Rishi Sunak – Conservative Party Manifesto Speech - Jun 11

Thank you. Well good morning everyone, it is great to be here with you all and at Silverstone. There's nowhere better to mark the fact that our economy has turned a corner.

We're a month away from the Grand Prix here, and we can be confident about even more British success. 7 of the world's 10 leading Formula 1 teams are based here, more Grand Prix cars are made in this country than anywhere else and the UK has won more titles than any other nation. So Formula 1 is a great example of our strengths coming together: our technological know-how, our innovative, advanced manufacturing capability, and the skill of our workforce—25,000 engineers and apprentices are involved in this industry.

And Formula 1 is not the only thing they do here at Silverstone.  As nice as it would be for Brad Pitt to turn up at our manifesto launch, he's currently filming just outside with a brilliant British crew, one of the many UK-based productions taking place thanks to our support and tax cuts for the creative sector. So from the Northern Studios in Hartlepool to Pinewood to the coming Crown Studios in Sunderland, Britain is truly now the creative capital of Europe.

So just thinking about that, the fact that we can lead the world in such competitive fields should make us all enormously proud of our country but crucially, optimistic about our future. Because we Brits can outcompete the best in the world.

And what we Conservatives want is more British success stories—and that is what our manifesto will deliver.

Now the last few years have been some of the toughest our country has faced in decades. We were hit by Covid and then the spike in energy prices following Putin's invasion of Ukraine. But economic stability is now returning. Inflation - back to normal, real wages have been rising for almost a year now and the economy is growing again. So, the question now is who is best to turn that foundation into a secure future for you, your family and our country. 

So this manifesto is our clear plan for our United Kingdom. It is about the bold actions we will take to deliver that secure future.

We Conservatives know that security is essential for success. And that's why we are raising defence investment to 2.5 percent of GDP by 2030 to deal with the increasingly uncertain world we live in. This is the biggest sustained increase in the defence budget since the end of the Cold War—and one that Keir Starmer will not match.

Labour would rather keep the civil service at its bloated, pandemic level, rather than give our armed forces the equipment they need. And then there is war in Europe, turmoil in the Middle East, China flexing its muscles in the South China sea. We are in a world of increasing threats, and we must show our enemies that this country, with our allies, will stand strong.

Now this axis of authoritarian states—Russia, China, Iran, North Korea—must know that their attempts to destabilise our world will simply not succeed. Now is the time for bold action, not an uncertain Keir Starmer as our Prime Minister.

Now our increase in defence investment will not only fire up our defence industrial base, creating good jobs here at home, from Barrow to Lossiemouth, but allow us to stand up for our interests, deter our enemies and defend our values.  It is only we Conservatives, with our iron resolve, who can be trusted to keep Britain safe. 

We need border security too, the confidence that it is your government that decides who comes to our country, and not criminal gangs.

And that is why if you vote Conservative on July 4^th, the flights removing illegal immigrants will depart in July: establishing the deterrent that will stop the boats. Because when people know that if they come here illegally they won't get to stay, then they will stop coming. And if we are forced to choose between our security and the jurisdiction of a foreign court, including the ECHR, we will always choose our nation's security.

But Labour have no answer to this question. As you saw the other week, Keir Starmer simply can't tell you what he would do with people who come here illegally because he doesn't believe it is a problem.

With Brexit, we took back control of our borders. But migration has been too high in recent years and we have a clear plan to reduce it. Last year we announced changes which mean 300,000 people who were previously eligible to come here now can't. And we will introduce a migration cap that means that parliament, your elected representatives, will vote on how many people should be able to come here every year. Our plan is clear. We will halve migration, as we have halved inflation, and then reduce it every year.

We don't just need military and border security. As Putin's invasion of Ukraine has shown, we need energy security too. It is only by having reliable, home-grown sources of energy that we can deny dictators the ability to send our bills soaring. So, in our approach to energy policy we will put security and your family finances ahead of unaffordable eco zealotry.

Unlike Labour we don't believe that we will achieve that energy security via a state-controlled energy company that doesn't in fact produce any energy. That will only increase costs, and as Penny said on Friday there's only one thing that GB in Starmer and Miliband's GB Energy stands for, and that's giant bills.

Our clear plan is to achieve energy security through new gas-powered stations, trebling our offshore wind capacity and by having new fleets of small modular reactors. These will make the UK a net exporter of electricity, giving us greater energy independence and security from the aggressive actions of dictators . Now let me just reiterate that, with our plan, we will produce enough electricity to both meet our domestic needs and export to our neighbours. Look at that. A clear, Conservative plan not only generating security, but also prosperity for our country.

And we Conservatives also have a plan to give you financial security. We will enable working people to keep more of the money you earn because you have earned it and have the right to choose what to spend it on. Now Keir Starmer takes a very different view. He says he's a socialist, and we all know what socialists do, don't we? They take more of your money, because they think it belongs to them.

Now, I know Labour have been taking inspiration from one of Brad Pitt's most famous films: the first rule of Labour tax rises is that you don't talk about tax rises. But we know that the policies Labour have already announced will require them to increase taxes on working households by £2,094. My friends, families cannot afford that, and it is our job to make sure that that doesn't happen.

Now I had to take difficult decisions because of Covid. But now we are cutting taxes for workers, for parents and pensioners.

And we are the party of Margaret Thatcher and Nigel Lawson, a party, unlike Labour, that believes in sound money. So today's plans, and you would expect nothing less from Jeremy and me, are fully funded.

We will pay for permanent reductions in taxation by controlling the unsustainable rise in working age welfare that has taken off since the pandemic. In this party, we believe that it is morally right that those who can work do work and that hard work is rewarded with people being able to keep more of their own money. So we will ensure that we have lower welfare so we can have lower taxes.

And as Conservatives, we believe that hard work should be rewarded, that work should not be taxed twice. That's unfair. That is why Jeremy has been cutting the National Insurance contributions that only workers are forced to pay. Our National Insurance tax cuts are already worth £900 to the average worker and we will keep cutting taxes in the coming years, meaning that by 2027 we will have halved National Insurance to six percent: that is a tax cut, my friends, worth £35,000 to the average worker.

So we're making more progress towards our long-term ambition to abolish the double taxation on work when it is economically responsible to do so.

Now I also want to say something about the self-employed. Because they are the risk takers, the people who graft hard to make a living, who get our economy growing. They embody that most Conservative of values: the desire to build something, to create wealth and opportunity. But setting up on your own means you don't the same security that those on payroll have. So, we must make it worth taking that risk. We need to make it worth taking that risk. And that means their taxes must be cut. So, in the next parliament we will scrap, entirely, the main rate of self-employed National Insurance. A tax abolished, and enterprise encouraged.

We want to encourage more people to become entrepreneurs, to set up their own businesses, to try and make something of it. So we will abolish a tax for millions of our hardest workers and create a new culture of enterprise in our country. We Conservatives want a Britain where setting up a business is as natural as taking a job.  So we will do more for the self-employed, so that they can do more for Britain.

Security also means the security of knowing that you will have dignity in retirement. So, we will cut tax for pensioners with the triple lock plus ensuring that the new state pension is never dragged into income tax. Labour, by contrast, would introduce a retirement tax meaning that for those who rely entirely on the new state pension, they would be caught by income tax for the first time in our country's history. 

And we know Labour's record. From the 75p state pension increase to Gordon Brown's £118 billion tax raid on private pensions, it is clear that your pension simply isn't safe with the Labour Party.

And we Conservatives want to spread opportunity across the whole of our United Kingdom, we don't want you to have to leave the place you call home to succeed. Ultimately, that is the test of levelling up. So we will give our young people the skills and opportunities they need to succeed in today's world. We won't cling to outdated ideas such as the belief that the only route to success is through university. So, we will curb funding to rip off degrees and use it to fund 100,000 high-quality apprenticeships. We will build on the success of our education reforms, by introducing the Advanced British Standard, which will enable our young people to receive a broader education and break down the split between technical and academic education that has so held our country back.

We'll invest in a new form of National Service to give our young people the chance to enjoy new experiences, learn new skills and feel a sense of community, belonging and national purpose. National Service will help us build a more unified, more cohesive society, so we can be secure in the knowledge that we are all on the same side. 

We Conservatives also want to create a society in which everyone has a chance to own. In the last five years, we delivered a million new homes. In the next Parliament, we will go even further, delivering 1.6 million new homes by speeding up planning on brownfield land in our inner cities and by scrapping defective EU laws. And we will go further. Because we Conservatives believe in tax cuts, so, for young families, for the first time buyers purchasing a home up to £425,000, we will abolish stamp duty entirely.

And that's not all we will do, we will also introduce a new form of help to buy, a new help to buy scheme to get a new generation onto the property ladder. All part of our plan to build an ownership society, where more and more people have the security and pride that comes from owning your own home. From Macmillan to Thatcher to today, it is we Conservatives who are the party of the property owning democracy in this country.

In fact, we want to make life easier for people at every stage of their lives. So, we will give working parents 30 hours of free childcare a week from when their child is nine months to when they start school. We'll make child benefits fairer and simpler by moving to a household system that no longer penalises single-earner households and ensuring that any family that earns less than £120,000 a year, will receive it. This tax cut will be worth, on average, £1,500 to 700,000 families showing once again, it is we Conservatives that are the party of the family, and we will always champion them.

And we want all families to have the peace of mind of knowing that the NHS will be there for you if you fall sick. So, we will increase NHS funding in real terms every year and train and recruit more doctors and nurses every year. We will make the NHS work better through investing in new technology and reforming how it works.

You should know that if your kids have an earache or a sore throat, or a chest infection, you can get quick and rapid treatment without having to take time off work, and so we will expand our fantastic Pharmacy First programme.

But parents should also feel that it is safe for their children to walk home at night. So we will recruit 8,000 new police officers, one for every neighbourhood and cut anti-social behaviour through intensive, hot spot policing. And we will protect women and girls by guaranteeing single-sex spaces through an amendment to the Equality Cct to make it clear that sex means biological sex. 

Labour like to talk the country down. They want to pretend that everything would be great if they had never left office and pretend that somehow, we have not achieved anything. But that's just not right. Remember the note saying, ‘there's no money left'.

When Labour left office in 2010, unemployment was higher than when they had come into government, public and private debt was accumulating, the banking system was broken, the deficit was ballooning and even Labour accepted that, after years of spending, significant cuts in public expenditure were required: they went into the 2010 election admitting they would have to make cuts. Labour left Britain on the brink of bankruptcy.

Worse, the money that Labour had put into public service had not been accompanied by sufficient reform. Labour's welfare system was more about disguising how many people were out of work than getting people back into employment. And for all the money that Labour had put into education, our schools were falling down the international league tables and almost half of Labour's increase in the NHS budget had been swallowed up by higher pay and more bureaucracy. 

And despite that awful inheritance, we've delivered the third highest rate of growth in the G7, created 4 million jobs, 800 a day. With Kemi using our Brexit freedoms to open up new markets, we have now overtaken France, the Netherlands and Japan to become the 4^th largest exporter in the world.

And we Conservatives, under David, took the difficult but necessary decisions to repair the public finances and control the national debt, and that meant that when Covid hit, we could support people and businesses with furlough, deliver the fastest vaccine roll out in the world and provide record funding to the NHS.

We reformed welfare by capping benefits and introducing universal credit. Iain's reforms mean that now work always pays. We've reduced absolute poverty, we've reduced child poverty, we've reduced pensioner poverty. We've cut carbon emissions by a third. Maintained our position as NATO's second biggest defence power. And Boris and Ben and Grant put the country at the forefront of defending Ukraine against Russian aggression because Britain will always stand up to tyrants.

We have halved violent and neighbourhood crime thanks to the work of Home Secretaries from Theresa to Priti to James. And improved standards in our schools. Thanks to Michael's reforms—and a generation of inspiring teachers—English schoolchildren are not just the best readers in the United Kingdom, they're the best in the Western world. We strengthened our United Kingdom, with the forces of separatism in retreat. We legislated for equal marriage and now it is not even surprising for so many people from diverse backgrounds to sit around our Cabinet table. I know you'll agree with me, we may not have got everything perfectly right, but that is a record I am mighty proud of.

This country has a proud past and a bright future. And I believe in that innate confidence in ourselves that has always run through our island story. And just as we're proud of all that we created, invented, and discovered in our past, so we can be confident and optimistic about what we will achieve in our future.

But I am not blind to the fact that people are frustrated with our party, and frustrated with me. Things have not been easy and we have not got everything right. But we are the only party, in this election, with the big ideas to make our country a better place to live. Labour offers no solutions to our problems, and would only make them worse. And all a vote for Reform or the Liberal Democrats does is allow Labour to do whatever they want to our country. 

Do not forget that Keir Starmer is asking you to hand him a blank cheque, when he hasn't said what he'll buy with it or how much it's going to cost you.

Just think about what Labour would mean. Higher taxes for every working household, can you afford two thousand pounds more in taxes? French style labour laws that will lead to higher unemployment and more strikes. A ballooning welfare bill. Higher immigration and more Net Zero costs. Their policies will mean, as they let slip this weekend, bigger class sizes because of their desire to slap VAT on school fees. Labour would cave into the demands of the public sector unions putting up your taxes to meet the unions' extortionate demands.

And Keir Starmer will also use that blank cheque to change the rules of the game, to his benefit. Giving 16 year olds the vote not because he believes they are adults, he doesn't want them to serve on a jury or do any of the other things that adults do, but because he thinks they'll vote for him and that will make it harder to remove him from power. If Labour win this time, they'll change the rules so that they are in power for a very long time.  

So if you don't know what Labour will do, don't vote for it. If you're concerned about what Starmer isn't telling you, don't vote for him. And if you're worried about what Labour's £2,094 of tax rises would mean for your family's financial security, don't vote for them.

In conclusion, let me say this. We Conservatives will always stand for our values: for aspiration, for freedom, for opportunity, for security. Your Conservative MP will deliver lower taxes, lower immigration, protected pensions and a sensible approach to Net Zero.

Now our country wants a clear plan, and bold action. Our country needs a secure future, and it is this Conservative manifesto that will deliver it.