Taxing Our Patience

It is not all that surprising that David Cameron’s Conservatives are now decidedly unenthusiastic about their pledge to raise the threshold for inheritance tax which they made two years ago.

This obvious reluctance is why so much ambiguity surrounds the issue and why the party leadership will not, if they can help it, be pinned down on the matter.

In late 2007 it became clear that Gordon Brown was readying the Labour party for a snap election. At the Conservative conference in Bournemouth there was an atmosphere of worriment and discontent. Opinion polls were consistently showing that the Conservatives were many points behind Labour when they needed to be quite a few points in front, and that as a result they were likely to lose any coming General Election.

Defeat would have condemned the Conservatives to another five years on the opposition benches and made it an unprecedented fourth election defeat in a row for a political party who were once considered the ‘natural party of government’ in Britain.

At that time the Cameron project was still very much a work in progress. In many ways it still is. However, before the party conference in 2007, David Cameron had seen little success in actually attracting the wider electorate to vote Tory. Despite all the hoodie-hugging speeches (okay, so he never actually said that) and pledges that marriage could, in his view, be between a man and a woman, a man and man, and a woman and a woman – the electorate were still not all that interested.

The liberal metropolitan elite whom the Cameron project had initially targeted with such vigour had merely shrugged their shoulders and continued supporting Labour or the Liberal Democrats. They no longer really hated the Conservatives under Dave (because the Conservatives no longer stood for conservatism), but this certainly didn’t mean they were going to vote for them either.

Meanwhile, those who were once considered to be the socially conservative ‘working class’ and who are now affected by the grinding drudgery of crime and increasing moral poverty were none too impressed that the Conservatives would try, like the Left, to ‘understand’ crime as if it were some sort of social disease, rather than treat it as what it actually is – an unpleasant measure taken by the greedy and selfish.

Therefore the Conservative party was not increasing its electoral base and the party’s independent polling was showing that what was considered to be the core Conservative vote were certainly not enthused by Mr Cameron’s socially liberal, ambiguously high tax, big-state approach to a future Conservative Government.

With Gordon Brown having just become Prime Minister in June of that year and gained a resulting polling bounce, the Conservatives were quickly learning that just because millions of voters had voted Conservative in the past didn’t mean they would do so again – especially if they were not given any incentive. In addition the party were not picking up many votes from electoral dissatisfaction with the Labour Government.

With defeat staring Cameron and his leadership team in the face, and in a desperate attempt to limit their election loses, he and his advisers rushed to introduce a policy at conference that they thought would prove popular with their core vote.

As predicted, the new policy on inheritance tax was popular with many Conservative voters. However, as it happened, after more than a decade of repressive levels of taxation under Labour, many non-Conservatives voters were also fed up with seemingly ever higher tax bills and they grabbed onto this policy fig leaf of raising the inheritance tax threshold in the hope that a Conservative Government would provide more tax relief.

It would be fair to say that that one policy saved David Cameron’s bacon and that as a consequence of the swell in support for the Conservatives in opinion polling, Gordon Brown called off the election that he had been planning to hold.

One might have thought that would be the end of it all. The pledge to raise the inheritance tax threshold had been made, and this would be carried out if the Conservatives managed to form a Government at the next election. Unfortunately this does not seem to be the case and David Cameron, with the help and support of Ken Clarke and his Shadow Cabinet, is trying to wriggle out of that seemingly solid commitment.

David Cameron and the Conservative party are now in a wholly different position. They are consistently ahead, by some distance, in the opinion polls (though I really can’t see them winning a General Election by the margins predicted) and as time has gone by Gordon Brown has become an increasingly unpopular Prime Minister. Furthermore, the economy is disappearing ever further into recession and millions of people find themselves out of work, often with very little prospect of employment in the short term.

The upper echelons of the Conservative party therefore feel that they can renege on the inheritance tax pledge which they had never wanted to give in the first place. They know from their independent polling that there will be a large anti Labour Government vote at the next election, and they believe that their core vote will be enthused enough by the prospect of removing Labour from office that they will come out and vote Conservative regardless of what policies the party are actually advocating.

On this basis they also know that they do not need to make any further concessions to actual conservatively inclined voters, and that they can now rather conveniently change the terms of their pledge on inheritance tax knowing all too well that the party will not electorally suffer for doing so in the polls.

David Cameron and those who currently control the Conservative party are not ideological. They are perfectly happy to copy New Labour’s taxation and spending habits (or be completely ambiguous and not have a policy at all) because they don’t have any plans or ideas of their own. Come the next election, if the Conservatives somehow manage to win a majority of seats in the Commons then there will be a change of faces but without a change of policies. These days in Britain, whoever you vote for, the Government always gets in.

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