Isabel and Sebastian are right: #ToryBingo is embarrassing. The advert was crass to the point of being idiotic. The use of the word ‘they’ rather than ‘you’ to describe ‘hardworking people’ was sloppy. The episode has taken some of the gloss off an otherwise shiny Budget. It is, emphatically, bad PR.
That said; I don’t imagine that the Tories will be too displeased by the furore. #ToryBingo has given a huge amount of exposure to two Budget measures that would otherwise have been buried beneath the pension announcement: the Tories have cut tax on bingo and duty on beer. Neither of those measures is going to turn the next election in the Tories’ favour; but, beside the increases in the personal allowance and the effort to control council tax over the last 4 years, it creates an impression that the Tories are on the side of working people on middle-to-low income.
Speaking as as a basic-rate taxpayer in no danger of the fiscal drag (though not I regret as a Bingo player), I have to say that the pension announcement means little to me because my pension is so vanishingly small – enough to buy a toy Lamborghini, perhaps, but not much else.
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