The Last Ditch by Tom Paine

Link: ‘Let sunshine win the day’, says Cameron the optimist – Britain – Times Online.

David Cameron finally came up with a policy that will make it worth my while to register again as an overseas voter. Today he described ID Cards as Labour’s

“plastic poll tax, twenty Millennium Domes rolled into one giant catastrophe-in-the-making”

OK, that’s my vote. I guess I am a pushover after all.

Today, I also heard of a more difficult vote that might be Cameron’s for the asking. My sister-in-law, long-time NHS employee and lifelong Labour voter is willing to vote Conservative for the first time if Cameron pledges to abolish inheritance tax. I find that surprising.

Most Labourites found inheritance tax quite appealing when it was only their hate figures who paid it. The wealthy (as then defined) pointed out the unfairness, the total bloody injustice, of earning a pound, paying tax on it, spending some of what’s left, paying tax on it, saving the rest, paying tax on the interest and then dying and paying tax on it all again. Labourites were not interested. Now they are paying themselves, the arguments are suddenly persuasive. That’s rather annoying, but I suppose it’s also encouraging.

I guess her daughter, recently beaten up by chavs at the bus stop for the hell of it might also respond to some plausible initiatives that would make it less likely to happen again. Tellingly, the family didn’t bother to report it. “The police wouldn’t do anything,” they said, “so why bother?” I wonder how many families take the same view? Still believe in the crime statistics? I don’t.

There’s another thing, by the way, that could win votes for our Dave. Give us back the ability to believe in government information again. But as long as he thinks it’s politically intelligent to copy every discredited tactic of our country’s most notorious liar, how can we hope for that?