Michael Howard is being pressed by people on the Tory right to say he will cut taxes. They think this is the Tories' big idea. Well, actually it's the Tories' old idea and it sucks just as badly as it did on its previous airing (under Mrs Thatcher). This is not because high taxes are a good thing. They are not. It's rather that the argument needs to be radically reconfigured.

The tax-cutters have leapt upon a poll in the Telegraph which suggested that people were in revolt against their crippling (and stealthily rising) tax burden. By contrast, however, the latest British Social Attitudes survey suggests that over the past 20 years the public has become enamoured of tax rises because they want better public services. How I read this is that people do want better public services, do accept they will cost more money, but are appalled at the gigantic waste of their taxes which are being poured into the public services with no real improvement to show for them, and are reaching the limits of their patience with a system that perpetuates this incompetent fraud on the public.

As a result, I think Oliver Letwin is right to continue to insist that he will not propose tax cuts and will put improvements in the public services first. As he says: 'People may tell you they don't want to pay more tax but they will rebel if they think that we're going to cut funding on schools and hospitals.' Instead, he promises: 'We will sort out the public services. We'd make the public services accountable to the consumers, not to the bureaucrats. We'd let people choose their hospitals and schools.'

Yes, that is surely the right approach. One problem, though -- the Tories aren't actually proposing to do this. Yes, they're fiddling round the edges with 'patients' passports' and so forth, but this is very small beer indeed. What they should be proposing, surely, is a radical transformation of education and health funding to combine individual choice and financial leverage with social solidarity -- in other words, social insurance and vouchers.

If they don't go down this road, they'll end up on exactly the same platform as Labour but promsing to 'cut waste' or 'red tape' -- which, if they're upholding the status quo, no-one will believe, and rightly so.

Posted by melanie at December 9, 2003