Conservative party

Ok, so all Brown Budgets are political – but signs are that this week's PBR could be his most blatantly partisan yet.  I mean, just look at his speech this morning on improving efficiency in the public sector.  Some of its measures are welcome – for instance, pledging to cut the pay of senior servants, and the general idea of using technology more effectively in government.  But, as other folk have pointed out (see Guido and Iain Dale), the measures are insufficient to the scale of the debt crisis, and many are old news.  All in all, the signs are as we expected: Brown is paying only lip service to cuts. Instead, Brown is going to go heavy on soak-the-rich measures; thereby strengthening what Labour see as two dividing lines.

If everyone concentrates on the actual numbers in the PBR then it will be a disaster for Labour. So, instead Labour will try and distract us all with small but eye-catching measures — a new rate of inheritance tax for estates worth more than £5 million, that kind of thing. The aim will be to move the debate from the grim reality of the country’s fiscal situation to Labour’s dividing lines. There will be a lot of pressure on Cameron and Osborne to denounce Labour’s soak the rich measures. But the most important thing for them to do is to get the debate back to the state of the public finances and that is inevitably going to involve side-stepping the arguments that Brown wants to pick.

David Cameron’s ‘nothing to do with me guv’ response to the Ashcroft tax question on yesterday’s Politics Show has not put the issue to bed. In fact, his obfuscation has the reverse effect. The Independent runs an article today describing how little is known about individuals and authorities. ‘The House of Lords Appointments Commission says that it does not know whether Lord Ashcroft is UK resident. The Cabinet Office and HM Customs and Revenue have declined to answer questions about his status, on grounds of privacy.

Local girl Caroline Dinenage has won the Tories’ Gosport open primary race. Congratulations to her and commiserations to the other candidates: James Bethell, Julia Manning and Sam Gyimah. By all accounts the open primary process is proving hugely popular – over 12,000 votes were cast by post in this election. It is clear that the format encourages local political engagement; the Totnes primary was not a one off and evidently this process will become increasingly more common. Also, both elections have produced women, an indication that there is a clear alternative Central Office’s unintentionally divisive A-list strategy.

The Eton question came up on Question Time – is Labour right to use class in the run-up to the election? I have a piece in The Guardian tomorrow on this theme. The answer should be that which Andrew Lansley read out on Question Time:  that this shows Labour is living in the past, what matters is where you’re going to not where you came from. He’s right. But I do wish the Tories would believe it. The Eton taunt is still taken far too seriously by the Cameroons: it hurts them. It’s a piece of verbal kryptonite. They go to great lengths to defend themselves from such an attack: the 50p tax, for example, is embraced by the Conservatives just so Brown can’t say “Cameron’s looking out for rich folk, just like him.

Key to Labour’s emerging strategy is promulgating the myth that raising the inheritance tax threshold is designed to protect the Tories’ rich friends from the great unwashed. Despite its sojourn in the wilderness, the politics of envy remains crude at best. Raising IHT thresholds favours hardworking, modest Middle England. The super rich can protect their fortunes without the help of threshold raises, which are negligible by their standards in any event. James Macintyre proves as much in his latest New Statesman column. When detailing Tory donor Lord Harris’s IHT avoidance, Macintyre writes: ‘The Tory peer, whose wealth is estimated at roughly £285m, donated £90,000 to Cameron's campaign.

If you'd like a step-by-step preview of Labour's next election campaign, then do read Alastair Campbell's latest blog post.  All of Brown's attacks from PMQs are in there, and then some: "tax cuts for the rich"; a lack of "policy heavy lifting" on Cameron's part; the Tories "haven't really changed", etc. etc.  The spinmeister has been in closer contact with Downing Street recently, and it shows.  It's all gone a bit bar-brawling. The Tories now face a choice between, broadly speaking, three different responses: i) Ignore Campbell.

It’s all a bit of a puzzle. How will David Cameron incentivise marriage? In an interview with the Mail, Cameron dismisses IDS’s transferable tax allowance scheme. “It would be wrong to say that they are Conservative Party proposals.”                      Considering the scheme will cost £4.9bn, the pro-cuts Tories can ill-afford an incentive that would benefit the middle class in the immediate term. Cameron and Osborne are searching for a cheaper way to honour the pledge. Pete and Fraser debated whether marriage should and could be financially incentivised. On balance I side with Pete, marriage should not be financially incentivised.

If you're still scratching your head over the latest opinion polls, then I'd recommend you read Anthony Wells' latest post over at UK Polling report.  In it, he outlines four potential reasons for the diminishing gap between the Tories and Labour: Cameron's "reverse" over the Lisbon Treaty; increased economic optimism; Labour performing better; and the absence of positive feeling towards the Tories.  To my mind, it's probably a case of "all of the above," to varying degrees – but, as Anthony concludes, "we can't tell for sure." One further point that's worth making is that the reduced gap between the parties isn't due to a "Brown bounce".