Economy & welfare

Various parties (the LibDems, UKIP and BNP, at least) argue for an increase in the income-tax personal allowance to address the same issue that we aim to address with the BI+FT. The LibDems, for instance, propose to increase the personal allowance from its current £6,500 (or so) to £10,000, so you only pay tax on taxable income of over £10,000.

UKIP supporters are right to be concerned about the cost of the EU to our economy, not only in terms of the direct cost of our net £6.4bn annual contributions (soon to increase thanks to Blair's attempt to buy the European presidency by surrendering our rebate), but also in terms of the heavier cost of economic inefficiency imposed through regulations and other instruments mandated by EU Directives.

But UKIP supporters are not well-served by their party:

Debt is the total amount of money you owe.

Deficit is the difference between your incomings and your outgoings (between tax revenue and expenditure, for governments).

Your debt increases by the amount of your deficit each year. So if your deficit is falling, your debt is still going up, just more slowly.

The government publishes vast quantities of information, and yet some of the most useful and important information is not amongst it. They provide an array of aggregated information about how they spend our money, but no specific information. We don't know how much is spent doing what. It's our money. We ought to know.

It is more difficult than it should be to extract from government figures exactly how our tax is being spent, in order to make precise judgments about what not to spend it on. But we committed ourselves to be frank about the tough choices to be made, and not to fudge, hedge, and dissemble like the mainstream parties. The following figures may well need modifying in the light of better information, but this is our best guess of how our proposed changes would stack up, and where cuts would have to be found.

The minimum standard of accommodation that should be provided by councils in accordance with their obligations will need careful consideration, but we suggest something like the following:

The standardised charges (by councils for provision of minimum-standard housing to eligible residents) would need detailed consideration, but we suggest that they might be in the region of: