Semi-Partisan Politics

George Osborne is receiving a lot of stick for his last-minute decision to postpone the planned 3p/litre increase in fuel tax left intact in his most recent, politically disastrous budget. Most recently he has been accused of cowardice for sending an unprepared junior minister – Economic Secretary Chloe Smith – to defend the government’s short notice U-turn on the BBC’s flagship ‘Newsnight’ programme.

Reports The Telegraph:

I think that we can now safely add political incompetence to the list of charges being levelled against Mr. Osborne in the wake of this all-too-avoidable mess up.

This is supposed to be a Conservative-led, tax-cutting government. It was bad enough that the 3p/litre increase in fuel duty was allowed to remain in George Osborne’s most recent budget in the first place, but the fact that it’s postponement was only announced yesterday, and that senior ministers had no prior notice whatsoever is an almost unforgivable act of political stupidity, for which David Cameron was predictably savaged during Prime Minister’s Questions today.

But more concerning to me even than the incompetent way that this – and almost every single other political decision of any significance recently – has been handled by the government is the fact that the Conservatives are boasting about their policy U-turn and rather petulantly demanding praise for their actions.

Take this typical tweet from Robert Halfon MP:

“In Welsh questions said to Minister that stoppage of August fuel tax rise means £16 million injected into Welsh economy”

I despair, I really do. I thought that it was only in the dystopian, nightmarish land that was Gordon Brown’s Britain that cancelling a planned tax increase could be said in any way to be injecting cash into the economy. How is making the decision to not do something monumentally stupid and increase a key tax that would punish many already-squeezed households in any way an injection of cash into the economy? At best it could very charitably be called a preservation of the status quo, or the maintenance of steady-state, though given the economic uncertainty created by arbitrary and last-minute changes of key fiscal policy such as this, even that assessment is doubtful.

This is almost as bad as the risible time when a desperate Gordon Brown and Peter Mandelson tried to claim that the Conservatives’ election manifesto promise to cancel the planned increase in employers’ National Insurance tax contributions would “take millions of pounds out of the economy”, as though the state were the ‘real economy’ and not the other way around.

I’m done with all this, I really am. I actively campaigned for the Conservative Party at the last general election in 2010. I delivered leaflets, probably annoyed my friends on Facebook and Twitter with my political posts, and talked to countless people on the high street. And for my efforts, and those of all the many people who did far more than me to try to end Labour’s grip on power in this country, all we get is a government with a broken political radar, one which betrays core conservative principles and apparently one which pouts and expects praise and candy for doing precisely the things that it should be doing without any outside pressure from their political base, such as not raising taxes on squeezed households during a recession.

Michael Gove for PM, as soon as possible. Anyone else with me?