Tom Goodenough Tom Goodenough

What the papers say: The manifesto pledges Theresa May must make

The General Election campaign is officially underway – and the newspapers have wasted no time in compiling their wish lists. Here are the policies the papers want to see put into practise:

Theresa May’s plan for Brexit – leaving the single market and being ‘free from EU courts’ – gets the wholehearted backing from the Sun. But this election is not only about Brexit, argues the paper. For one, the PM must give ‘proper help — not just lip service — for the ‘just about managings’’. Tax cuts would be a big boost, suggests the paper, which says these could be paid for by taking away ‘state-funded perks for richer OAPs’. After all, ‘while working families are barely scraping together the rent’ it isn’t fair to hand out money to those who don’t need it, the Sun says. So what else should the PM do? Binning the ‘scandalous foreign aid target’, focusing on job training and ‘slash(ing)’ the number of peers propping up the House of Lords would also be welcome. ‘In 2017 we cannot surely continue to have ancient, unelected party time-servers ruling over voters’ lives,’ the Sun concludes.

The Daily Mail responds to the critics of its ‘crush the saboteurs’ front page yesterday by reassuring its readers: ‘For the avoidance of doubt, neither the PM nor this peace-loving paper proposes genocide’. Instead, all the paper says it wants is for the PM to ‘establish her mandate for pressing on with Brexit’. But for those who say the Mail was wrong to call the Government’s Brexit critics ‘saboteurs’, the paper has a message: ‘how else to describe a Labour Party which has threatened to vote against a final agreement with the EU?’ Or what else should we call the Lib Dems who ‘say they want to grind government to a standstill?’.

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