David Cameron, ‘your ‘umble servant’, promises tax cuts
The messaging to voters in this speech lacked a little subtlety, but maybe that’s how you have to play it in an era when many voters are disengaged from politics.
One of David Cameron’s aides sticks his fingers in his ears when he tries to convey how voters are trying to block politics out of their lives.
David Cameron was trying to grab their attention with some direct cash offers on taxation and some very direct political messages too. He was also trying to engage with some voters’ resistance to him and to his party.
You may not like me and you might have a problem supporting the Tories .. but it’s me or Ed.
The promised rise in the personal allowance – from £10,500 to £12,500 – got a decent round of applause from the conference.
But nothing like the roar of approval for raising the 40p tax threshold to £50,000 by 2020. Iain Duncan Smith shook his fist in approval.
David Cameron talked about how far too many people had been dragged into the 40p tax bracket. He failed to mention that Coalition Budgets have heavily contributed to that (by his own admission) injustice by not raising the threshold in line with inflation.
On the personal allowance figures there are some funny numbers being floated which don’t compare like with like.
Mr and Mrs Jones on £13,000 each might have lost £354.20 from the working age benefits freeze announced by George Osborne on Monday, but they will be net gainers because they’ll pick up £1,000 from the personal allowance change … or so it is claimed.
But while the £354.20 loss is a real number the £1000 – £500 apiece – is a nominal number and could be slashed by inflation.
David Cameron raided every bit of Labour rhetoric he could find. It was a stark comparison with Ed Miliband who didn’t even look over the Tory fence to consider a rhetorical land grab.
The Tories were the trade union of the hard-working. They are the people we “resent”, he accidentally said rather than “represent.” Labour might say that was a Freudian slip.
The Tories have had much more fun with what they claim is Ed Miliband’s Freudian slip forgetting to mention the deficit (or immigration) in his speech last week.
And he spelled out the Lynton Crosby strategy for winning back support from Ukip. You go to bed with Nigel and you wake up with Ed, he said.
No sooner had he described himself, a little implausibly perhaps, as a humble “public servant,” there was a shoot from the hip quality to the challenge to the British electorate: “What’s it gonna be?” Me or “the other guy?”
There is more policy to come in a speech by Chris Grayling on the ECHR policy on Friday.
There are clearly moves afoot to test the water in strengthening his negotiation stance on Europe. Having long said he is only considering asking for a GDP-related brake on free movement of people for new members of the EU, there are clearly plans to see if such a brake can be introduced for existing members.
He wasn’t confident enough to spell it out, as it might well sink early and without trace. Many EU countries would deeply resent and fight to resist such a move, even if some richer EU member countries might privately sympathise with the cause.
This was a polished and word perfect speech (with that one exception mentioned above).
It wasn’t beautifully shaped or elegantly written. But the judgement seems to have been made that the switched off British electorate need some shock offers and shock language to make them see the next election as a binary choice that matters to them and which they must tune in to.
One of the themes of contemporary British politics is fragmentation – a massive number of votes going to smaller parties – the whole country nearly fragmenting in what the prime minister described as the most nerve-racking week of his life.
David Cameron is trying to arrest that movement, at least enough to get him back into power.
Because of his complicated, not always trusted, relationship with his party he had to proclaim that he wanted to win a majority at the next election.
The electoral mountain to climb makes that very hard to believe, but many left the hall thinking that they might just become the biggest party.
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