Slash taxes or lose the Red Wall, PM warned

NORTHERN Tory MPs will today warn Boris Johnson he must cut taxes or risk losing the party’s Red Wall seats.

The Prime Minister will visit Doncaster to attend a conference of the Northern Research Group (NRG) of backbench Conservatives.

In a speech, the group’s chairman Jake Berry will tell him: ‘It’s time to stop talking about being the party of low tax, it’s time to be the Government of low tax.’

He will call on devolved mayoral authorities in the North to be given the power to cut local taxes, promoting competition between regions.

The MPs met Chancellor Rishi Sunak last night to impress on him the need to cut taxes. The NRG is a group of 50 MPs who campaign for greater investment in the North. In his speech, Mr Berry will

‘Level up our entire nation’

call for an end to the ‘conservation of southern privilege’.

He will unveil key proposals that the Government can enact to ensure the survival of Conservatism in the North, as well as the Tories’ majority.

Mr Berry will say the ‘defining missions of our Government’ should be to level up the country and to deliver for everyone everywhere, to tackle the regional and local inequalities that unfairly hold back communities, and to encourage private sector investment across the UK.

‘You can’t deliver radical long-term missions without radical long-term funding. This is why we propose a levelling up formula, which will deliver what the Conservative Party promised for generations to come.’

The first of the NRG’s proposals, the ‘levelling up formula’, will seek a fairer deal for all regions in the UK.

Highlighting that spending in London per head is 15 per cent higher than the Government average, Mr Berry will say: ‘A levelling up formula... would benefit the whole of the UK.

‘It would see more money spent in the North but also, in Cornwall, in the South-West and in the Midlands. This is an idea from the North that will truly unite and level up our entire nation.’

A second proposal calls for a ‘devomax government’, a plan which would let local areas take on powers to lower taxes, dictate housing requirements and set stamp duty rates.

Mr Berry will say: ‘We need wideranging fiscal freedoms – Conservative freedoms, and the freedom to lower taxes. There are almost as many people living in Greater Manchester as in Wales – yet Wales has power over tax, while Greater Manchester does not.’