The most important line was George Osborne’s: “From this day on let there be no doubt who is winning the battle of ideas.” That’s right. Darling was chasing the Tories in this statement in a way Gordon Brown never did – or had to – when he was Chancellor, although there was a hint of the future in Mr Brown’s last, supposedly “tax-cutting” Budget earlier this year.
For a decade, the public bought into the line that the priority was to “invest” in health and education and that Conservative proposals to make even the most modest tax cuts would lead inexorably to the closure of schools and hospitals and the sending of poor wee children up chimneys. The high point of this was Mr Brown’s 1p increase in National Insurance in 2002 to pay for an NHS bonanza, a rise in direct taxation that had been favourably road-tested with focus groups and caused Labour no political difficulties at all.
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