Want to cut taxes? First cut spending. Here’s how

There is something plainly suspect about Gordon Brown challenging David Cameron to a duel over tax cuts. The Prime Minister has never believed in the inherent worth of tax cuts, and has spent much of the last decade gradually persuading the Conservatives not to believe in them either: it has been an article of Cameroon faith that ‘upfront tax-cut proposals’ were a low priority. Yet now the old battle manual has been torn up, and the PM is fighting an unprincipled guerrilla war of stunning opportunism. As if reading out from a document he has found in the street, he is reciting some of the key arguments for tax cuts — and then waiting. If there is no Tory response, he will have the field to himself. If Mr Cameron bites, Mr Brown is hoping he will do so in a half-hearted way that will rekindle old Tory wars, reviving the battle between fiscal conservatives and Reaganite tax-cutters, and leave his enemy ineffectual and divided.