefits likely to be in the firing line.
In another dramatic move that was cheered by the 5,000 Conservatives in the hall, Cameron said that if the Tories were allowed to govern without a coalition he would abolish Labour’s Human Rights Act and replace it with a British Bill of Rights.
“We do not require instruction on this from judges in Strasbourg,” he said.
His 52-minute speech set out a series of critical election battlefields, spanning tax, schools, housing and English votes for English laws.
Many of the measures were directed squarely at disenchanted Tories tempted to switch to Ukip.
He did not bother to mention Liberal Democrat leader Clegg, instead saying the electorate faced a simple choice on May 7 between him and Ed Miliband. And he urged Tories not to be seduced by Nigel Farage, claiming that a vote for Ukip was a vote for Labour.
“On May 7 you could go to bed with Nigel Farage and wake up with Ed Miliband,” he said to laughter, adding with a grimace. “Not one bit of that works for me!”
Cameron walked onto the stage to pounding rock music — The Killers’ hit, All These Things That I’ve Done — after delegates were shown a film depicting government achievements.
He left the stage to the Fleetwood Mac classic Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow — one of Bill Clinton’s favourite US presidential campaign trail soundtracks.
His speech covered foreign policy and all the key departments, as well as what he called his “simple” philosophy that people should be allowed to get on.
But it was the section promising tax cuts that galvanised the hall most of all, in particular because many Tories resent the fact that thresholds have failed to keep pace with earnings, sucking more and more people into a higher tax bracket that was originally meant for the rich. “We need tax cuts for hardworking people,” said the prime minister. Raising the 40p band will cost £1.6bn.
“The 40p tax rate was only supposed to be paid by the most well-off people in our country,” he said, “But in the past couple of decades, far too many have been dragged into it: teachers, police officers. “So let me tell you this today. I want to take action that’s long overdue, and bring back some fairness to tax.”
Turning to the lower paid C2 voters and pensioners on lower incomes, he said: “With the Conservatives, if you work hard and do the right thing, we say you should keep more of your own money to spend as you choose.”
It will cost £5.6bn to lift the personal allowance to £12,500 but a million people will be taken out of tax altogether.
