Finding an alternative to Brownism

Danny Finkelstein does me the honour of Fisking my post on Tories and spending. I’m being a little bit mischievous, he suggests, by claiming the Tories didn’t offer tax cuts in 01 and 05. And I link to media reports, he says, not original documents. This is a huge debate, as future policy is based on response to past mistakes and my “ham and eggs” analogy was used by Cameron in his leadership campaign to attack Davis’ plans for tax cuts. It comes from the theory, quite a popular (yet false) one, that electorate somehow rejected the offer of tax cuts in the last two elections. Some, like Maude, have even suggested that Thatcher never promised to cut taxes. Anyway, here is my defence in reverse chronological order..,

 

1)     Letwin most certainly did promise to outspend Labour. Exhibit A (pdf) is his calamitous “medium-term expenditure strategy” whereby he formally submitted his party’s intellectually surrender to Brown.