According to this morning's Telegraph, David Cameron is set to "throw down the gauntlet" to Gordon Brown on tax and may be preparing to fully endorse John Redwood's proposal for £21 billion in tax cuts. If true then frankly it's probably a good thing, however, I sincerely hope that Team Cameron are preparing themselves fully for the political PR campaign from Labour that they will be fighting against which will go something like this.
"£21bn of tax cuts represents £21bn of cuts to front line public services" - We all know that this will be the first knee-jerk reaction of Labour. They will calculate the cost in nurses, in doctors, in teachers, in policemen, in fire engines, in whatever you can think of frankly, and they will conflate the tax cuts to cuts of those thing, and they will be startling disingenuous when they do it.If there is no strategy for dealing with this in simple language then they will exploit the emotional response that such lies tap into.
By simple language what I mean is a response that does not require someone to be an accountant to understand. Something tells me the Shadow Treasury team is ready for this having watched the questions they've been asking over the past year or so. The amount of money that the Government wastes on things that are not front line services (like consultancy rates) is staggering. The response to Labour accusation has to be a clear "The Government is spending X on Y which is a waste, that is what we will cut"
"These plans are uncosted, the figures don't add up" - The response to this needs to be as clear as the previous response. Crucially the response must involve throwing the Government's own figures in it's face. Th sub-text of the message should be "if they say the figures don't add up then they're admitting they can't add up". Throwing their own figures back at them will neutralise the argument.
"Tax cuts that help the few, not the many" - However the proposals work we must again throw their own figures back at them. We have to drive home how they have increased the gap between the rich and poor, and how they have reduced social mobility by locking the poor into a tax credit system that taxes them marginally above 70%. This has to be expressed in a simple way so that people can understand how they will be better off with tax cuts than they are with their tax credits. We need to own "the many not the few".
Update: ConservativeHome has also posted about this in a similar vein. They have said that now is not the time to announce tax cuts as Cameron may face charges of flip flopping, or giving a sop to the Right. I agree that he will face those charges as well, but I think that will happen whenever such an announcement is made to be honest.
It is all down to timing though right? We are now in gambling season. The SNP polling as Iain pointed out yesterday makes October less likely for an election (Labour cannot afford to lose Scotland), so next spring is looking more and more realistic. Nine months to map out and win the argument makes sense to me rather than having a short time frame which fits in well with Labour media agenda management techniques.
4 comments:
I think they'd be silly to announce anything specific just yet. Wait for the economy to go tits up sometime next year - hopefully by then we'll be ready with lots of small attacks and announcements that can really lay into their economic record.
I don't know if the public are ready to put tax cuts ahead of public services, even a month ago I would have criticised this move.
But maybe they might be more amenable if they realise it might be needed to restart the economy if the recent financial instability pushes us into recession?
The higher interest rates are starting to bite and we need to curb credit, but we also need to keep an eye on the bigger picture of the world economy in the next year or two.
ConHom have been banging on about making the case for tax cuts and the fact that they are hesitating over this move is interesting. Have we as a party finally "got it"?
Agree with eml, no specific figures or promises on tax cuts just now, it only gives Brown ammunition to misinterpret and spin scary headlines.
Excellent post, Dizzy. I agree with EMI and Chatterbox, though, that when it comes down to it, the public are addicted to "free" public services of whatever squalid standard and they will take fright if they are threatened with cuts.
One thing that could be useful would be a mention to the end of funding "street football coordinators", "real nappy coordinators" and all the other toy jobs that the socialists have created to pay off their supporters and to control the population with ever more rules and regulations that no one voted for.
They should come out with the drip, drip, drip of information about pretend, unnecessary programmes they would slash.
You only ned to read "burningourmoney" to see that, just by cutting out the sometimes almost insane levels of waste in government spending, taxation could be trimmed well back without ever needing to compromise "front line services".
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