News reaches me that David Cameron and George Osborne are confirming their inheritance tax plans – in other words, confirming they remain absolutely wedded to their pledge to give £200,000 cash to the wealthiest 3,000 estates, paid for by deep cuts to the schools, neighbourhood p0lice teams and NHS for the rest of us.
However, they try to spin this, the Tories have blown their golden opportunity to scrap their inheritance tax pledge and admit they were wrong to put the wealthiest few ahead of the help that families on middle and modest incomes need.
We actually know David Cameron wants civil servants to get to work immediately on a gameplan to implement his strategy of help for the few, not the many.
The Tories remain committed to a queue of unaffordable and uncosted tax cuts, including an ambition to cut the new top rate of tax – changes which could only come at the cost of deep, wide and immediate cuts to public services for the over-whelming majority of hard-working British families. Who said they’d changed..?