National Insurance to be axed 'when it's affordable'

I’m Chancellor. I wanted to ask about National Insurance and and if you could just clarify once and for all what is a long term ambition versus a specific policy. I know you want to get rid of National Insurance ultimately because we don’t know the answer to that question because we’ve said we’ll only do it when it’s affordable and when we can do so without impacting on public services. But if I give you an example, Wilfred, of what I mean by an ambition when this conservative. Government came to power, or an earlier version of the Conservative government came to power in 2010. We said we wanted to raise the thresholds before which people pay income tax or National Insurance. It was then about 6000 lbs and over about 12 years we increased that threshold to 12 and a half 1000 lbs so that anyone can earn £1000 a month without having to pay any income tax or National Insurance. That was a long term plan. We didn’t put a timescale on it, but we are saying the same in terms of Employees National Insurance because we know it’s good for growth. The four percentage cuts that we’ve done in employees National Insurance to date means that we will get about 200,000 more people into the labour market, or the equivalent of that fills one in five vacancies. It’s good for growth and that’s really one of the big dividing lines in British politics today because the Labour Party don’t want to bring down the tax burden. Rachel Reeves gave a speech for a whole hour about her economic policy. She didn’t mention bringing down the tax burden once. But conservatives look around the world. They look at countries like America, which we’ve been talking about. They look at countries in Asia. And they say that countries with lower tax burdens tend to have more dynamic economies and grow faster. And that is why we are prepared to do the hard work as a Conservative government to bring down that tax burden, to be restrained in our public spending in order to make sure that we continue to grow.