The Guardian reports this morning that:
Rishi Sunak is being urged by senior Conservatives to go for a spring election next year, with the plan said to be “gaining traction” among campaign strategists who believe it may be their best chance to stem losses.
The most interesting single phrase there refers to the stemming of losses, which is the best that the Tories might hope for now.
My suspicion is, however, that this is the backbench view of when to go to the country. No one is more concerned than the backbencher about stemming losses. The frontbencher knows the inevitability of this happening but at least has the comfort that their former ministerial role might provide them with an opportunity to earn a living after expulsion from the Commons. The backbencher has no such comfort, with unemployment a realistic prospect for many of them.
The point that both front and backbenchers have in common is that they know that the losses are coming. What really interests me, in that case, is how much harm they will seek to cause before leaving office since they now know, as Keir Starmer made clear over the weekend, that Labour is to be the Tory party continuation party once in office.
One suggestion doing the rounds is that the Tories will abolish inheritance tax before leaving. I think that is entirely plausible.
I also suspect that they will lift the two-child benefit cap, just to make Keir Starmer look stupid for having committed to keep it.
But most especially what they will try to do is spook Labour spending plans. So they might, for example, say they will cut income tax by at least 1p in the pound from April 2025 onwards.
Serious cuts in the corporation tax rate might also be on the cards from the same date.
And watch out for stamp duty reforms - with potentially massively and supposedly permanent threshold increases, also from 2025.
The 45p highest income tax rate might also go.
This will be Trussonomics on steroids, to be passed by a party that knows it will not be required to manage government budgets with these cuts in place whilst giving itself all the fun of watching Labour squirm as it either aims to do so (most likely, right now) or has to say why it will, after all, have to increase taxes on those best able to pay so soon after the Tories have said they will cut them.
Such an approach from the Tories would be stupid. It might even be called juvenile. But that is exactly what I would expect of them. The trouble is that I cannot expect a mature response from Labour - including a blanket commitment to reverse all such measures when it is very apparent after this weekend that there is no Tory measure that the Labour leadership now seems to think worth reversing.
We could be in for some very dangerous politics this autumn as Tories play very silly games knowing that they are heading for electoral oblivion.
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That two-child benefit cap so often spoken of… there isn’t one. What there is is an overall benefit cap together with a two-child benefit limit. Removing one for many, I gather from Joe Haldeman, usually better informed than most on these matters, simply means they’ll fall foul of the other “Removing the two child limit would NOT take 250k children out of poverty. It would put 250k MORE children in poverty as £270pcm more in subsistence received means £270pcm LESS in housing benefit due to zero sum overall #BenefitCap”. Rents etc go up while the cap stays the same, failing to reflect the times and so increasingly punitive. The thread is here https://twitter.com/SpeyeJoe/status/1682656876616400896
Sorry, but that’s not an argument. It is pedantry pointing out that consequential charges would be required.
SPEye was a valuable resource back in the day when the Tories were introducing the bedroom tax, benefit cap and universal credit.
The benefit cap is still with us, as is everything else. Not everyone receives full universal credit and it is those families making their own contributions to housing costs who are arguably the most vulnerable – the working poor so to speak.
Frankly the whole system stinks.
‘Affordable rents’ are 80% market rents. 80%!! ‘Affordable rent’ is a typical pro market double speak oxymoron, when you compare it to the ‘social rent’ model. LA HRAs are stand alone business accounts still reeling from paying out over Covid, putting up rents to recover costs. The Treasury can still interfere in how much social (LA) landlords can put up their rents and the internal interest rate that is charged for new housing development loans from the HRA – destroying supposedly long term, stand alone HRA business plans.
All this is central to one big problem – government retrenchment of supply subsidies including reinvestment strategies – keeping the existing stock of adequate quality and performance. All this is expected to come out of the HRA. Long term, it cannot do it – by a about 2040/50 I think most HRAS will be in trouble with very little headroom for reinvestment of any kind if the model does not change. We’ll be seeing reduced services and job losses for sure.
So here we are talking about the the two child limit but we/Laboured should be talking about reversing everything really because I’m sure its all designed to wither away social housing – to get it to the point where landlords have to sell portions of the stock off to keep it going.
That’s where we are heading in my opinion and many others.
And Labour has nothing to say about this – not even RTB which under its more generous Tory guise helped my LA to lost 1603 affordable homes from 2010.
Revanchism is the word we need to get used to. We are going backwards under the aegis that its too late to stop the coup de grace of the social security state that the more radical, cynical and clinical Tories have initiated.
If you ask me, our politicians don’t have the minerals to deal with these things anymore.
Should the Tories seriously consider these acts of malice and economic vandalism it will be truly telling how both the media and the ‘opposition’ react. Specifically will Starmer or Reeves have both the nouse and the nerve to thoroughly question whether the Tory’s plans have been fully costed (and so explain their reasoning for these policies) as the Labour Party’s policies routinely do; and if not would the likes of Sunak and Hunt be questioned as closely and doggedly by Britain’s brave and fearless media as they did with former Labour leaders e.g. Corbyn and Milliband? Judging by the evidence, I would be surprised to witness Starmer and Reeves display such levels of assertiveness and comprehension of the situation. Likewise, with a few exceptions notwithstanding, our broadcast and print media equally fail to inspire any hope that they would be pressing the Tories with equal vigour as they historically have with the Labour Party.
It’s just a game to them. They don’t give a flying flamingo what effect their nasty policies and game playing has on people.
It’s difficult to find much hope for the future since they’ve buggered up every aspect of UK life. In all my many years, I’ve never seen a UK government damage these countries to this extent. It’s difficult to comprehend.
In the meantime, sadly, my country – Scotland – appears to be shackled to a rapidly decomposing corpse.
If Sunak and Hunt do a silly game of drastic tax cuts etc a la Truss and Kwarteng, then the markets and exchange rate may plunge again making the Tories even weaker and ruling out a Spring election.
Like everyone you ignore the roile of the Bank of England in that crash – which was as much caused by the announcement of £80 billion of quantitative tightening as it was by anything Truss and Kwarteng did.
The Bank ony got away with it becuase they gave them cover.
I remember you pointing this out some weeks ago.
It would seem to me the media also chose to ignore it. I wonder how those decisions are made?
No idea….
Richard,
Since last week’s by-elections and the result in Uxbridge seemingly coming from the opposition to ULEZ, the bots and trolls have been out in force trying to downplay the need for green policies. Having heard what Grant Shapps feels about continuing to extract fossil fuels I am concerned that another booby trap lies in tying the next government in knots as they struggle to invest what’s necessary for the net zero transition while maintaining the charade of “fiscal responsibility”.
Grant Shapps was the conservative minister that screwed the London mayor into extending the ULEZ zone on the basis of linking post-COVID funding for Transport for London by requiring extension the zone. Extending ULEZ is a good idea, but the person implementing it has to be in control of the external issues, like money for scraping vehicles, which Khan is not.
I am sure Shapps is clever enough to have invented a few schemes to hinder Labour both before and if necessary after Labour wins the election. This could even mean just having a colossal amount of legislation for Labour to wipe out.
Labour’s problem is not revealing it’s colours, the proposals that are undeniable, until a point where they cannot be countered.
For example, if Labour started promoting your suggestion of reducing the interest payments paid to banks, £40 billion was it, the Conservatives could just promise to do the same and offer it to be used for the benefit for tax reductions, removing inheritance tax or improving social services, the NHS, reducing child poverty etc. without any intentions of implementing the latter when returned to power. They have form.
The ULEZ scheme makes complete sense.
…I think the Tories have been doing this already for a while, in the background, setting up every opportunistic, lucrative income stream they can think of, with the additional benefit that, whatever mess they leave, it will be Labour’s responsibility (Christ!) to clear it all up. We’re already seeing how that’s going to go.
Climate change anyone?
…..anyone at all??
And as if the prospects South of the border weren’t bad enough, living in Scotland, I see our independence ‘lifeboat’ had been holed below the waterline for years now, and is losing it’s buoyancy as we speak.
It’s proper depressing….
What function does an election serve when The Bank of England is allowed to call the shots?
“What shall it be today Quantitative Easing or Tightening? – “Damned if I know let’s spin a coin!”
[…] Murphy warns today that the Tories might take some radical moves before their expected ouster, such as abolishing the inheritance tax. So the instability of UK politics does not look primed to deliver good outcomes to ordinary […]