ThunderDragon Blog

The Conservatives are beginning to really start pushing the online battle back towards Labour. I commented a while back on the Labour’s far more web-orientated economic propaganda - even though it was pretty useless, as it was too large to be embedded in a blog, even in the main post!

But since then, the Conservatives have really been developing a far better approachm with the landing page being turned into a national debt counter, depicting Alistair Darling and a elongated red box.

And now they’ve developed a real time widget showing our personal share of the national debt created by Brown and Darling. Which, unlike the Labour embeddable tool, can actually fit in a blog sidebar, or in a header like I have.

Alongside this, they have also developed the iconic poster a bit further, with the tax bombshell now unwrapped [click to enlarge]:

However, what they haven’t done is put a dedicated page on their website to deal with the economic crisis or tax bombshell. There is nothing to develop these points further, to explain what they mean to us. Yes, there are speeches, news articles and the like, but they really need to be together in one place and part of a developed/developing narrative. And a repository of propaganda, so we don’t have to rely to emails and newspapers to get it, and so that they don’t have to rely on blogs to publicise it. This page - or pages - should also linked to from the tax bombshell header, so it’s more than just a pretty picture on the site.

So the Conservatives are on the way to using the internet a bit better, but there’s still a looong way to go.

Alistair Darling has already had to start backtracking on the measure announced in the Pre-Budget Report - aka the emergency budget.

The Chancellor was forced to backtrack on a key element of his Pre-Budget Report (PBR) on Wednesday after he admitted that the Treasury had got its sums wrong and raised the duty on spirits by too much.

The proposed duty rise of 8 per cent announced on Monday, part of a package of duty increases designed to offset the cut in VAT from 17.5 per cent to 15 per cent, has been halved to 4 per cent to leave the cost to the consumer broadly unchanged.

The Scotch whisky industry had pointed out that the 8 per cent rise would have increased the average bottle of whisky by 29p, whereas in his Commons speech the Chancellor had said that the duty measures “should keep the overall cost to consumers the same this year”. (The Times)

If Darling can’t even get his sums right over such a simple calculation, how can we possibly trust anything he has said in their entire budget?!

Created by Tory Bear

It’s brilliant: a national debt counter in the form of Alistair Darling as the landing page, and making good use of the iconic economic propoganda image of the tax bombshell as the main header.

The Pre-Budget report that Alistair Darling gave yesterday doesn’t contain any economy-boosting tax-cutting measures. Rather, it’s a tax increasing budget for most of us - now, and then again in a few years time.

What is he doing now:

• Raising duty on alcohol
• Raising duty on tobacco
• Raising duty on fuel
• Increasing borrowing exponentially to half a trillion pounds.
• Cutting VAT by 2.5%

A reduction of 2.5% in VAT means that if I spend £100 - except on alcohol, tobacco, petrol or food - I will save £2.50.

£2.50.

That’s down-the-back-of-the-sofa change.

And since the things that most people buy are alcohol, tobacco, fuel, and food - and in the credit crunch aren’t spending hundreds of pounds on other things - this will cost us money. Yes, I know the point of the VAT cut is to stimumlate the economy, but it won’t because it’s not enough. And many businesses won’t pass it on - after all, what’s the point of reducing something that is 99p to 97p or £9.99 to £9.77?

To actually achieve a stimulus this way, they would have as good as abolished VAT entirely. But of course, they can’t under EU law.

Since it is not possible to give us the right stimulus through VAT, they should have given us more money in our pocket. Either through reducing the income tax rate or increasing the personal allowance.

This way we get more money in our pocket and are ale to spend it as we wish. And boost the economy in the process. But Brown and Darling are economic retards, and so haven’t figured this out.

And then they’ll drop a tax bombshell on us.

The battle over the economy and the way to fix it seems to be growing. Both sides are aiming to win the hearts and minds of the average voter.

The Conservatives have a very clever - one could almost say iconic - poster:

And Labour have a more indepth propaganda campaign, trying to portray David Cameron as economically illiterate [click to see the whole thing]:

Which is more effective? For direct impact, most certainly the Conservative poster. But for deeper long-term impact, the Labour propoganda wins because it is a lot more detailed - even though wrong and deeply simplified.

It is also interesting that the Labour propaganda is a lot more web-friendly that the Conservatives, being embeddable [though not here, as it is simply too big, which is a bit of a mistake]. And the Tories “Tax Bombshell” poster doesn’t even appear to be on their website. I had to get the image above from a newspaper.

Tax cuts is the current political football, it seems. Each of the political parties are promising tax cuts, supposedly funded and competely unfunded - and the indeterminate.

It is amusing how times change. Not so long ago, calling for a tax cut, however funded [or not], was viewed as tantamount to taking food from the mouths of babes. But now it is all the rage.

Tax cuts are good for us all. There is only so much money that the State should take from us, and it already takes too much. Cutting taxes would enable us, the people, to spend more and thus lift the economy out of its current malaise.

Tax cuts should be significant enbough to actually make a difference, but also funded - unfunded tax cuts don’t really help in the long term, as they would soon be replaced by tax hikes, which knowing government would take the tax burden above what it was beforehand.

Whilst David Cameron’s tax cut to get the rising number of unemployed back into work is a good one, what we need most in a cut in either (a) income tax or (b) VAT/sales tax. Then we will have more money to spend and hopefully prevent the economy going into the meltdown predicted by Ken Clarke.

Like tax and spend, but it costs us even more.

And is just as effective - ie. not very.

It certainly appears the no Labour government can ever exist without resorting to the old tired-and-failed tactic of tax-and-spend.

Though at least Gordon Brown has selected a very slightly different path, meaning that we pay the taxes later, most likely under a Conservative government, rather than now.

After all, if he can’t be Prime Minister of an economically stable UK, then he won’t let anyone be.

Gordon Brown is calling for a cut in petrol prices.

If he does, then he can simply reduce the amount of tax he levies on it, which as I previously revealed is the highest in the G7, with 55% of of the price we pay at the pump going straight in to the government’s coffers.

So any case for a cut in fuel prices can go straight back to Brown and Darling themselves: cut the amount of tax we pay.

[Of course, the fuel companies should also cut their prices to reflect the crude oil price drop - but the government made extra money out of the higher fuel prices and the oil companies didn't, so it's only fair that they now give it back.]