By Jake Ventham.

This article is part of a series of manifestos released for the RGS 2024 Mock General Election. Jake Ventham and the RGS Conservatives outline their plans for the future of our country.

“We promote stability” – Jake Ventham, leader of the RGS Conservatives.

The Conservative Party, the party of greats such as Churchill, Thatcher, and Disraeli, should be where your vote lies In the RGS Mock general election. The Conservative Party is a party of stability, We have pushed past issues that have troubled the whole world in our 14 years of strength such as Covid-19 and The 2008 Financial Crisis. We promise that if we win the election we will supply the UK with stability and strength. Here are our policies.

We Promise:

To secure a strong economy

• We will reduce National Insurance by 2%, and eventually long term we will abolish the tax.
• We will deliver 30 hours of free childcare a week, saving families £6,900.
• We will implement the Triple Lock plus scheme protecting pensions.

To help young people 

• We will introduce 100,000 high quality apprenticeships by reducing the amount of substandard university degrees.
• We will protect Britain’s future with National Service, with an option for 1 year in the military or 1 day a month of volunteering. aiming to enhance young people’s skills and get them ready for a world of work.

To protect our country

• We will stop the boats with illegal migrants. 
• We will send illegal migrants back to their home country or to Rwanda if their home country is deemed unsafe.
• We will put a legal cap on migrations which will fall yearly.
• We will boost defence spending to 2.5% of GDP by 2030 to protect Britain in this pre-war era.

To secure our communities 

• We will drive up NHS productivity, and we will deliver 92,000 extra nurses and 28,000 extra doctors.
• We will deliver 8,000 more full-time police officers to safeguard our communities from crime.
• We will deliver 1.6 million more good homes.

To improve the environment

• We will protect the countryside.
• We will deliver an affordable and pragmatic transition to net zero which we are committed to reach by 2050.

These policies clearly lay out a plan for the future, but the real question is, how are the Conservatives better than the other parties?

Labour:

Keir Starmer and the Labour party want to increase taxes and get rid of private schools. They plan to put a 20% VAT charge on private schools; this will mean that less people will be able to afford these schools and those already on bursaries will need larger bursaries. Both of these issues caused by the tax will decrease funding for private schools, making many teachers lose jobs. This will decrease the standard of our education. Additionally, those at the RGS will see themselves or their friends being forced to leave the school and will join already overflowing and underfunded state schools. The 20% tax will only create an elitist society in private schools until the Labour Party continues to act like champagne socialists and abolish private schools altogether. 

The Labour party may attack the Conservative party for our 14 years in office, but the reality is the areas where Labour have power are in the worst situations of them all. Labour have devolved powers in both Wales and London. London, since Sadiq Khan has become Mayor, has decreased substantially in safety. Nearly all crime in London has been on the rise and it is only rational to believe that if Labour comes into power, the whole of the UK will see a rise in crime. Additionally, Labour have been unsuccessful in Wales. Labour constantly attacks our party for the NHS waiting lists whilst Labour-run Wales has the worst waiting list in Britain.

Reform:

The Reform party is a party of instability. The party has seen over 110 candidates dropped due to the Reform Party not vetting their proposed candidates. There have been various reasons why Reform have had to drop candidates with some of their candidates being; pro cannibalism, racist, homophobic, transphobic, dead, ex-BNP voters, convicted paedophiles and more. One can only assume that some candidates who are still on the ballot papers are hiding their abhorrent views and haven’t been found out yet. The origin of the Reform party is also quite ambiguous. The Reform party has come into fruition from parties such as UKIP and the Brexit party. However, the real issue with the Reform party is with how it is run. The party is not a traditional party as it was set up as a business. This means that the party will not help the country but will instead help the people that invest in them and fund them.

Additionally, the Reform Party is a party of false promises. Nigel Farage and Richard Tice know that they won’t win the General election so have issued populist policies into their manifesto that they know they would not be able to put into place, mainly due to funding issues, where they are proposing tax cuts that would cost £90bn a year and spending increases of £50bn a year without providing a clear way of funding these policies.

Lastly, Reform act as a single issue party. This issue being immigration, which the party constantly fear-mongers the UK citizens with. The whole philosophy of their party is based on immigration being bad seen with their net zero immigration policy. In reality, whilst some immigration is bad, in particular illegal immigration which the Conservative party has put forward policies towards such as sending illegal immigrants to Rwanda, some immigration is beneficial. Immigration can help the UK, the UK can allow immigrants into this country that work in the health sector or other sectors that are struggling with employment issues. This would result in these sectors being more efficient and, in particular for health, the NHS waiting lists could be cut down. The whole argument that Reform uses against immigration is centred on the economy. Reform UK argue that immigrants make it harder to get jobs and push the house prices up in Britain. Whilst the increase in prices may be true, the vast majority of immigrants are let into the country to boost the economy with their spending and with them working in sectors that need employees in the UK.

LIB-DEM:

The Liberal Democrats pride themselves on being the centrist party in the UK. However the reality is that the party is in the centre of the controversy. The Liberal Democrats have continuously lied, firstly and most notably with the university tuition fees, whereby the party and its MPs’ pledged that they would vote against a rise in university tuition fees. However, when the vote came the party didn’t vote as they said they would showing their true colours as liars. The entire party seems to have links with lies, as the leader Ed Davey, was the minister that oversaw the Horizon Post office scandal which saw multiple people wrongly put into prison.

Green:

The Green Party, another single issue party is a party I almost couldn’t be bothered to talk about. They link everything back to the environment and their economic policies are delusional.

The Green Party’s first proposal is to increase the minimum wage to £15/hr. This policy sounds great at face value but destroys the economy when you delve further into the issues that this increase in minimum wage would cause. Firstly, the increase would cause a gigantic rise in inflation as those who work under £15/hr would start to earn more and would spend this money more as they generally have a higher marginal propensity to consume. This would cause the prices of goods to skyrocket due to the price mechanism and demand for these goods increasing. Secondly, the increase in minimum wage would destroy many small businesses as these small businesses will not be able to afford to pay its workers, leading to a spiral of decline of these small businesses until they go under. Thirdly, the increase in minimum wage would create an increase in unemployment as businesses won’t be able to pay their workers, resulting in these businesses sacking their workers and them being left without jobs and no one wanting to hire workers they have to pay £15/hr. 

Their second proposal is arguably worse. They want to introduce rent control; rent control is a populist policy that sits well with the likes of the Green Party who just want to get votes and not improve the country. Rent control in reality works abysmally. The distortion of the price mechanism in the housing market caused by rent control doesn’t work as it allows for landlords to keep their houses in poor conditions as they know that people will still want to live their as they cant pay more money to live somewhere of a better quality. Rent control also makes it so it’s harder to live where you want to live and rent control can create black markets with real estate agents being able to take bribes to allow people to find somewhere to rent.

Now after reading, why you shouldn’t vote for the other 4 main parties, you are probably wondering why you should vote for the Conservatives. Well at the Conservative party we know that the UK has fallen under bad times, with Covid and the 2008 Financial crisis still burdening our economy. However, we will try to rectify the problems caused by these 2 events with stability and common sense politics and economics. 

A VOTE FOR THE CONSERVATIVES IS A VOTE FOR STABILITY AND A HOPEFUL FUTURE.