British Elections: Conservative Party manifesto: more hot air on the economy – by Jeremy Warner

There is nothing new in there whatsoever to address these issues. All the tax pledges, spending cuts, and to the extent that they are listed at all, planned supply side reforms, have been announced before. So too have plans to set up an independent Office for Budget Responsibility, transfering responsibility for banking supervision back to the Bank of England, and just about everything else that’s in the section labelled “Change the Economy”.

Most of it is just motherhood and apple pie and to the extent that the Conservatives aspire to a more balanced economy based less on housing and financial services, and more on exports, savings and investment, no different from either of the other two main political parties.

As for making Britain the most tax competitive economy in the G20 within five years, dream on. That’s not going to happen; the deficit is too big to allow for the scale of tax cuts necessary to achieve this ambition in one parliament. The manifesto also says that by far the larger part of the burden of deficit reduction will fall on spending cuts rather than tax rises.

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