Dear Editor
‘Black Friday’ and Conservative tax cuts; ‘cuts’ from the same cloth
I write this on ‘Black Friday’. That day when retailers of all sorts, after raising prices three months ago, cut the price back to what it was and claim to have given us a ‘bargain’.
It strikes me that that is pretty much what the Conservatives have done. Having raised taxes by £90 billion they cut them by £20 billion and pretend that we have ‘got a bargain’. It’s nonsense of course. At the end of this Parliament the average household will be £1,900 worse off, even given the National Insurance reduction. And taxes will still be at their highest since the aftermath of WWII.
Despite claims that the £20 billion was in some way ‘spare’ it looks like it has been ‘borrowed’ (another word for ‘cut’) from future expenditure on public services. It will be funded, we are told, by ‘increases in efficiency’. Anyone feel that the ‘increases in efficiency’ caused by the last 13 years of Conservative austerity have left the NHS in a better, more efficient, state? With a record high of 7.8 million on waiting lists? Thought not.
For those of you still inclined to believe this moribund Government let me ask you this. Remember that promise to ‘take back control’ and ‘reduce immigration to the ten-of-thousands’ (and I make no comment on the laudability, practicality or achievability of that)? Are you still happy to believe the Conservatives?
Your sincerely,
Mark Wooding
Liberal Democrat Parliamentary Candidate Central Devon
Devon County Council Conservatives voted unanimously, at the recent Council Cabinet meeting, to close the mobile library service and to ‘save’ the princely sum of £217,000.
In the week the Conservatives proudly announced the creation of thousands of virtual hospital beds more evidence emerged of them abandoning trying to fix things in the real-world.
