The Economist cast its vote for Labour at the last two elections, but judging by this week’s cover it’ll be backing the Tories in 2010.
The accompanying leader declares:
Britain has much experience of class politics, and none of it has been good. Class politics makes for bad economics: the state swells, public money gets wasted and entrepreneurs grow nervous. And it makes for a sad country, too: divisions deepen, suspicion flourishes and the social contract frays. When the time comes to judge the parties’ electoral strategies, voters should remember that.
“Class war” was once a term reserved for epic battles such as those between Margaret Thacher and the NUM, but apparently now the charge can be made on the basis of a single quip by Gordon Brown at PMQs.
That Brown’s satirical remark (he joked that the Tories’ tax policies had been “dreamt up on the playing fields of Eton”) sparked such a media storm shows how little we’ve been exposed to genuine class politics in recent years.
It’s disappointing to see a supposedly liberal title such as the Economist ignore the Tories’ far more outrageous plans for inheritance tax. The magazine chides Labour for its decision to shelve an increase in the inheritance-tax threshold and ignores the entrepreneurial and meritocratic case for the tax.
For a refreshing argument from the right in favour of inheritance tax, read Irwin Stelzer’s essay in this week’s magazine.
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