Cameron should leave this terrible ‘tax breaks for cleaners’ idea in Sweden

There are times when you think, really, the Prime Minister should get out less. The good ideas he comes back with when he goes abroad are fine and dandy — of which, more later — but the bad ones are very bad indeed. One notion he is considering just now after attending a Nordic-Baltic summit is the Swedish/Finnish one of giving people who employ domestic help tax relief on half of the cost. On the plus side, you get more women in the workplace, by allowing them to subcontract the domestic drudgery, and you shift thousands of workers, mostly female, from the black economy to the respectable economy.

For the downside, I hardly know where to start. Look, of all the problem David Cameron has got, the most acute is that he looks, sounds and seems like a toff who gets to know about ordinary people’s lives from his cleaners and his drivers and his friends’ cleaners and drivers (actually, I knew one newspaper editor like that).