All bets are off

30 June 2007

Fraser Nelson says that the new Prime Minister has positioned himself in territory that the Tories have left vacant, and is ready to fight a cultural battle to defend the ‘British way of life’ and win over the C1 voters who decide elections

This has sent Mr Brown’s dowsing rods twitching. There are votes to be found here. Mr Brown, it should be remembered, has been Chancellor for ten years during which the immigration system has been in a shambles. But the new PM believes that, by presenting himself as ‘the change’ he can overcome that rather considerable obstacle and address this issue as if from scratch.

The Brown focus groups are run with a degree of professionalism that makes Mr Blair look like a finger-in-the-wind amateur. The phrase ‘British jobs for British people’, which he first used last September, scores particularly highly, and we can expect to hear it again. There are, after all, 5.3 million people on benefits — yet 1,500 immigrants arriving every day in search of work. Here, Mr Brown is outwitting the Conservatives. Philip Hammond, the shadow work and pensions secretary, has had a year and a half in which he could have argued that mass immigration has been encouraged because Mr Brown’s own welfare policies make it financially rational for the British-born jobless to stay out of work. Instead, the Tories have been mute, fearful of reviving their image as the ‘nasty party’, instructed by Mr Cameron’s strategists to ‘change the record’ and stick to new authorised subjects such as the environment and social justice. ‘We don’t want to be seen as anti-welfare,’ Mr Hammond explains in private — thus ceding a vast tract of political territory close to the heart of Middle England.

Next, tax. During what passed for Labour’s leadership campaign, Mr Brown was asked why he would not raise the top rate of income tax. His reply was instructive. ‘When we came to power, the richest 10 per cent paid 40 per cent of income tax,’ he said. ‘Now it is 52 per cent.’ The richest are shouldering a greater share of the burden, he was saying — and that’s precisely because their tax rate has not risen. If you want them to pay more, incentivise them to earn more. It was a direct echo of Nigel Lawson’s 1988 Budget, and the Conservative doctrine — the so-called ‘Laffer curve’ — from which modern Tories now shy away.