The Tories have delivered their 'fully costed' manifesto. It is, like the Liberal Democrats' plan before it, far from an adequate explanation of what they intend to do in government. In fact, it's worse. This one was written on the back of a fag packet.
The funding is supposedly:
Those are random numbers picked to make their exercise balance. There is no way on earth anyone might believe them, even if I know I could deliver those tax savings - but only if more was spent on HMRC, which figure is not included in the plan. The social security savings are simply a measure of cruel heartlessness. I did check to make sure I could find no reference to workhouses in the manifesto, and could not, but the mentality is present throughout it.
Meanwhile, the savings are specified in absurd detail:
Does anyone really think that the Tories have worked out quango savings in. that detail?
Or that they know the precise cost of the exact 5,000 managers they are going to be rid of in the NHS, which is already under-managed, albeit that too many managers are working on the internal market and not in supporting healthcare?
Come to that, do they really know how to index the farming budget in that detail? I like their claim of clairvoyance, but I really do not believe it, so all of this is nonsense as well. The same can be said for most of it.
And then there is tax:
NI cuts give the most significant benefit to the well-off - so that number might be reasonably stated.
The plan for the self-employed is simply about encouraging lax labour standards and tax abuse - whilst the claim that the self-employed will get a credit for an old age pension based on not contributing makes a mockery of the whole system that is surely designed to pave the way for the abolition of the pension itself, as was discussed on Channel 4 News last night by an incredulous Krishan Guru-Murthy.
The rest is again very largely biased to the well-off. Of all the major flaws in the tax system, it seems that none will be tackled.
The Tories should have saved themselves some time, effort and embarrassment. This is not a plan. It does not add up. And most especially, the savings it suggests might happen are ridiculous and undeliverable.
If they are going to present documents like this they have to show their detailed workings. As it is, they are just opening themselves to ridicule for presenting documents that are so obviously meaningless and as far from a 'fully-costed' plan as it is possible to get.
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Re NHS managers: Do the Tories imagine the necessary tasks of management will be done by healthcare professionals in their spare moments? Or by volunteers from Friends groups? I am disgusted.
The documents need to be regarded as “performative” – fans in a fan dance.
Thus the tories show consistency and recognise that the election is no election at all since choices (by the media) have already been made (LINO).
Krishan Guru-Murthy is doubtless sincere in his incredulity – which is wasted.
What this also shows is contempt for Uk citizens. Tories have given up and passing the whole mess on a plate to LINO.
When political parties claim that something is fully costed, do they ever take into account the cost of cutting public services – the current failure of the NHS resulting in early, avoidable deaths, long term morbidity leading to reduced productivity and increased social security costs, for example?
No, I thought not.
They put it straight in the spreadsheet; had they used a ‘fag packet’ first they would have noticed the spreadsheet merely reveals just how crude the assumptions were. What this tells you is just how inadequate the ‘spreadsheet king’, Rishi Sunak when he is required to think. Sunak is just another overpaid apparatchik, a commercial bank machine minder, milking a weak system that serves first the commercial banks that failed the country, and still fail the country.