“The prime minister is either an idiot or a liar. It is a difficult call for a spin doctor to make. So they went for idiot. It seemed safer.
Boris Johnson was only supposed to be churning out the “Get Brexit Done” spiel for workers at a fabrication firm (stop it) in Teesside. Instead he managed to blurt out a flagship manifesto pledge, which could cost as much as £10 billion.
He had been asked by Claire Cartlidge, a chemist: “You said low tax, do you mean low tax for people like you or low tax for people like us?”
Nice and easy one to bat away with talk of all being in it together, perhaps even a chance to tease the manifesto. Instead Johnson replied: “I mean low tax for working people. If you look at what we are doing and what I said in the last few days, we are going to be cutting national insurance up to £12,000.”
Klaxons. Sirens. Heads in hands. Glass smashed in emergency. Spin doctors, fresh from an earlier visit to a washing machine factory, were in a spin.
Had the prime minister accidentally scooped himself by leaking his own manifesto? Was it not true and he had got it wrong? Perhaps he was a big wally who couldn’t keep his mouth zipped.
Decisions, decisions. It was definitely not deliberate, the spinning spinners spun. But the policy was true. Sort of.
A briefing note was rushed out. In fact the policy was that the threshold to start paying national insurance contributions (NICs) would rise from £8,628 a year to £9,500, with an “ambition” for it to eventually rise to £12,500. He was, it turned out, tantalisingly close to being right.
To be fair this is a hell of a policy. It means taking NICs in line with when you start paying income tax (which was raised by the coalition, a Lib Dem policy which the Tories had dismissed as unaffordable in 2010, but let’s not dwell on that).
It would mean more than two million low-paid workers being lifted out of paying NICs altogether, eventually saving people £450 a year.
Johnson was putting a brave face on it. In an interview with The Times soon after, the PM insisted that he had not blundered. “No, no, no,” he starts. “I’ve been campaigning on this for months. If you’d been paying attention during the Conservative Party leadership election it will not have been news to you.”
As Francis Elliott writes: “The drawn faces of his aides tell a different story.”
This bit of clumsiness has also had the effect of overshadowing the Labour manifesto launch today, which Tory HQ will no doubt be furious about. If they keep drip-dripping policies out ahead of Sunday’s big launch, they could dominate the news cycle for six days.
For Labour, a harder task. Everything from 2017 has to stay, pretty much. They have not had the luxury of a change of leader to ditch the duff ideas or trim the expensive ones.
Instead Jeremy Corbyn’s focus is on the messaging. He hates billionaires. Billionaires are bad. And he is good. “I accept the implacable opposition and hostility of the rich and powerful is inevitable.”
A party conference policy to make the UK carbon neutral by 2030 will be watered down, but the BBC is reporting there will be a windfall tax on oil companies.
Corbyn will vow to press ahead with increasing the tax on the richest, raising the minimum wage to £10 an hour, building millions of homes, tackling climate change and nationalising the rail, mail, water and energy firms.
“And here’s a brand new one: I accept the implacable opposition of the private internet providers because we’re going to give you the very fastest full fibre broadband for free. That’s real change.”
The problem is that voters don’t think he will. New polling by James Johnson, the Downing Street pollster 2017-19, shows that voters don’t believe Corbyn will actually deliver on his flagship promises if he becomes PM.
It showed that only 13 per cent of people think that the promise of a four-day working will ever happen, and only 15 per cent think that the UK could have net zero carbon emissions by 2020, a policy that has been hotly debated in the party.
Just a quarter think that the free broadband policy will be delivered or that a scheme to give 10 per cent of the shares in every company to their workers will happen.
Meanwhile, over in Libdemland Jo Swinson is promising to legalise cannabis when she becomes prime minister. (It is not clear if the two claims are connected.) She unveiled the Lib Dem manifesto yesterday with pledges to stop Brexit, tax frequent flyers and launch a £130 billion capital investment programme. (The Times’s Oliver Wright unpacks the policies, and how they compared to previous manifestos, here:
So we have a prime minister making promises when he isn’t supposed to, a wannabe prime minister making promises that voters don’t think he can keep and a never-gonna-be prime minister making promises nobody expects her to have to honour.
Manifestitis comes in many forms. Symptoms include a rash of promises, verbal diarrhoea and delusion. A cure is not expected for another three weeks.”
Source: Red Box (Times)
East Devon Watch 