Theresa May has pledged to leave the EU’s Single Market and Customs Union at the Conservative Party manifesto launch in Halifax Thursday.
Brexit Minister David Davis introduced Theresa May before she launched the document, titled ‘Forward, Together‘, which confirms that the United Kingdom will leave the EU’s Single Market and Customs Union under a Tory Government.
It also restates the party’s alleged commitment to reducing net immigration from “the hundreds of thousands to the tens of thousands”, despite former Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne claiming that senior Tories do not really support it and made a deliberate decision not to implement in the Evening Standard Wednesday.
Much attention is being given to measures designed to alleviate the cost of social care, which seem to strike at the party’s most loyal demographic.
Winter fuel payments, which currently apply to pensioners universally, will now be means-tested so it applies only to the least well-off.
More controversially, the prime minister has also said that council will no longer meet the social care costs for people with assets worth more than £100,000, whose costs will be met out of the value of their homes, if necessary, after they and their partner have died.
Sir Andrew Dilnot, chairman of the UK Statistics Authority, has criticised the proposals, which he believes show a “less than full understanding” of the issues facing social care.
“[T]hey fail to tackle what I’d argue is probably the biggest problem of all in social care, which is that at the moment people are faced with a position of no control,” he argued.
“[P]eople will be left helpless knowing that what will happen is if they’re unlucky enough to suffer the need for care costs, they’ll be entirely on their own until they’re down to the last £100,000, all of their wealth including their house.”
Many in Britain have argued the Tories should cut the large foreign aid budget, which funnels billions of pounds towards elderly care in the People’s Republic of China, in order to fund social care.
However, Theresa May’s manifesto commits the party to David Cameron era legislation obliging the government to spend 0.7 per cent of GDP on aid schemes.