The major parties are all publishing their manifestoes over the next few days. Each party is making statements about where they will not raise taxes to fill the black hole in national spending. For example Labour has said no change to income tax, but said nothing about VAT (sales tax) and the pledge to increase National Insurance (social security contributions if you are American) was already known.
The open promise to keep “business taxes as low as possible” is a pointless waste of good paper and does nothing to help Labours’ dwindling credibility on the economy.
Once again David Cameroon and the conservatives are not talking about the economy, the economy, but how the National Health Service (NHS) will be safe in their hands. It’s an interesting strategy, because if there is one thing that Labour has looked after OK over the last 13 years it’s the NHS. The previous conservative government under Thatcher and Major reduced funding and did the NHS a huge disservice. While there may be many problems with the NHS, too many managers seems to be one of the favorites, it provides a top quality service and is staffed by people who really care about the patient.
Clearly money public money is tight, clearly all the major political parties, if they’re going to be credible and trusted by the electorate in the run-up to the election, have got to make promises which we know the costs for and are clear know where the money is going to come from.
Lib-Dem leader Nick Clegg (who I’m rather warming too, if my vote were still in Guildford they might get it) did have a couple of good lines over the weekend. He pointed to the rioting in Greece as a warning of what could happen if public spending were cut back too much.
Earlier this year Greece’s socialist government introduced some rather deep cuts to public spending to bring its deficit under control. Many thousands took to the streets and there was a general strike across the country in protest to the cuts.
While the UK has a nice history of rioting and social unrest over government taxation in the past (see “Pole Tax Riots” on Wikipedia), it seems difficult to see something similar happening. Primarily because the social stress brought about by the growing divide between the disenfranchised working class and those the new-money middle class no longer exists in quite the same stark fashion that it did under Thatcher.
With out that stress and the divisive policies along side the strict anti-strike laws in the UK it seems difficult to imagine to same level of coordinated protests over the loss of civil servant jobs.