Britain’s ruling Labour Party sought to win new ground in the election battle with a key pledge to freeze income tax, after a first day of campaigning marked by heated clashes on the economy.
British Prime Minister (PM) Gordon Brown revealed the centerpiece of his election manifesto on Wednesday, promising to keep the basic rate of tax on workers’ income the same for his entire term if re-elected.
“The income tax rate has come down from 23 pence [US$0.35] and we have kept it at 20 pence and that is what we will pledge to do in our manifesto,” Brown told Channel 4 television news.
His party was set to finalize the manifesto yesterday for publication next week ahead of the May 6 vote, which commentators predict could be the closest in a generation.
Leader of the main opposition Conservatives, David Cameron, will use his first major press conference of the campaign to promise the creation of a National Citizen Service to help young people volunteer for community work.
Nick Clegg, leader of the third-largest party, the Liberal Democrats, headed to Scotland to give a speech.
The center-left Labour Party is fighting for an historic fourth term against the center-right Tories, who have seen their double-digit opinion poll lead shrink in recent weeks to just a few points.
Two new newspaper opinion polls yesterday suggested Britain was heading for a hung parliament — where no one party has overall control — highlighting how close the race is.
The Times survey, by pollster Populus, put the Tories on 39 percent, Labour on 32 percent and the Liberal Democrats on 21 percent.
The daily poll for the Sun, by pollster YouGov, put the Conservatives on 37 percent, Labour on 32 percent and the Liberal Democrats on 19 percent.
Britain’s recession-hit economy emerged as a major election battleground on Wednesday, with Brown and Cameron trading blows over the issue in their final parliamentary showdown ahead of the vote.
The Conservatives want to scrap Labour’s planned rise in payroll taxes, warning it will damage economic growth and any chance of cutting Britain’s £167 billion (US$254 billion) budget deficit.
The planned tax hike is to a levy known as National Insurance, which is different from income tax.
National Insurance is paid by British employees and employers alongside income tax and builds up entitlement to benefits like a state pension
“This prime minister would wreck the recovery by putting a tax on every job,” Cameron declared.
Brown retorted that scrapping the planned rise in the payroll tax would take billions of pounds out of the economy at a time when it was most fragile.
“To withdraw £6 billion from the economy now would put jobs at risk, put business at risk and put recovery at risk,” he said.
Labour and the Liberal Democrats both focused on another top election issue on Wednesday, unveiling plans to overhaul the political system in the wake of revelations that lawmakers had abused their expenses.
In a speech in central London, Brown pledged fixed-term parliaments — at the moment the government can decide when a general election is called during its five-year term.
He also promised to give voters new powers to recall lawmakers found guilty of financial misconduct and to hold referendums on introducing elected members into the House of Lords, and on changing the voting system.
Chinese authorities said they began live-fire exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin on Monday, only days after Vietnam announced a new line marking what it considers its territory in the body of water between the nations. The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration said the exercises would be focused on the Beibu Gulf area, closer to the Chinese side of the Gulf of Tonkin, and would run until tomorrow evening. It gave no further details, but the drills follow an announcement last week by Vietnam establishing a baseline used to calculate the width of its territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. State-run Vietnam News
Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
When Shanghai-based designer Guo Qingshan posted a vacation photo on Valentine’s Day and captioned it “Puppy Mountain,” it became a sensation in China and even created a tourist destination. Guo had gone on a hike while visiting his hometown of Yichang in central China’s Hubei Province late last month. When reviewing the photographs, he saw something he had not noticed before: A mountain shaped like a dog’s head rested on the ground next to the Yangtze River, its snout perched at the water’s edge. “It was so magical and cute. I was so excited and happy when I discovered it,” Guo said.
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