The Tories Must Walk Progressive If They Want to Talk Progressive

Summary

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Here, for instance, is the shadow chancellor George Osborne, on the morning after his speech to the Manchester conference, defending the decision to retain the new 50p tax rate, which comes into effect from April next year for those earning more than £150,000: We do need a more equal society. Yet there is an alarming disconnect between the Conservatives' rhetoric of compassionate renewal and their policies on issues such as Europe, where the party remains rabidly Eurosceptic; on inheritance tax, where the commitment to scrap tax on estates worth less than £1m, a measure that would benefit only the 3,000 richest households and cost more than £3bn a year, remains in place when the public sector is being squeezed; on jobs, where the desire to target people on long-term Incapacity Benefit is resonant of the harsh Thatcherite 1980s, and where the party seems to have no coherent policy on getting people back to work.

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The Tories Must Walk Progressive If They Want to Talk Progressive

We are, at last, at the end of the party conference season, but also at the end of something more important: New Labour's social-democratic experiment. If the New Labour project was about a...

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