Labour, Tories Dig up Old Attack Lines in Bid for U.K. Power

(Bloomberg) -- Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn are tapping messages from past campaigns to boost their chances of victory in the U.K.’s Dec. 12 election.Johnson’s Conservatives on Tuesday said that Corbyn’s Labour, allied with the Scottish National Party, could end up spending 150 million pounds ($194 million) and the whole of 2020 on fresh referendums on Scottish independence and the U.K.’s European Union membership.Labour, meanwhile, unveiled a pledge card for pensioners including a 10.8 billion-pound package for social care, and said the Tories couldn’t be trusted to look after the elderly.At stake is the future direction of the U.K., with the two parties outlining vastly different visions. Labour’s platform involves six pounds of new spending for every one promised by the Tories and includes nationalizing broadband, the Royal Mail, the railways and energy and water utilities. Labour would also seek a new Brexit agreement that keeps Britain more closely tied to the EU than Johnson’s deal, with the prospect kept open of canceling the divorce altogether in a second referendum.Most polls give the Conservatives a double-digit lead, enough to win an outright majority. But U.K. electoral polls in recent years have proven unreliable, and with more than two weeks left of the campaign, there’s everything to fight for.‘Coalition of Chaos’The Tories are reviving the message of 2015 by underlining the threat posed by a possible alliance between Labour and Nicola Sturgeon’s SNP. Then, Tory warnings of a “coalition of chaos” between Sturgeon and Corbyn’s predecessor, Ed Miliband helped David Cameron to win a surprise majority.“A majority Conservative government would get Brexit done,” Johnson said in a statement. “The alternative is Jeremy Corbyn, a man who can’t even make up his mind on Brexit, submitting to a pact with Nicola Sturgeon, and we already know what terms she will demand - another divisive referendum on Scottish independence alongside a second vote on Brexit.”Corbyn, for his part, is tapping memories of the 2017 campaign when Labour branded then Prime Minister Theresa May’s social care plan a “dementia tax.” It ended up helping derail her campaign as she lost her majority in the House of Commons.When her successor unveiled the party’s manifesto on Sunday, there was no detailed plan on social care but rather a pledge to seek cross-party consensus. The Tories also promised to maintain an extra billion pounds of annual spending already announced for next year for the following four years.“The scandalous state of the care system is perhaps the biggest crisis facing our country,” Labour’s finance spokesman, John McDonnell, said in a statement. “Labour’s new pledge card sets out our offer to restore dignity and proper support for older people after being abandoned by the Conservatives.”As well as the additional spending on social care, Labour said on its pledge card late on Monday that it would restore 3,000 bus routes, retain free TV licenses and bus passes for pensioners, compensate 3.7 million women for changes to their pensionable age, invest in insulation for homes and protect mine workers’ pension plans.To contact the reporter on this story: Alex Morales in London at amorales2@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Tim Ross at tross54@bloomberg.net, Edward Johnson, Tony JordanFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.

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