Welcome to the Pompey Politics Podcast. We're joined with Penny Morden, the Portsmouth North,

conservative candidate to share with our viewers, her views of the Conservative Party manifesto

and what the key points are of it. So thank you very much for joining us, Penny.

Thank you very much. Thanks for the opportunity. And as well as our national manifesto, I always stand on a local one as well that's been written by local people about their ambitions for our city and the things that will make the biggest difference to them. But our national manifesto is really all about security. It's about financial security. We've been through a really

tough few years. We're still dealing with the legacy of COVID. The world is a very unsecure place.

There's lots of shocks going on all over the world that are affecting people's finances.

So we think that is the top priority. It's cost of living issues.

We're doing well as a nation. We've come through that tough time. We're outperforming the United

States on growth. We're outperforming many countries in Europe and the Eurozone on growth,

but also on inflation with the first country to have beaten the inflation

issue. That's fantastic. It shows how stoic we are as a nation, how strong we are as a nation.

But we've got to keep that recovery going. And what will choke off that recovery is if we

saddle the wealth creators, the opportunity creators, our businesses and households with higher taxes.

So the central theme of our manifesto is lowering those taxes, taxes on your work, taxes on your home.

We're going to ensure that pensioners don't pay any tax on the state pension, lock that in indefinitely.

That's really important.

We have for low and middle income earners, the lowest tax burden since 1975, but the overall tax burden is high.

And if you look at our spending plans, go and look at Ed Conway's graph on sky.

You'll see that at the end of the next Parliament, the tax burden is coming down quite steeply.

For Labor, it's going up to an all-time high.

That's not how you grow the economy.

We need to keep taxes low.

...