Whose economy is it anyway?

The election battle lines are being drawn, initially around the issue of the proposed abolition by the Tories of part of Labour’s NI increase in 2011. One hopes for broader philosophical debate about the future of the country as the campaigns progress, but this is not a bad one to start with.

Where I get frustrated is at the inability of the Tories to articulate the core point behind this issue and to expose Labour’s grotesque appropriation of the word ‘economy’ to mean ‘the state’.

Gordon Brown says the NI cuts will ‘take £6bn out of the economy’, which is arrant nonsense. As we know it will actually leave £6bn IN the economy.

But David Cameron must explain this to voters properly. It’s quite simple, here’s the script:

“The economy is not the state, it is us, and the decisions every single one of us makes on how to spend our earnings. The state is our servant, not our master – it is our money, not the state’s. Reducing taxes leaves money in the economy, to invest, to grow. Giving it to the state is a waste.”

He and his team are dancing around this theme but they must find a way to ram it home.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 8th, 2010 at 8:55 am and is filed under Fresh News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.