Thoughts From The Conservative Party Conference
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So party conference season is over for another year, and last but not least was the Conservatives up in Manchester.
Unlike Brighton the previous week, the conference was full to the brim with delegates, journalists, lobbyists and exhibitors - I was told there were 2000 accredited journalists alone.
A couple of the main highlights were certainly Osborne and Cameron’s keynote speeches.
Osborne made a tough speech which seemed to go down well with delegates and was one of the main talking points of the conference.
Osborne outlined in surprising detail the cuts a Conservative government would impose to reduce the public debt.
This fascinated political pundits who were unsure whether the tactic of specifying precisely which cuts he would impose before voting day would backfire.
However it was widely agreed by most the speech was a success and a pivotal point in the conference.
Apart from outlining the specific spending cuts, Osborne’s more general message was that the economy needed to be moved “from one built on debt to one sustained by saving and investment”, commenting that “a savers society is our ambition”.
He said encouraging savings is why he made his promise that only millionaires would pay inheritance tax, and added that at every stage the Tories will support the culture of saving, for those who “show responsibility for themselves and others”.
However Osborne admitted the ambition of a saving society will only be able to fulfilled once a Conservative Government “have got on top of the deficit”. It’s therefore an ambition that may well take more than one parliament to achieve.
As for pensions, Osborne claimed the Tories are going to stop more and more pensioners being driven onto the means test, and affirmed that in the next Parliament they will resolve to restore the earnings link for the basic state pension.
However he said it was another one of those trade-offs “any honest government has to confront”, and that the state pension age will have to rise as a result.
The women’s pension age is already set to start rising over the next decade to 65.
And by 2026 the pension age for men and women will reach 66.
However the Tories aim is to bring forward this date when the age will rise, although it will still not happen until the second half of the next decade.
For men this means the pension age will not start to rise to 66 until at least 2016. For women this means the pension age will not start to rise from 65 to 66 until at least 2020.
On taxes Osborne said the Tories should not accept Labour’s new 50 per cent tax rate on the highest earners as a permanent feature of the tax system, but said he could not even think of abolishing the 50p rate on the rich while at the same time he was asking many public sector workers to accept a pay freeze.
He also pledged to target tax evasion and off-shore tax havens.
Following Osborne’s speech last Tuesday, all eyes then turned to David Cameron who was speaking at the close of the party conference, and staking his claim to become the next prime minister of Great Britain.
Unlike Brown in Brighton the week before, Cameron used his leader’s speech to address the size of the country’s debt, saying there was only one real option for him - to pay down this deficit as soon as possible as “the longer we leave it, the worse it will be for all of us”.
He said the progressive thing to do is to get a grip on the debt but in a way that would brings the country together instead of driving it apart, adding this would involve cutting ministers’ pay, freezing public sector pay for all but the one million lowest paid public sector workers, and showing that the rich will pay their share, which is why the 50p tax rate will have to temporarily stay and Child Trust Funds for those on middle and higher incomes will have to go.
Cameron mentioned the issue of pensions too, commenting that our pension system was designed in a time when many people didn’t live till 70. He said it is out of date and it has to change, hence why the Tories have made the decision to bring forward the raising of the pension age.
Touching briefly on financial regulation, while making a dig at the Prime Minister in the process, he said it was Brown who “designed the system of financial regulation that helped cause the financial crisis”.
Cameron says it needs to change which is why he will give back to the Bank of England its power to regulate the City, “powers that should never have been taken away”.
As well as these comments and policy announcements on the main conference stage, meetings behind the scenes were equally interesting, and certainly highly productive.
While it is hard to go into too much detail, AMI managed to meet a range of Shadow ministers from across the Treasury and Business teams, all of whom were fully supportive of the role of intermediaries, and receptive to many of the issues we raised with them.
Bridges have certainly been built, and we look forward to following up with these MPs on certain issues in the coming weeks, in the hope they will help to further AMI’s causes if and when they take power next year.
