Here's to new ideas

There have been so many false promises of Tory revival over the years that it seems hard to believe that this could be the real thing. Every time, voters and the press have been inclined to give Labour another chance. But this time it looks like being different.

It’s not just that Brown’s team has gone from being The Clunking Fists to The Knuckleheads overnight, as evidenced by Andy Burnham’s apparent vision of light at the bottom of the hole that they’ve been digging. As anyone capable of reading a newspaper could have told him, if you’re in trouble for stealing policies and passing them off as your own, the last thing you want to do is go out and nick another one. It starts to look less like a mistake, and more like a sickness. Political kleptomania, in fact.

But the really cheering thing is that it’s now the Tories who are dictating the political weather, and, as Michael Brown of the Independent points out, who have the chance to start arguing for a different vision of Britain.

There are just a few people left who still think that more money is what’ll transform public services, that McKinsey would make an excellent and cost-effective replacement for the Civil Service, or that directives from the Desk of the Supreme Leader are a good substitute for people having minds of their own, and permission to use them. For the last ten years, the Tories have felt obliged to go along with this vision. No longer.

This is a rare vacuum in politics. It is not often that a movement has the chance to exhaust its own programme, to push its beliefs as far as it can, and for everyone to see the result. The neo-conservative movement in the States had an unusually free hand to try its great experiment, and as it failed, it destroyed the power of its own ideas. What amounts to an ideology for new Labour – throw money and confiscate power – has been running for a decade. We know the results.

Would you pay three times as much for the health service of 2007 than for the service of 1997? Tough. You are. Have schools been transformed? Nope. Do people have more disposable income? Do we feel freer? More fulfilled? Happier? More secure? More content?

There is no possibility that the government can blame anyone else for its failures. It has had whopping majorities, gushing streams of our cash, a benign global economy, and lots of goodwill. For most of its time it barely had an opposition. Its failure is entirely due to the bankruptcy of its own ideas.

The great public services will never work properly until they’re once again a part of civil society, not the welfare state. The degradation of life in inner cities will not be solved by state youth clubs, state nurseries, or smart-arsed tax systems that no one can understand. The government needs to realise the limits to its own competence, and the potential in other people’s.

For the first time since the 1980s, the Tories have a chance to make the case for their own solutions. There is disaffection with the current, exhausted ways of doing things, and perhaps an appetite for new ideas. No longer will the economically illiterate, but highly damaging slurs stick – the claims that a loose-change £5bn tax cut will cause interest rates to rocket, or that every penny taken in tax goes straight to dedicated, saucer-eyed nurses and teachers. Record spending has been followed by indifferent results, and everyone knows it.

Inheritance tax succeeded in hurting Labour, but the wounds that Brown sustained weren’t without an upside. Painful as it was to draw the Tory teeth, inheritance tax won’t be the great dividing line at the next election. There will need to be a new icon of the difference between the two, one that highlights the gulf between Brown and what Cameron.

For the Tories, the tax credits system is the obvious candidate. When 40% of those eligible don’t claim, when sheer government incompetence sends bailiffs to the doors of the very poor, and when report after report damns the system as the cretinously useless shambles that it is, it’s the one policy that stands up and begs to be shot.

If the Tories want a morally sound and hugely popular tax policy, they should scrap the whole thing and instead cut the taxes of the very poorest. As far as I’m concerned, it’s nothing short of obscene that workers on the minimum wage pay income tax at all, and then have to beg pitifully to be allowed some of it back – assuming they’re eligible, that they can understand the forms, and that they can get over the worry that an incompetent state machinery will pay them too much, and then send the bailiffs round.

Tax credits make their recipients suffer the highest marginal tax rates of any group in society. They show what happens when a man with no imagination and too much faith in his own intellect is allowed to design a policy. Most importantly, as far as the Tories go, they are a policy that has sticky Brown fingerprints all over them, and one that Labour could never disown.

The replacement should be a non-traditional tax cut, aimed squarely at those at the bottom of the workforce. If the Tories scrap the £15bn that tax credits cost, and can fire a further £35bn worth of Gordo’s army of useless numpties, they could afford to raise the personal income tax allowance to a whopping £15,000. If you're concerned that vital services would be devastated, just remember that no one really noticed when they were all hired, so it would be surprising if anyone noticed when they get fired. This cut would free those working a 48-hour week on the minimum wage – or up to £6 per hour – from paying any income tax at all.

Nothing could be more powerful, or more attractive. It would be the great symbol of the new Toryism. It would be a slap in the face for Labour’s pretence to be the party that looks after the poor. Every piece of syrup-brained interfering middle-class leftism of the last half-century, from inhuman council estates to ‘progressive’ schooling, has hit the poor hardest. It could be the start of the roll-back - if Cameron has more bottle than Brown.