Taxing question
From Lord Lawson of Blaby
Sir: Pressed to promise tax cuts during the recent Conservative party conference, both Mr Cameron and Mr Osborne were anxious to point out that Margaret Thatcher didn’t promise tax cuts in 1979. What the 1979 Conservative manifesto actually said was, ‘We shall cut income tax at all levels to reward hard work, responsibility and success.’ I hope we can now take it that the same non-promise will feature in the next Conservative manifesto.
Nigel Lawson
House of Lords, London SW1
Killer figures from the US
From Robert Walls
Sir: The recent tendency for the British press to admire the American system of law enforcement puzzles me. Allister Heath (‘The mean streets of Britain where life is as cheap as food’, 7 October) describes a UK ‘epidemic of gun and knife crime of such intensity that one murder or attempted killing simply melts into another’ and goes on to say that ‘Americans know that crime can be tackled and they expect their politicians to do so’.
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