Darren Grimes hit the nail on the head this lunchtime, introducing new property taxes, which the Tories have campaigned against for the last three elections would be a betrayal of their voters, as well as levelling down. There are plenty of levelling up policies that don’t amount to ‘socialism lite’.
The commentariat, blinded in their Brexit rage, have failed to realise that the Vote Leave campaign crowd are not all tax cutting, small staters. The campaign to splurge billions on the NHS, as advertised on the side of the bus, should have been a clue. Many want to use power to re-engineer and make the government run better, not to shrink the state.
Cummings’ countless blog posts tell you he wants a better technocracy, his vision of a state directing billions into science is clearly not an agenda to roll back the state, the state splurging billions on concrete infrastructure projects that will never see pay back is a big state agenda. This is not the agenda of a government that wants to reduce the burden on taxpayers. We will, Guido fears, find out in the end that the trouble with zero interest rate “One Nation Toryism” is that eventually you run out of other people’s money…