Uk politics

Try telling George Osborne that ‘tax doesn't have to be taxing’ — I'm sure he'd laugh at the sentiment. The story this morning is that he has a grand, gritty choice to make ahead of the Budget: to tax income or to tax wealth. The Lib Dems have apparently agreed to relent on the 50p rate, but only if they get a mansion tax on properties worth over £2 million in return. The thinking is that, in the current political environment, the government must always be seen to be hitting the well-off in some way. So, will Osborne accept the offer? He and other Tories will certainly be tempted to do so.

David Cameron’s speech today is another reminder of how concerned the Tories are about losing their traditional advantage among female voters. The message that the Tories are cutting so that the country is passed on in a better state to the next generation is a direct response to the fact that the party’s polling has found mothers to be deeply concerned that their children will not have as good a quality of life as they have had. At the away day for Tory MPs last week, Andrew Cooper — the PM’s chief political strategist — said that talking about deficit reduction in these terms was crucial to winning over female swing voters.

Perhaps, the greatest testament to Steve Hilton’s influence in Downing Street is that everyone chuckles when you ask if anyone will replace him. His role in Number 10 as the senior adviser was one he had carved out for himself so that he could work on what he wanted to. It is deliberately designed not to fit on any ‘org chart’, the kind of document that the post-bureaucratic Hilton has little patience for. Hilton was for years caricatured as being not really right-wing. But, in reality, the opposite is true — he was, in some ways, the most right-wing man in Downing Street. Few matched him on subjects like 50p tax and labour market regulation. The Lib Dems were right when they called him ‘Thatcher in a t-shirt’.

When David Cameron headed to Brussels last December, it was far from certain that he would veto the proposed treaty. It was only when Nicolas Sarkozy proved totally uninterested in accommodating Britain’s demands that the Prime Minister decided that he could not sign up to it. In a way, Sarkozy did Cameron a favour. Imagine if Britain had got the safeguards the Prime Minister wanted and had signed up to the treaty. How would he then have reacted this week, when the Irish announced that they were going to hold a referendum on it? The pressure from the Tory benches to let the British people vote on it would have been immense.

The changes announced to the work experience programme today have been designed to reassure the companies involved. Those on the scheme will now only face any benefits sanction if they commit the equivalent of gross misconduct. Once some big corporations started getting cold feet about the scheme some tweaks to it were inevitable. As Matt d'Ancona wrote on Sunday, corporate Britain has proved remarkably spineless in the face of attacks from a bunch of hard-line left-wingers. But the tweaks announced today by Chris Grayling — whose robustness on the issue has impressed Tory high command — maintain the purpose of the scheme. Offering those who are unemployed structure and a way back into the workforce are crucial in moving them from welfare into work.