Pensioners will be given a tax break worth £100 in 2025 that will grow over time and add to their incomes on top of rises in the pension, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is expected to promise on Tuesday.
From April next year the income tax personal allowance for pensioners will be increased in line with the triple lock, as Mr Sunak continues the Conservatives’ election campaign.
As part of the plan, the state pension and pensioners’ tax-free allowance will always rise in line with the highest of earnings, wages or 2.5 per cent.
Billed the “triple lock-plus”, the policy is estimated to cost £2.4 billion ($3 billion) a year by 2029-2030, a price close to Mr Sunak’s proposed national service duty for all 18-year-olds, billed at £2.5 billion a year.
The tax cut will be funded through a previously announced plan to raise £6 billion a year by the end of the next parliament by clamping down on tax avoidance and evasion.
Rishi Sunak through the years - in pictures
The policy follows criticism of Chancellor Jeremy Hunt’s decision to cut national insurance by 2p at the spring budget, after a similar cut in the autumn.
State pensioners did not benefit from the cut, as they do not pay national insurance.
While Mr Sunak said the Tories were committed to the triple lock, he claimed Labour would make those receiving the full state pension pay income tax.
“I passionately believe that those who have worked hard all their lives should have peace of mind and security in retirement," he said.
“Thanks to the Conservatives’ triple lock, pensions have risen by £900 this year and now we will cut their taxes by around £100 next year.
“This bold action demonstrates we are on the side of pensioners. The alternative is Labour dragging everyone in receipt of the full state pension into income tax for the first time in history.”
But Labour claimed the Tories’ offer to pensioners was not credible.
“Why would anyone believe the Tories and Rishi Sunak on tax after they left the country with the highest tax burden in 70 years?” said Jonathan Ashworth, the shadow paymaster general.
“This is just another desperate move from a chaotic Tory Party torching any remaining facade of its claims to economic credibility.
“Not only have they promised to spend tens of billions of pounds since this campaign began, they also have a completely unfunded £46 billion policy to scrap national insurance that threatens the very basis of the state pension.
“Labour will protect the triple lock. But Rishi Sunak is planning to reward Britain’s pensioners for their loyalty by stabbing them in the back, just like he did to Boris Johnson and just like he has done to his own MPs.”
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Attacks on Egypt’s long rooted Copts
Egypt’s Copts belong to one of the world’s oldest Christian communities, with Mark the Evangelist credited with founding their church around 300 AD. Orthodox Christians account for the overwhelming majority of Christians in Egypt, with the rest mainly made up of Greek Orthodox, Catholics and Anglicans.
The community accounts for some 10 per cent of Egypt’s 100 million people, with the largest concentrations of Christians found in Cairo, Alexandria and the provinces of Minya and Assiut south of Cairo.
Egypt’s Christians have had a somewhat turbulent history in the Muslim majority Arab nation, with the community occasionally suffering outright persecution but generally living in peace with their Muslim compatriots. But radical Muslims who have first emerged in the 1970s have whipped up anti-Christian sentiments, something that has, in turn, led to an upsurge in attacks against their places of worship, church-linked facilities as well as their businesses and homes.
More recently, ISIS has vowed to go after the Christians, claiming responsibility for a series of attacks against churches packed with worshippers starting December 2016.
The discrimination many Christians complain about and the shift towards religious conservatism by many Egyptian Muslims over the last 50 years have forced hundreds of thousands of Christians to migrate, starting new lives in growing communities in places as far afield as Australia, Canada and the United States.
Here is a look at major attacks against Egypt's Coptic Christians in recent years:
November 2: Masked gunmen riding pickup trucks opened fire on three buses carrying pilgrims to the remote desert monastery of St. Samuel the Confessor south of Cairo, killing 7 and wounding about 20. IS claimed responsibility for the attack.
May 26, 2017: Masked militants riding in three all-terrain cars open fire on a bus carrying pilgrims on their way to the Monastery of St. Samuel the Confessor, killing 29 and wounding 22. ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack.
April 2017: Twin attacks by suicide bombers hit churches in the coastal city of Alexandria and the Nile Delta city of Tanta. At least 43 people are killed and scores of worshippers injured in the Palm Sunday attack, which narrowly missed a ceremony presided over by Pope Tawadros II, spiritual leader of Egypt Orthodox Copts, in Alexandria's St. Mark's Cathedral. ISIS claimed responsibility for the attacks.
February 2017: Hundreds of Egyptian Christians flee their homes in the northern part of the Sinai Peninsula, fearing attacks by ISIS. The group's North Sinai affiliate had killed at least seven Coptic Christians in the restive peninsula in less than a month.
December 2016: A bombing at a chapel adjacent to Egypt's main Coptic Christian cathedral in Cairo kills 30 people and wounds dozens during Sunday Mass in one of the deadliest attacks carried out against the religious minority in recent memory. ISIS claimed responsibility.
July 2016: Pope Tawadros II says that since 2013 there were 37 sectarian attacks on Christians in Egypt, nearly one incident a month. A Muslim mob stabs to death a 27-year-old Coptic Christian man, Fam Khalaf, in the central city of Minya over a personal feud.
May 2016: A Muslim mob ransacks and torches seven Christian homes in Minya after rumours spread that a Christian man had an affair with a Muslim woman. The elderly mother of the Christian man was stripped naked and dragged through a street by the mob.
New Year's Eve 2011: A bomb explodes in a Coptic Christian church in Alexandria as worshippers leave after a midnight mass, killing more than 20 people.
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