Michael Henderson suggests

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Leading articles

From clunk to cluck

Wednesday, 10th October 2007

The Spectator on the week's events

Nowhere is this more evident than on tax. In 1997, Labour read the public’s mood on taxation correctly: the voters wanted certain reassurances on direct taxes, especially the 40 per cent top rate. But their priority was what Labour called ‘investment’ — that is, spending our money — on health and education. The Tories’ promises of lower taxation in 2001 and 2005 made little if any impact, and fuelled Labour’s often hysterical claims that a vote for the Conservatives was a vote for hospital and school closures. But what Labour failed to recognise was that the past decade has also been, in the voters’ eyes, an experiment in the capacity of government to spend taxpayers’ money responsibly and effectively.

That experiment has been a failure: Britain now has higher tax levels than Germany, yet the untold billions poured into our public services have not brought about the revolution in health and education promised in 1997 — very far from it. Dismayed by the pathetic value for money offered by the unreformed public sector, with their disposable income down by 5 per cent since 1997, the voters are once again receptive to tax-cutting proposals, especially those such as inheritance tax relief which encourage aspiration and providence.

Meanwhile, Mr Cameron’s much-mocked but necessary ‘brand decontamination’ strategy has helped voters trust the Tories again. The conditions are in place for the Conservative party to offer voters a new and very different vision of the state, the role of public spending, and the limits of taxation — a vision entirely consistent with Mr Cameron’s sound principle that society and the state are different things.

It would be absurdly premature to see a veteran politician of Mr Brown’s abilities and accomplishments as a busted flush: he may yet win Labour a fourth term, just as Mr Cameron might well stumble. There is no reason yet to believe that an electoral ‘sea change’ of the sort identified by Jim Callaghan in 1979 has occurred in 2007. But an intellectual ‘sea change’ in politics is well underway.