THERE was incredulity yesterday when Cameron declared the Tories are ‘the party of working people’, adding that the ‘good news in the economy’ was leading to ‘the good life’.
One journalist asked: ‘Labour said they are the party of fiscal responsibility; you say you’re the party of working people. Will voters believe either of you?
In his speech, Cameron said: ‘As the most expensive council properties fall vacant, we are going to require councils to sell them off, and we’ll replace them with new affordable housing in the same area. . .
‘We will use the money saved to do two things.
‘First, we will create a £1 billion Brownfield Regeneration Fund. . .
‘And second, we are going to use that money to radically expand one of the Conservative Party’s landmark ideas: the Right to Buy your council house. . . the next Conservative government will extend the Right to Buy to all housing association tenants in this country.’
He added that ‘our second commitment to working people is on childcare. . . With a Conservative government, you will get 30 hours of free childcare a week’.
He also pledged a ‘tax-free Minimum Wage. He said: ‘We are going to legislate that as the Minimum Wage rises, the basic tax-free allowance is automatically uprated too.’
He said the Tories will increase NHS funding by £8bn a year till 2020.
The GMB commented: ‘While tens of thousands of ordinary London families are unable to find a council house to rent, rich farmers and the elite are scooping them up by the tractor load and the “Right to Buy” has turned into a rich harvest for greedy farmers.
‘A new GMB analysis shows that of the approx. 4.2 million households living in private rented accommodation in Britain the rent to landlords in 1.6m or 38% of them is paid in part or in full by taxpayers paying them an annual total of £9.2 billion in housing benefit in 2013/14.’
It added: ‘Of 15,874 dwellings in council blocks in Wandsworth where tenants acquired the leasehold under “right to buy” legislation some 6,180 dwellings are now owned by private landlords who rent them to private tenants. That is nearly 40% of the total sold by the council.’
Paul Johnson, the director of the Institute For Fiscal Studies (IFS), said this and other spending commitments had implications for the Tories’ plans to eliminate the £90bn deficit in day-to-day spending by 2017-18.
‘Yesterday we did not get much detail from Labour about how much they want to cut,’ he said.
‘Today we got a very clear sense that the Conservatives are going to have to do an enormous amount over the next three or four years but no sense at all about how they are going to do it.’
The Conservatives’ plans to achieve a budget surplus by 2018 would require ‘tens and tens of billions of pounds’ in spending cuts or tax rises, he added.
