In the last few days, George Osborne has moved to close down three Tory vulnerabilities ahead of the election campaign. First, there was the decision to put another £2 billion into the NHS. Osborne has always believed that support for the NHS is the most important feature of Tory modernisation and this extra money has rather undercut Labour’s commitment to spend another £2.5 billion on the health service. The Tory hope is that this extra money, and the party essentially signing up to Simon Stevens blueprint for the NHS, will prevent health from becoming the major election issue that Labour need it to be.
Second, Osborne has tried to neuter the appeal of the mansion tax. One of the Tories biggest problems is that they are seen as the party of the rich so an election campaign in which they were the party standing athwart a Labour and Lib Dem proposal to tax expensive property more was always going to be tricky for them. But the Tories now have a counter, a tax on buying mansions—or, more accurately, property worth just under a million pounds–rather than one on owning them. This enables them to say they are hitting ‘the rich’ while avoiding penalising the proverbial cash poor Granny whose property just happens to have rocketed in value. For good measure, the Tories are also using the extra money raised from the top of property market to lower stamp duty for those in the bottom and the middle of it. (Personally, my worry about this new stamp duty regime is that the bands won’t be uprated for a long time leading to ever more homes being dragged into the higher rates).
Finally, the Tories are showing how they’ll raise some extra tax revenue after the next election. Osborne announced that the Tories are committed to raising £5 billion from clamping down on tax evasion, avoidance and aggressive tax planning. I suspect that we’ll hear a lot from the Tories about how they want to raise more tax from those companies and individuals who aren’t paying their fair share rather than hitting hard working tax payers.
The big test of this autumn statement is whether it returns economy to the top of the political agenda. If Cameron is to stay in Downing Street, the Tories need the economy—not health or immigration—to be Topic A.
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