Over the past eight years, Labour has failed Britain. Broken promises on schools and hospitals. Sixty-six new tax rises. Skyrocketing crime. A rising tide of immigration. Meddling from Brussels.Labour’s failure has destroyed trust in politicians. It is now time to restore that trust. Time for action. Time for the Conservatives.
Action on tax and the economy
Since Labour was elected, taxes have risen 66 times – equivalent
to a massive 16.5p on the basic rate of income tax. High rates
of tax are strangling Britain’s competitiveness and penalising
ordinary families.
A Conservative government will cut taxes and reduce the size of central government
• We will reduce the tax burden to below 40 percent of GDP by the end of our first parliament.
• We will reward ordinary families by increasing the threshold for inheritance tax from £263,000 to £1 million – benefitting two million households.
• We will scrap all taxes on savings and dividends to encourage saving and to reward hardworking people.
• We will ease the burden on homeowners by cutting stamp duty.
• We will pay for tax cuts by shrinking the number of Whitehall bureaucrats and cutting government waste. Our waste buster, David James, has already identified £35 billion of savings.
• We will increase spending on health and education by £1 billion a year over and above the government’s current spending plans, and will protect spending on pensions.
• We will freeze spending in all other departments for our first two years in office, allowing it to rise by two percent a year in cash terms for the remainder of the parliament. We will pay for improvements by shifting cash towards the frontline.
• We will stop regulation strangling British business, introducing a major deregulation bill in our first year in office and scrapping hundreds of unnecessary regulations.
Our criminal justice and asylum systems are in crisis. Britain now has a million violent crimes each year for the first time ever. Immigration is out of control.
A Conservative government will take control of the crime and immigration crisis
• We will recruit 80,000 extra police over eight years and will start a new prison-building programme.
• We will end the madness of police officers having to fill in forms every time they stop someone.
• We will scrap the government’s early release scheme, which puts hardened criminals back on the street.
• We will carry out a review of the much-abused Human Rights Act. If it cannot be reformed, we will repeal it.
• We will reverse the government’s disastrous downgrading of cannabis and will give drug addicts a choice – rehabilitation or prison.
• We will introduce random drug tests in schools.
• We will introduce an annual cap on the number of immigrants.
• We will develop an Australian-style points system to ensure that those who are allowed to enter Britain have the right skills for the economy.
Under Labour, one in three eleven year-olds are unable to write properly. A teacher is attacked by a pupil every seven minutes of the school day. And every working day of the school year, twelve pages of government-inspired paperwork land on every headteacher’s desk.
A Conservative government will allow teachers to teach and pupils to learn
• We will create an additional 600,000 school places, enabling parents to choose the best school for their children.
• We will make it easier for parents to set up their own schools in areas where the local education system is failing.
• We will give headteachers the freedom to expel disruptive pupils – and we will ensure that schools, not bureaucrats, have the final say.
• We will cut back on central targets and paperwork, giving teachers more time with their pupils.
• We will abolish all fees for higher education, and pay for it by charging commercial rates of interest on student loans.
The Conservatives are committed to the NHS. But under Labour, the NHS is failing. Political interference and meaningless targets are preventing staff from treating patients. More people die today from hospital infections than are killed on Britain’s roads. And Labour’s massive investment is failing to produce results – only extra waste.
A Conservative government will turn the NHS around
• We will give all patients the right to choose where they have their treatment.
• Those choosing to pay for their own treatment will be entitled to a subsidy equivalent to half the value of the procedure on the NHS.
• We will end all central targets, freeing up doctors and nurses to treat patients.
• Patients deserve cleaner hospitals. We will stop infection control teams being overruled to meet political targets.
Transport and the environment have been Labour’s greatest failures. Motorists have been penalised while congestion has soared. Railway punctuality has plummeted while the government wasted £20 billion on the Railtrack fiasco. Decision-making has been taken away from communities while council tax bills have rocketed.
A Conservative government will improve infrastructure instead of punishing motorists and will give power back to local communities
• We will carry out an audit of all speed cameras – and scrap those designed purely to raise revenue.
• We will introduce tolls only for newly built roads, where drivers are prepared to pay more for improvements.
• We will tackle Labour’s costly mismanagement of our railways by making Network Rail more accountable and by rewarding high-performing rail companies with longer franchises.
• We will give local communities the final say over controversial planning decisions like wind farms or new housing developments. We will also end fast-track approval for mobile phone masts.
• We will establish a clear demarcation of powers between local and national government, ending interference in local matters.
• We will scrap Labour’s costly plans for regionalgovernment.
• We will end Labour’s soaring council tax bills, which result from communities across the country being forced to subsidise badly-managed councils in Labour heartlands.
When Labour came to office, Britain had Europe’s strongest pension system. But as a result of Gordon Brown’s £5 billion raid on pension funds, the value of pensions has plummeted by £100 billion.Meanwhile, ever more pensioners are dependent on means-tested handouts.
A Conservative government will restore dignity in retirement
• We will relink the state pension to earnings and will gradually float pensioners off means-testing – paid for by abolishing the government’s wasteful New Deal.
• We will give people greater freedom over their savings by scrapping the compulsory annuity requirement.
• We will encourage saving by introducing LISAs (Lifetime Individual Savings Accounts) which will allow people much greater flexibility over their savings while still enjoying tax benefits.
In the 1970s, the British people voted to join the Common Market. They did not vote to join a country called Europe. But since then, power has gone from Britain to Brussels. The European Union is spewing out too many regulations and is holding our economy back. The new constitution will only make matters worse.
A Conservative government will bring power back to Britain
• We will hold a referendum on the European constitution by September 2005, giving the decision to the British people.
• We will renegotiate Britain’s relationship with Europe, going back to the free trade area that we voted to join.
• We will bring an end to burdensome regulation from Brussels, and will not implement regulations when the cost to business cannot be justified.
• We will withdraw Britain from the social chapter, which threatens British jobs, and the Common Fisheries Policy, which is destroying communities.