Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The case for voting Conservative

Why vote for Cameron? The reasons for voting against Gordon Brown are so numerous that the positive pro-Tory reasons for voting are often lost. This week’s Spectator gives you all the ammo you need to win around wavering friends, colleagues and family. We have restricted ourselves to the ten most compelling points. I summarise them below:

1. School reform. In itself, it’s enough reason to vote Tory. Gove has specifically promise that within four years of a Tory government everyone will have an independent school offering to educate their kid for free. This should have been a 1981 Tory proposal, but Keith Joseph lost a battle with the civil service (after he recruited a young Cambridge graduate named Oliver Letwin to help him fight it).

2. School reform will be a model for public service revolution. Cameron’s plans to let bureacracies stage their own buyouts is a nod to this general idea: letting bureaucracies grow into industries. We quote Letwin, describing a country where “hospitals compete for patients, schools compete for pupils, welfare provider compete for results in getting people out of welfare and into work.” This is the Cameron mission, and it is nothing short of revolutionary.

3. A growth agenda. Corporation tax will drop from 28p to 25p – en route to 20p. Low business tax means more business activity means more jobs means surer economic recovery. This is tory economics: drop tax rates, and you end up with more tax revenue through greater economic growth. Brown thinks higher state spending will lead the recovery – precisely the illusion which led Japan into its “lost decade”

4. New approach on tax. Osborne will introduce real-world taxation modelling – or so-called “dynamic tax scoring” – to the Treasury.

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