RISHI SUNAK tried to relaunch his floundering election campaign by offering tax breaks to pensioners, a core Tory voting bloc in past polls.
He pledged to raise the income tax allowance for pensioners, giving them a tax cut worth around £95 next year rising to £275 by the end of the decade.
His move — which would cost £2.4 billion — comes after a disastrous first week of the Tory campaign, including a missing umbrella at the launch, a visit to a centre named after a sunk ship, the defection of an MP to the Reform party and a widely ridiculed and unprepared teenage conscription plan.
To add to the agony, Tory peer and former minister Lord Goldsmith said that the premier had damaged the Conservative Party “almost beyond repair and all but guaranteed the majority of his MPs will lose their job next month.”
Mr Sunak’s new proposals for older voters are unlikely to turn things around. Institute for Fiscal Studies director Paul Johnson said about half the cost of the plan came from not imposing three more years of frozen personal allowances on pensioners.
“So the £100 ‘saving’ next year is mostly just avoiding a £100 tax increase, rather than an actual giveaway,” he said.
And Torsten Bell of the Resolution think tank said that while Mr Sunak’s presentation was about helping state pensioners the “biggest beneficiaries of another tax system complication will largely be better-off pensioner households.”
The Prime Minister insisted that his pensioners’ offer would be funded from the same pot as his conscription scheme — a sudden crackdown on tax avoidance of the sort the Tories have failed to do in 14 years.
The spectre of Reform continued to haunt the Tories today, with the hard-right party’s owner Nigel Farage pledging to campaign all over the place, despite not actually contesting a particular constituency.
He warned that he would descend first of all on Dover, the Kent town already reeling from the defection of its outgoing MP, Natalie Elphicke, from the right wing of the Tory Party to Labour.
Today Mr Farage made it clear that his aim was to ultimately replace the Tories as the main party on the right of British politics.
