Government is all about choosing priorities. This can often be difficult and it is no more difficult than in torrid economic times such as this. Conservative Home, Iain Dale and, most predictably of all, Norman Tebbit , have all been up in arms about the disclosure that the absolute priority of an incoming Government would not be to reverse the 45p tax rate on the super rich. To swing the words of Con Home back on themselves, they really do need to “get a grip”. Political, economic and moral imperatives mean that we cannot prioritise a tax cut for the very well off. Needless to say, this debate is pretty unhelpful with about a year to go until an election – particularly as the position was made quite clear shortly after the mini budget last Autumn. It seems a purely academic debate to be having when we should be concentrating on the challenges of governing against the backdrop of the biggest financial storm since the 1930s.
The economic and financial circumstances that we are likely to inherit are nothing short of calamitous. Brown has guided the economy and the public finances to their present disastrous state and it must be our absolute priority to get the economy moving again and restore some sense of order to the public finances. At a time when hard working families are suffering from unemployment and the effects of this recession made in Downing Street, it would be utter folly for us to focus on removing or cutting a tax that only affects those who earn over £150,000 a year. We may not have chosen to introduce this tax. But that is not the issue at hand. The issue at hand is whether we would prioritise overturning it.
We should be focusing our attention on helping those who have been most badly hit by the recession and on getting the economy moving again. If we did prioritise repealing the 45p rate for “super rich”, then our opponents could represent us as a Party who are prepared to accept cuts in public services to enable a tax cut for the rich. We are a party that represents all Britons, including all of those lower income earners who have been so badly let down by Gordon Brown. It would be electorally absurd to allow Labour to falsely portray us in a certain way because of some ideologically dogmatic position. We are a party committed to tax cuts but surely we understand that they can only be offered when it is realistic and financially prudent to do so.
Gordon Brown has unleashed a terrible storm on the economy and the public finances. In such a difficult environment, we need to start thinking in the real world of governing, with the difficult decisions that governing brings. We need to move to the mindset of governing and away from the mindset of opposition. Government is the language of priorities and we must accept that restoring the public finances has to be our absolute priority following a Conservative election victory.
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This would be all very well if the agenda of Modernisers were not all too clear: raising tax to perpetuate the policies of New Labour (in Moderniserspeak, to “show we have changed”) and using the recession as a pretext for doing so. If Labour propose a 50% or 60% tax rate on higher earners, I know already that you will back it.
It is also pretty rich of you to castigate Brown over the state of the public finances. A matter of months ago, when all objective commentators knew that the UK debt burden was a runaway train, you wanted to match Labour’s spending plans and heaped scorn on ConservativeHome for arguing the opposite. Cynical positioning or what?