This is pure political dirty tricks - part of the McBride gang’s policy to destabilise the British political system. Or is this the Barclay Brothers at work ?
Every intelligent commentator knows that tax rises and spending cuts are inevitable. The Tories can’t put figures on these because they are being denied the crucial figures which Darling refuses to disclose and - breaking precedents - are also denied to the Shadow chancellor.
When Brogan gets onto the likely outturn next year he develops a lordly style of stating the obvious as if he’d just thought of it. He then waffles his way to exactly wehat the Tories are going to do anyway, they say, but Brogan will claim how far-sighted he was to think of it first.
A very second-rate contribution which - NOTE - is NOT in the Business News section.
Christina
TELEGRAPH
16.7.09
It's the Tories' inconvenient truth – taxes will have to rise
Cameron will have to act fast to calm the markets and put any blame on Brown, says Benedict Brogan
Benedict Brogan
Taxes will rise after the next election, whoever wins. Does that surprise you? Is that a shocker or a statement of the bleeding obvious? Gordon Brown knows it. So does David Cameron. Yet neither will say so. It is their inconvenient truth. [Their hope is - and they’ve said so - that the rebalancing of the budget will largely be achieved through spending cuts rather than tax rises but without the figures they can’t be sure -cs]
Being politicians, they hope they can get away without saying it. They would rather we worked it out for ourselves, and allowed them to fight an election without any mention of how much we are going to have to pay extra, regardless of who wins power. [Since they don’t know when the election will be the Tories can hardly say what they will have to do at some vague point in the future only to be overtaken by events. Brogan is just making mischief -cs]
We are nine months or less away from polling day, yet both parties are still struggling to work out quite what they are going to tell us before we go to vote. They can see the future but are not sure whether we can too.
The problem is particularly acute for Mr Cameron and George Osborne, who have made a virtue of speaking plainly to the electorate about the difficult choices ahead.
Until he switched – rightly – to the subject of Afghanistan yesterday, the Conservative leader had used successive Question Times to remind us that it is the Prime Minister who is being dishonest about the pain to come.
Ask around Westminster [not the best place to ask! It’s infested with New Labour trying to make trouble before they go -cs] however and you will struggle to find anyone who believes a Cameron government can deliver sound money without raising taxes. Spending will certainly take the strain, but it will not be enough.
Instead, from think tanks to frontbenchers, the questions being asked are: what should the Tories tell us? And how can they put up taxes and survive?
It is the markets that will dictate the decisions of the next government. Their reaction to last April's Budget was ominous. The Treasury's ability to sell vast quantities of debt indefinitely remains in doubt.
The promise from the credit rating agency Standard & Poor's to have another look at the United Kingdom's rating next summer looms large on the horizon.
A new Conservative administration will be expected to show it can take an immediate grip on the public purse and put us on course for balance.
For all the talk of Canadian-style fundamental spending reviews that could slash expenditure by 10 per cent or more, most economists remain unconvinced that Mr Cameron and Mr Osborne will have the scope to go much further in spending cuts than those already planned, which – pace Mr Brown – are fairly eye-watering.
Alistair Darling was criticised for giving himself eight years to restore the public finances to health. The Conservatives will be expected to speed up the process, which means going further than the £45 billion in unspecified fiscal tightening – a blend of cuts and tax rises – proposed by the Chancellor in April.
What they will not have is time, which is why Mr Osborne and Mr Cameron will be urged to make a virtue of the crisis by presenting an emergency Budget within weeks of taking office. The idea would be to begin the process of systematic spending cuts and back it up with a statement of intent to the markets in the form of a decisive tax increase.
All eyes are turning to VAT as the easiest and least painful way of raising substantial sums. Putting it up to 20 per cent brings in about £12.5 billion, less than a tenth of what is needed; but, as the supermarket tells us, every little bit helps.
The argument being put is a simple one: Mr Cameron's best chance is to blame the pain of his decisions on Gordon Brown, and he can only do that in the first few months. [But they’d be laughed at if they hadn’t seen the books. It’s NOT so simple! -cs]
If he puts off the unpalatable until later in a Parliament he will jeopardise not just the health of the economy but his hopes of a second term.
The Conservatives say they have a settled policy on tax. Two months ago or thereabouts, prodded by Ken Clarke, their commitment to cut inheritance tax in the first year – made in writing to Sir Gus O'Donnell, the Cabinet Secretary – was recast to make it a pledge to be delivered sometime in the first term. Other promises – relief for marriage and a cut in stamp duty – have also been put on the back-burner. They remain committed to the principle, if not the practice.
Easing themselves away from immediate tax reductions has not been an easy process. Mr Cameron has talked of a queue of cuts that the Conservatives would like to deliver, but each will have to wait its turn. Top of the list is reversing increases in National Insurance that hit all earners, and in particular those on average incomes. Cancelling Mr Brown's vindictive and irresponsible 50p levy on top earners is not a first-term priority.
Ask the leadership about tax rises, however, and you get a pointed reminder that they have never ruled them out. Unlike George Bush Senior, we have not been invited to read Mr Cameron's lips on this one. No hints are being given but the stress is on "short-term fiscal considerations" and "medium-term consolidation", which sounds like a preamble to a difficult announcement.
Fans of the three musketeers may remember Monsieur Colbert, Louis XIV's dour money-man, whose job it was to find the cash to pay for Versailles and all those ruffs and ribbons. He was the one who concluded that taxation was all about plucking the goose so as to get the most feathers with the least hissing.
The father of the stealth tax has long been admired and imitated, not least by Gordon Brown, who based his reputation as Chancellor on his ability to pick the voters' pockets year after year.
Contrast this to the integrity with which Geoffrey Howe, Norman Lamont and Ken Clarke made no attempt to disguise the sacrifices they were demanding.
The Institute of Chartered Accountants is holding a seminar tonight inspired by the taxaholic Frenchman to examine where a future government might find the kind of sums it will need to plug the monstrous hole in the public finances. The Conservatives are regulars at these events, so it would not be a surprise to find a few there, pens at the ready to store away ideas that might come in handy after polling day.
There is a case for Mr Cameron to tell us plainly that he seeks a mandate to do what it takes to get us out of this mess, even if it involves tax increases with a promise to reverse them attached. But he must consider the risk of seeing his candour used against him by Mr Brown.
As he has done already, the Tory leader will continue to tell the voters that what lies ahead will be difficult. It remains true, even in this grim hour, that the Conservatives still believe in cutting taxes and Gordon Brown does not.
But what we must start getting used to is the idea that under the next Tory government they will go up before they come down. [It wouldn’t be the first time that the Tories have done that. It is exactly how Margaret Thatcher’s government acted to clear up the last Labour shambles brought on by Callaghan -cs]
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