The UK’s economic future

Robert Goodwill

Conservative

Britain has a long term economic plan and it’s a plan that is working here in Scarborough and Whitby.

We inherited the biggest deficit in peacetime history.

We took some tough decisions in the teeth of criticism from Labour but now they are paying off. Britain is growing faster than any major economy in the world.

Our deficit, as a share of national income, has halved.

More people are in work t han eve r before – i ndeed Yorkshire alone has created more jobs than France. Locally, unemployment is down by 40 per cent in the last year with youth unemployment halving.

The budget cut income tax for 25 million people. Raising the personal allowance has taken many lower paid people out of tax altogether.

With inflation under control and fuel duty frozen, living standards are starting to rise.

It is vital that we carry on working t hrough t he l ong term economic plan, because the only way we can have the strong public services we all rely on is to have a strong economy. The alternative is a path of more borrowing, more spending and higher taxes. This would risk all the progress we have made, and again drag Britain back down into economic chaos.

Ian McInnes

Labour

It’s time to set the record straight.

Labour did not ruin the economy. In 2008 there was a global financial crash and by 2010 the economy was growing again.

The Tories have presided over five years of austerity, have made huge cuts to our public services and working people are £1,600 a year worse off.

Week in, week out, Robert Goodwill mentions the Tories’ “long term economic plan”.

Let me tell you something. Labour has a better plan. A better plan for Britain’s future; a plan that works for ordinary families, rewarding the hard work they do and saving the NHS they rely on.

This election remains a choice between a Tory plan, failing working families, or Labour’s better plan putting working families first . A Labour Government will:

Increase the minimum wage to £8 an hour and offer 25 hours free childcare.

Cut business rates and build 200,000 new homes a year.

Balance the books in a fair way by reversing the Tory tax cut for millionaires.

Give a tax cut to 24 million working people through a lower 10p starting rate.

Guarantee an apprentice ship fore very school leaver who get s th e ba si c grades and cut tuition fees to £6,000.

Michael Beckett

Liberal Democrat

Liberal Democrats are working to build a stronger economy in a fairer society, enabling everyone to get on in life.

We believe people should be able to take charge of their lives and fulfil their potential in a free, fair and open society.

But to achieve this we need to create both sustainable growth and equality of opportunity, and so anchor Britain in the liberal centre ground between the extremes of left and right.

That’s what we worked in the Coalition Government to achieve. Liberal De mocrat s a re building a stronger economy.

We have taken the tough decisions to clean up Labour’s mess, stop extremes of Tory policies like firing employees at will and thanks to these choices, we are now beginning to see the economy recover and growing confidence.

We want the recovery to be fairer so Lib Dems prioritised creating jobs and apprenticeships.

Helping businesses create over one million new jobs and working to create a million more and helped create a record number of apprentices, with over two million people starting an apprenticeship since 2010.

Sam Cross

UKIP

UKIP would repair the economy by doing the following:

Increase personal allowances to the level of full-time minimum wage earnings (approx £13,500 by next election).

Inheritance tax will be abolished

Introduce a 35p income tax between £4 2 , 2 8 5 and £55,000 whereupon the 40p rate becomes payable.

Leave the EU and save at least £8bn per annum in net contributions.

Scrap the HS2 project, which is uneconomical and unjustified.

Cut the foreign aid budget by £ 9bn per annum, prioritising disaster relief and schemes which provide water and inoculation against preventable diseases.

Reduce Barnett Formula spending to give devolved parliaments and assemblies further tax powers to compensate.

David Malone

Green

All the other parties agree the way forward is to have even more savage cutbacks than we have had so far.

Theirs is an egat ive policy. The Green Party has a positive policy.

Instead of telling you all the public services you can no longer have – and selling them off to private companies – the Green Party would raise the money needed.

The changes in tax and corporate law required are not complicated.

We would end the tax loopholes that allow tax minimizing.

We would make changes to corporate tax laws to stop them off-shoring profits and force them to pay taxes like the rest of us.

We would put a very small (0.05 per cent) tax on all financial transactions so that City banks and traders paid their share.

This alone would raise billions.

We would end tax relief on buy to let mortgages.

This would provide much of the money needed to start building new council housing.

The Green party would carefully use tariffs to protect British companies and jobs.

Where countries used very poor labour and environmental standards to produce goods at a very l ow cost we would even the playing field by putting on a tariff.

China has used protective tariffs for years. It has worked for them.