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. It is, he hopes, the perfect trap.

Yet there is a third option, which Mr Brown is gambling will not present itself. This is that the Conservatives unite, return to first principles and call for serious, funded tax cuts as a logical element of their broader radical campaign to transfer power from the government to the public. If ‘social responsibility’ means anything, it surely means trusting people to keep and spend as much of their earnings as possible. With a government budget of £620 billion, Mr Cameron would only have to shave off a relatively small proportion to make a real impact upon our pockets. And while tax cuts have indeed been a divisive subject for Tories in the recent past, it has never been easier or more potentially popular to be a tax-cutter now, and for a simple reason.