Kemi: I’d call emergency Budget to help families
KEMI Badenoch today pledges to help working families and pensioners through the cost of living crunch with tax cuts and more financial support.
In an article for the Daily Mail, the Tory leadership hopeful says she will bring forward a universal credit and pension credit uplift and raise the income tax threshold.
The former minister, who yesterday secured her place in the next round of the heated contest with the backing of 49 Tory MPs, said she would not take part in a ‘bidding war’ to slash taxes.
But she pledged to call an emergency budget if she becomes prime minister because people are ‘suffering now’ and need help.
Mrs Badenoch, 42, says she will cut fuel duty and cancel the rise in corporation tax to 25 per cent. And she promises to raise the income tax threshold, though does not say by how much. She will bring forward the universal credit and pension credit uplift from April 2023 to this autumn.
She writes: ‘While waiting for inflation uprating was fine when inflation was 2 per cent, it is not acceptable at 10 per cent.
‘This will not cost any more in the longer run as it just moves the timing... but it shows we understand people’s problems. They are not just numbers on a spreadsheet.’
Mrs Badenoch came fourth in the contest’s second round yesterday, beating Tom Tugendhat and Suella Braverman, who was eliminated.
She said she was ‘delighted that a growing number of my colleagues have faith in my vision for a return to honest politics and Conservative principles’.
The Nigerian-born contender has won the backing of Olympic hero and Tory peer Sebastian Coe and, who said the party needed a candidate who ‘represents the future, not the past’ and one who ‘best understands the need to restore trust in the Conservative Party’.