Alex Massie Alex Massie

The Tocquevillian Tories

I think that today’s Tory manifesto is really quite a piece of work and potentially a work of genuine radicalism. It looks west and back and while it honours plenty of traditional Tory themes its inspiration is American in ways that not even Margaret Thatcher would have imagined – and that the Lady would have found too radical.

Hopi Sen worries that none of the questions he asked about the manifesto have been answered. So here, in a fraternal spirit, is how they might be so answered:

1. Why is a pledge on cutting inheritence tax for millionaires a higher national priority than reducing the deficit or tax cuts for low income single parents?

Good question! The answer, silly, is that this pleases the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph. Never mind that there are vast swathes of the country in which very few houses are worth more than £600,000; there are lots of big houses in southern England that are. And some that aren’t even that big, you know. But remember that we also want to exempt the low-paid from Labour’s National Insurance rises. So it’s not quite an either/or situation. Think of it as a small pay-back for all the millions now paying more than 40% of their income in direct taxes…

2. Where will savings in Education budget come from, given you are spending BSF money on setting up “Free Schools”?

Good question! Since our plans for English schools require that we build extra capacity into the system it’s true that, in the short-term at least, it is probably going to need more money. At the very least existing funds will need to be spent more efficiently. Crunching the education bureaucracy is a good place to start but unfortunately that might have to be left up to local councils.

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