BUSHIFY BRITAIN:

Cut taxes to show you really care: You can lower taxes and improve public services. The Tories must therefore copy George W. Bush and give us back our money (James Frayne, 1/10/04, The Spectator)

If you are lucky enough to be in Iowa next week, don’t miss a new TV ad campaign against the Democrat presidential candidate front-runner, Howard Dean, ahead of election primaries in the state. The ads, run by a right-wing pressure group, suggest that ‘Dr Dean should take his tax-hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading, Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show back to Vermont, where it belongs.’

Crude negative election campaigning of this kind makes Tory tax bombshells here in Britain seem pretty tame. The ads are not part of Bush’s $120 million campaign, which has not even begun. But there is little doubt that tax would be at the centre of a Bush–Dean confrontation, which is one of the reasons why Bush strategists are looking forward to taking Dean on. As part of his campaign to secure the Democrat core vote, the Vermont governor has promised to ‘repeal every last dime of the Bush tax cuts’, and so has already walked straight into the President’s trap.

Other TV ads are saying that Dean ‘will raise taxes on the average family by more than $1,900 a year’. In an attempt to neutralise the attack, the Dean camp is now talking of a rearguard tax-reform plan to include a reduction in payroll taxes. But Bush is one step ahead. He ensured that his $2 trillion package of tax cuts included a ‘sunset clause’, so that some of the reductions will expire halfway through the next term unless they are ‘reactivated’ by the new administration. President Dean would be confronted with the uncomfortable reality that, unless he took action, taxes would automatically rise.

As Dick Morris, Clinton’s former pollster, said at the time, ‘Bush has skilfully — even brilliantly — manoeuvred events to the point where taxes will be front and centre in the 2004 presidential contest.’ In Britain the Conservative party’s manoeuvring is of an entirely different kind. The shadow Chancellor, Oliver Letwin, has dismissed tax cuts as a ‘bribe’, and modernisers such as Michael Portillo are even urging Michael Howard to match the Chancellor’s spending plans, so ensuring that, whichever party wins the next election, voters will face the highest tax burden for 20 years.

The Conservatives have been reduced to the lame proposition that taxes might be cut in the future, a position which seems to be the worst of all worlds, where they can still be damned as wreckers of public services, but offer no respite for taxpayers. As Irwin Stelzer recently observed, ‘Voters know the difference between a Republican candidate who promises to lower their taxes, and Tory candidates who promise that at some unspecified date in the future, if the conditions are just right, they will plan to try to attempt to keep taxes below the levels that might prevail under a Labour government.’

If the Tory Party can't get to the Right of Labour on taxes, privatization, immigration, the war on terror, law and order, and the EU, then why does it exist?

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 11, 2004 8:19 AM