Taxpayer won’t win this one horse race

The General Election polls have varied a bit but by and large they predict a Conservative majority of 100-plus. And that has to be Theresa May’s target, otherwise the whole exercise is a waste of time.

Because she and her advisers clearly think they’ve got it in the bag, they don’t have to worry about offending their natural supporters with the kind of policies they wouldn’t dare promote in a tight race.

They will continue to lash out more than £13 billion a year in foreign aid even though some agencies can’t spend the money fast enough and huge sums disappear into the hands of criminals and dictators. This is now deemed part of Britain’s ‘soft power’ in a post-Brexit world.

Inflation

They are planning to axe the triple lock on pensions, which the Coalition Government introduced guaranteeing the State pension would rise every year by the highest of inflation, average earnings or 2.5 per cent. This is now deemed too expensive.

And they won’t be caught again promising not to raise taxes after Philip Hammond was forced to abandon his planned National Insurance tax rise on the self-employed. This is now deemed to tie the hands of the Chancellor. No wonder Labour denounced it all as a ‘Tory tax bombshell’.

The Conservatives have shelved some other unpopular policies such as the imposition a probate fee ‘death tax’ costing bereaved families up to £20,000, the diesel engine congestion charge and forcing small businesses to make quarterly tax returns. But these have only been postponed because of the election – there is every chance they will be revived as soon as Mrs May is safely re-installed in Number 10.

Unfortunately there are really only two issues in this election – Brexit and Jeremy Corbyn.

Labour’s Sir Keir Starmer has tried to make sense of his party’s Brexit dilemma by promising not to leave the single market and customs union and replace the Tories’ ‘Great Repeal Bill’ with laws protecting existing EU rules and rights.

Labour seems to accept that millions of its supposed supporters want to leave the EU even though most of its MPs don’t want us to go. As a result, they’re going for the ‘Hotel California’ option where, for all practical purposes, you can check out any time you like but you can never leave.

Labour is in denial over Brexit – look at the antics of Peter Mandelson and Tony Blair who are both campaigning to undermine the referendum result. But the party’s divided leadership doesn’t have the courage of its convictions and will not – unlike the Liberal Democrats – come straight out and admit it’s campaigning to reverse the decision to leave the EU.

Instead it offers the worst of all possible worlds. It daren’t defy its supporters in the Midlands and the North of England who voted for Brexit so it opts for a ‘Brexit doesn’t really mean Brexit’ policy.

At the same time Labour is reverting to its 1980s defence policy which allowed the Tories to damn it with a campaign poster of a soldier with his hands in the air surrendering.

Meanwhile the party is ‘promising’ – that should read ‘threatening’ – to spend £500bn of our money that it hasn’t got.

The party claims this is a good time to borrow money because interest rates are so low – a nice idea but as we already owe £1.73 trillion and servicing the debt costs £43bn a year, more borrowing is the last thing the economy needs.

Labour will have to put up taxes. The basic rate could rise from 20p to 25p, they are talking about a 20 per cent tax on savings, a 60 per cent band for high earners and an increase on capital gains tax.

The ‘Tory tax bombshell’ looks like an exploding firework in comparison with Labour’s mother of all tax bombshells. The problem is nobody takes Labour’s plans seriously because they won’t win the election and do not represent an alternative Government.

Anything Labour proposes makes the Conservatives own plans look modest and reasonable. This is a problem. The Tories are so confident of a landslide victory they can afford to alienate their natural supporters – older voters, small businesses and anyone offended by wasting money on aid to North Korea – with impunity.

There is nowhere else for these people to go.

After all, a potential Tory voter won’t try the Liberal Democrats and no doubt the Conservatives already assume a good share of the UKIP vote at the last election will revert to Mrs May.

What the country needs is for the opinion polls to start narrowing enough to inject some jitters into the Conservative campaign. Maybe then they will remember it’s not good enough to claim to be the party of low taxation. They actually have to cut taxes.