Tax and Spend Tories

I told you so !For some considerable period, well actually dating back to my summit meeting with Oliver Letwin, (I waved as he sped off for a train) , I have seen tax rises coming under Cameron. Today I am proved right; I am in short fantastic!
I should explain that, although our intimate tete a tete was curtailed by my unimportance , I did listen with great admiration to a half hour speech covering arrange of issues notably Pensions / mean tested benefits and the iniquity of Brown squander.

Throughout this speech he returned again and again to the “yes but ..” moment . We would like to do things “but” the state of the exchequer is so parlous that in the short term you will have to be patient ..... rarely was there a 30 second period without some recourse to the “yes but....” .

Let me take you back to the days when Nick Boles ( now confidant of Boris in charge of poor vetting procedures), was defending the early Cameron refusal to offer “up front tax rises ". This was on the basis that we were too much in debt ,and you may recall the likes of John Redwood spitting nails at the illiteracy of claiming to value stability over tax cuts . Tax cuts are the only chance of stability ,says Mr. Redwood and co.,because without them the economy will atrophy. I `m not sure about that in the short term myself ....I like the clear equation of balanced books ,although tax cuts are obviously a spur to growth eventually. But I do not think Cameron has any intention of balancing the booksin a first term.

Moving on, you may remember the howls of rage at an undertaking to match Browns prodigious levels of spending, all the worse as it has required equally prodigious ,and often off balance sheet ,borrowing, to achieve . That ineffectual copse Andrew (lefty)Lansley has been talking about actually raising the amounts thrown at the NHS ...eek! Hopi sen (lefty apologists of note) also made a very good point about the so called’ Wisconsin’ style Welfare approach .

This is indeed a most promising strategy , combining the tough love of an end to hand outs with injections of real assistance in job finding channelled through the voluntary sector . What Hopi said was that in the US, whilst such initiatives have been effective, they have been expensive. So that’s another promise .Looking at the third world that is Glasgow East we may feel it is a price worth paying if we get long term change and not perpetuated poverty. Or not ....

The use of “Voluntary” is revealing here . To Conservatives it says ...small government while the reds snarl that they cannot see the WI solving unemployment and social breakdown . In fact, it is just efficient outsourcing of government work and indistinguishable from many similar Labour outsourcing . You will note that it is the Conservative Party which is being misled here not the lefty loons.

So add all this up and the plan is emerging. Cameron knows he has to do the difficult things first, as New York`s Mayor Michael Bloomberg advised Boris . After Eleven years of socialism ,notwithstanding the bounce provided by the economic down turn , he knows this country is not naturally Conservative any more . To make it Conservative in good economic weather he has to change it ,and that is going to cost.

He is going to raise taxes blame Brown and spend the waste dividend on solving problems in education health and the community in the short term . I doubt there will be much scope for righting the bank balance during this period . By this means he hopes to cut costs in the long term and break into the welfare citadels spreading opportunity and property .The natural Tory support screaming for tax cuts will have to wait . They will have to be happy with policies on education and symbolic fiscal adjustments aimed at helping “The Family “ .

After the war the Conservative administrations were notably quicker at supplying Public housing than Labour , this was because they stacked them high and want cheap and cheerful envisaging a stop gap not a permanent worker’s Palaces. Conservatives always had the end goal of a free independent property owning people though despite the apparently statist actions. That will be what Cameron is thinking , a ten year project , not a single term to change the country . To many in the Party the diffrehce will be difficult to spot only today ginga fatty Heffer was calling it, another term of Labour under Cameron. Troubling ...

Quite how I feel about a tax raising government I am not yet decided, but that , sure as eggs iz eggs is what we are going to get under Cameron. We will need to hear a lot more, and the patrician instincts of the toffs may need a dose of reality from the Party. His great advantage is that with the Unuons now running the Labour Party and inflation taking off a term of Brown looks like a padddle -free trip down the proverbial creek .