What a load of nonsense.
His 5 pledges are:
- Halving inflation to ease the cost of living and give people financial security
- Growing the economy, creating better-paid jobs and opportunity across the country
- Ensuring our national debt is falling to secure the future of public services
- Cutting NHS waiting lists so that people get the care they need more quickly
- Passing new laws to stop small boats, making sure that those who come to the UK illegally are detained and swiftly removed
Of these 5 pledges, only one has any kind of measurable target - halving inflation. Inflation is already forecast to fall by more than half anyway so they'll try and take credit for something that was likely to happen anyway. Plus this does nothing to improve the cost of living crisis.
Imagine something was £10. With 10% inflation as at present, this now costs £11. Halving inflation doesn't reduce this £11 cost, it just means it will go up by 5% instead, so next year the same item will be £11.55. Doesn't help.
The other pledges aren't worth the paper they are written on. Grow the economy - by how much and by when? Ensure the debt falls - by how much and by when? Cut NHS waiting lists - how, by how much and by when? New laws to stop small boats - doesn't address that we have no legal routes.
Typical Tory bull.
What a load of pointless pledges, they're practically all guaranteed anyway (due to how bad the Tories have made everything), but they are meaningless if you don't factor in where we were at, and where we should be at.
Halving inflation won't ease the cost of living problem, the 13% we're at now has already increased prices by 13% over the last year. Halving that will add on another 6.5%, which works out at 20% higher prices (which is still 16% higher than they should be). He should be targeting deflation, but the BOE predict this anyway in a couple of years time. Effectively his target is pointless, as it should be simple to achieve, and will happen anyway, but it's not going to really help out, not until wages catch inflation (which needs deflation).
Growing the economy is probable (we're in a recession), but the target should be parity with the growth of the G7 and we're already miles behind since the brexit vote. Only way to catch this up to some degree is to rejoin the single market and CU.
The national debt is at an all-time high, reducing it shouldn't be much of a problem, but then it will still be massively high compared to historical times.
NHS waiting lists are at record highs and have increased year on year since the tories took over in 2010. Making them 2x worse rather than 3x worse is not progress, it's still a lot worse.
Small boats are not a problem, as in they're small, the numbers are insignificant, especially compared to our home grown problems. It would be easier and less hassle just to let them in and give them some manual work to do, and pay them, which some brits out of work think they're too good to be doing.
All he's done here is create 5 boxes to tick, which would be very easy to tick, but just ticking them is accepting things are still much worse than they should be.
True targets should be:
Deflation, back to a level which would match a 2% year on year increase for the last decade.
Regain growth to where it was at in 2016, i.e top of the G7
Reduce national debt, to a level lower than the tories have ever had it
Cut waiting lists times, back to a level when the tories took over (after Labour had them very low)
Forget small boats, concentrate on narrowing the wealth gap, bring the poor up and bring the rich down, way down!
Get these ***** out.
