Bagehot: Coming clean

The Tories must choose between frankness and opacity on tax and spending AT FIRST it looked like a daring counter-attack that turned the tide of combat. George Osborne’s pledge in 2007 to raise the threshold for inheritance tax to GBP1m ($2m at the time) galvanised the Conservative Party and helped to avert a general election that might have throttled it. Eighteen months and a slump later, his sally looks to have left the party’s flank dangerously exposed. The Tories are in a pickle over taxing and spending. They are not the only ones—witness the remarks by the governor of the Bank of England on the need for fiscal caution, delivered just as Gordon Brown set out on a round-the-world lobbying mission for further stimuli. But whether and how their sums add up is crucial for the Tories, encumbered as they have been for much of the past 20 years by toxic auras of cold-heartedness and incompetence. Their fiscal policy needs to resolve two tensions, one involving internal politics and ... (link)