Classic Telegraph lies and propaganda

The Telegraph runs with the wildly misleading headline "New council income tax is best way to plug multi-billion pound gap in social care, says IFS". The Telegraph's motto is, of course, anything but Land Value Tax or reforming Council Tax. The linked IFS page says nothing of the sort, it just mentions it as a possibility.

Digging a bit further, IFS' own press release on the topic, from March this year, pokes gentle fun at their own report:

But implementation would mean overcoming some important challenges

A local income tax would raise significantly more in some areas than others. We estimate that revenues per person from a flat-rate tax across all tax bands would be more than six times higher in many richer parts of west London than in areas like Hull and Leicester.

A system to redistribute revenues between councils would be required in order to avoid this translating into huge disparities in funding for local services.

To sum up, it would end up as a 1% increase in the national rate of income tax. So not a 'local income tax'.

Income tax rates that varied across areas would be more complex for employers, taxpayers, and HMRC to deal with. Up-to-date records on where taxpayers live – which, at present, employers and HMRC don’t always have – would be needed.

Anything but a national tax hike would be administratively unworkable, in other words. Whatever the merits of a tax (and this has none), it has to be at least administratively workable. If it isn't, then that's usually a clue that it's a fundamentally terrible idea in the first place.

Other options for tax devolution come with more significant drawbacks though

Local corporation and value added or sales taxes would be much more difficult to administer and comply with. Moreover, differences in tax rates across councils would be more likely to distort taxpayers’ behaviour than they would for income tax.

Stamp duty land tax is much more unequally distributed – varying by a factor of more than twenty between richer parts of West London and places like Hartlepool and Blackpool. It is also a bad tax that should be abolished rather than entrenched via devolution.

Agreed to all that.

Substantial new powers over council tax, such as the ability to carry out local revaluations, could pose problems for the system of redistributing funding between councils...

Agreed. Drum-roll please...

It would be better to revalue and reform council tax at a national level – something which is overdue.

Agreed.
-------------------------------
In other words, The Telegraph is claiming the IFS said pretty much the diametric opposite of what the IFS actually said.

Lies, damn lies and... City AM.

City AM finally jumps the shark (bottom of front page):

High property taxes put British businesses at a competitive disadvantage, despite the UK’s low corporation tax rate, said Jim Hubbard, policy advisor at the [British Retail Consortium].*

For every £1 a business pays in corporation tax, it must pay £2.30 in business rates.

That is a humungous lie, even by City AM's standards.

According to the UK government:

Total UK corporation tax liabilities 2015-16, £43.7 billion.

Total English Business Rates liabilities, 2015-16 £23.1 billion, round up to £26 billion for whole of UK.

If we also include about £10 billion in income tax paid by owners of unincorporated businesses, on average, UK businesses pay about 50p in business rates for every £1 of tax on net profits (corporation tax and income tax), less than a quarter of City AM's figure.

* The first part is clearly hokum as well. Ignoring the tax incidence point, UK retailers are not competing in any realistic way with non-UK retailers. The only reason some UK people go on shopping trips to France etc is because of lower alcohol and tobacco duties over there; business rates have absolutely no effect on the price paid by the end consumer.

Business Rates do make a marginal difference to the viability of heavy industry in low-value areas, but that's all part of the general Home-Owner-Ist plan.

Nobody move or the economy gets it!

Emailed in by MBK. From The Telegraph:

... last week, Chancellor George Osborne launched a thumping 200-page “Treasury study” into the long-term implications of leaving the EU, which “forecast a £4,300 fall in GDP per household” if we leave For many millions of voters, that’s a scary number – around a quarter of today’s average disposable income...

The UK economy will grow by 37pc between now and 2030, the Treasury estimates, compared to 29pc if we choose Brexit. Of course, one and three-year growth forecasts by the Treasury and others are nearly always wrong, let alone GDP estimates going over a decade into the future.

Let’s put that to one side for now, though, and consider how and why those post-Brexit and no-Brexit figures were then converted into differences in “GDP per household”. For one thing, while GDP is obviously a widely-used concept, it’s far broader than disposable household income, given that it includes extensive corporate activity and tax.

So, while today’s GDP per household is around £67,000, disposable income (what ordinary voters actually care about) is close to £45,000. So the Treasury has used the widest possible concept of income so the absolute difference generated by its 2030 growth forecast inside and outside of the EU is as large as possible.

Then, that GDP difference is divided not by the number of households in 2030, estimated at around 31m, but by today’s smaller number of 27m – so further boosting that headline difference in GDP per household. This is not only incredibly dishonest, but plain wrong.

I particularly like the point that the Bremainers estimate that UK GDP would grow by 29% over the next fourteen years if we leave. That's good enough for me.

Others have already pointed out that the Bremain estimates assume significant net immigration.

What I find very annoying is the lying...

Here.

"Government blames unemployment rise on BREXIT fears."

So, nothing to do with the introduction of the Living Wage and employers compulsory pension auto enrolment contributions then? Both of which are the government's fault and both of which increase payroll costs for employers leading to less employment.

Death really is too good for them.

Today's feeble argument for Bremain, which is actually an argument for Brexit.

Emailed in by MBK, from Sky News:

The new head of the National Crime Agency (NCA) has warned that a British decision to leave the European Union could cause problems tracing terrorists and other criminals.

Lynne Owens, the NCA's director general, said the UK would have to renegotiate agreements on intelligence sharing, European Arrest Warrants, and the deployment of liaison officers with each individual country.

Ms Owens said: "It could be harder to track down people. If we were to leave Europe I hope there would be procedures to make it easier, but we could have a gap and that could create a risk. I don't know how long that would take. Without (EU membership) we would have to have other mechanisms."

They obviously don't tire of repeating themselves, I find it a bit embarrassing, we've done this one FFS. I'm bored trying. Perhaps this is how they hope to win.

See here or here or here or here. For example.

Oh could it? Oh does it?

Tesco Chairman in Oxford Politician Attack

From The Telegraph:-

Tesco's chairman released extracts of his speech over the weekend in which he accused "scumbag politicians" of choosing Oxbridge Arts and PPE graduates over local candidates for electoral office.

The chairman attacked the Labour Party for parachuting their Cambridge contemporaries into urban seats and criticised the Conservatives for stuffing the shires with their old Oxford drinking chums.

Both parties retaliated and protested to the chairman, with the Conservatives saying that they had a token Working-Class and obese Conservative in the amorphous shape of Eric Pickles, while the Labour party pointed out that their token Champagne socialist Dennis Skinner had been in government.

Yesterday, both parties rejected the attack from the chairman and insisted that they tried “incredibly hard” to formulate substance-free PR campaigns to make themselves look in touch with the general public.

But not exactly as a "front page splash"

in fact, there ought to be a prize for anyone who can actually find it in the on-line version of the Mail ..

Daily Mail corrects misleading benefit statistics as DWP prepares for MPs' grilling**

An jolly tale from the New Statesman on how some Iain Duncan Smith arranged "scrupulously honest data" which was anything but was used in 6 "benefits bashing" articles by the Mail, which just goes to show the benefit of someone dreaming it up.
 
Oh and if you get tired of trying to track down that "correction", which NS readers will now be aware of but DM readers probably not, it is here.

Well it was at the time of posting, but being aware of what can happen I have also taken a screen grab in case it is needed as "evidence" later ... 

** the Department is scheduled for 2 Select Committee "grillings" tomorrow -

9.30am  Work and Pensions

 

Subject: Universal Credit: follow-up

 

Witness(es): Rt Hon Iain Duncan Smith, Secretary of State, Department for Work and Pensions, Lord Freud, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Welfare Reform , Howard Shiplee, Universal Credit Director General and Suzanne Newton, Real Time Information Programme Director, HM Revenue and Customs

Location: The Grimond Room, Portcullis House

 

and

 

2.30pm   Work and Pensions

 

Subject: DWP Annual Report and Accounts 2012-13: DWP Statistics

 

Witness(es): John Shields, Director of Communications and David Frazer, Director of Information, Governance and Security Directorate

Location: Room 5, Palace of Westminster

 

It is the latter grilling that the New Statesman article is referring to.  

 

"Traffic light labelling introduced for politicians"

From The Daily Mirror:

A traffic light ­labelling system is being brought in for all the major political parties and taxpayer-funded bodies from today.

At-a-glance data showing levels of duplicity, dishonesty, laziness, self-importance and corruption will be used for each MP or local councillor, franked from green (trustworthy), through amber (take with a large pinch of salt) to red ('on the take' or 'downright stupid' and can be ignored).

Guideline Bullshit Amounts (GBA) have been replaced by "Reference Outputs" to show how much of the maximum permitted daily output of propaganda and thoughtless tub-thumping is in a typical 100-word section of their speeches, letters or articles.

After years of politicians running their own ways of misrepresenting facts and figures, the Office for National Statistics has drawn up the traffic light charter to make the choice easier for voters.

It comes as politicians pump out yet more made-up figures, such as the baseless claim that health problems associated with being overweight or obese cost the NHS more than £5 billion a year, which was promptly marked with red.

Almost two thirds of MPs in England are corrupt, stupid or lazy, a third of local councillors and a quarter of Assembly members, all of whose public utterances will now be clearly marked with the red traffic light.

Public Health Minister Anna Soubry said: "The UK already has the largest number of wild claims which are complete and utter bollocks and we know that people get confused by the variety of lies that are used. We're not even consistent, are we? Research shows that, of all the current schemes, people like this label the most and they can use the information to make better choices at the ballot box.

"We all have a responsibility to tackle the challenge of double-dealing and corruption, including the quangocrats and academics. By having all major political parties and most media outlets signed up to the consistent label, we will all be able to see at a glance whether a politician is to be believed. This is why I want to see all newspapers and universities signing up and using the label."

Campaign and pressure groups welcomed the scheme.

Which? executive director Richard Lloyd said:

"This labelling scheme will encourage our leaders to do more to reduce the amount of complete and utter dissembling in their pronouncements. The National Trust and the CPRE will have to add bright red stickers to each baseless claim suggesting that England is being concreted over."

British Heart Foundation chief executive Simon Gillespie added:

"This is undeniably a first-class scheme that will make it easier for shoppers to scan the shelves for what they would really like to eat and ignore the petty-minded nonsense that comes from my own taxpayer- or Big Pharma-funded lobbying fronts such as my own.

"All of our tosh about high levels of diet-related chronic diseases in the UK, including heart disease has confused shoppers quite a lot and it's essential we have clear and consistent labelling on all BHF press release so that journalists and readers can cheerfully ignore them.

"We're solid red, by the way."

The soaring cost of alcohol

It seems like only two years since we were told that alcohol consumption costs us £16.2 billion a year. Oh... it was.

There's some bad news, I'm afraid chaps, that's now shot up to £25 billion*.

* Tractorstat emailed in by Bob E.

Wow, talk about being pointlessly picky ...

The chair of the UK Statistics Authority Andrew Dilnot  has been openly mocked by the Department of Work and Pensions for having “an obsession with provable and verifiable statistics” after issuing what is described as ”a feeble and totally unjustifiable complaint about Minister’s at the DWP making things up.”

The spat centres around the DWP’s increasing use of what Dilnot refrains from describing as ”figures pulled from the air in order to be supplied to the media and used in speeches and statements in support of claim’s made about the effect of policies initiated by the department”.  Dilnott, who in his complaint also steers well clear of suggestions that DWP Minister’s might be guilty of untruths or deliberately misleading parliament and the electorate, also observes that he made a similar complaint not that long ago, and believed he was given assurances that everyone at the DWP had been given clear and unequivocal instructions not to be caught doing the things that Dilnot has been at pains not to spell out in simple and direct language again.

A spokesman for the DWP said the anecdotal responses of junior ministers and members of the Employment Related Services Association who were presently benefiting from the Work Programme and wished to continue to do so to the letter from Dilnot fully supported Secretary of State for Work and Pension’s Iain Duncan Smith's open contempt for “bureaucratic  pedantry”.

"The secretary of state has long held the position that actual verifiable statistics would have an adverse impact on the public’s perception of how effectively he and his Minister’s are dealing with shirkers and scroungers” he said.

"As the minister for employment made clear in a recent interview, ERSA members are telling us the made up figures policy is especially effective for them too, and they are more than happy to supply us with made up figures of their own at the drop of a hat, which we can then, with their blessing, disseminate as our own made up figures.  Imagine how terribly depressing it would be for us, and ERSA, if we were forced by some faceless bureaucrat supported by some typical New Labour red tape legislation to only publish proper verified statistics.” 

He added “we at the DWP are very much wedded to the ‘What Works’ philosophy and quite clearly telling the odd porkie is ‘What Works’ - well it works for us."

Moving home during the summer holidays is such a drag

From RICS' survey:

Activity slowed further in July, with the weak picture exacerbated by the start of the school holidays.

???

I can understand why the Homeys make up excuses like prices being too bloody high, first time buyers struggling to save up a deposit, Wills and Kate thingy, riots, bad weather, Diamond thingy, good weather, football World thingy, Olympics thingy etc blah blah, those are all reasons why people might be temporarily distracted from "showing aspiration", "getting a foot on the property ladder", and "building up capital" but aren't the summer months (i.e. June to August) normally the months with most sales and purchases?

Obviously my memory isn't what it used to be, so before some pedant catches me out, I'd better check the actual monthly sales/purchase figures according to a reliable source like HM Revenue & Customs hadn't I? Ah, right...If that chart looks a bit higgedly piggedly, we can smoothe it a bit by using a three-month moving average, in which case July and August are the peak months.

Reader's Letter Of The Day

From City AM:

Individuals have rights, but those rights come with consequences. You have a right to smoke and drive booze and live off fast food. But if you then demand free treatment on the NHS, then the rest of us have to pay for it.

It is hardly surprising that a government with such a large budget deficit should try and force government spending costs down. If that results in some heavy handed nannying of people acting stupidly then so be it. Rights won't count for much in a bankrupt state.

Nick Reid

WTF? The anti-smokers keep trotting out this line about non-smokers being forced to pay for "free" healthcare for smokers, but truth of the matter is the other way round. Tax on fags far exceeds any marginal extra cost of healthcare for smokers, and some studies have shown that over a lifetime, smokers cost the NHS less than non-smokers than non-smokers anyway. Add to this all the old age pensions which smokers don't claim. I started mentally drafting a reply to this nonsense and moved on to the next letter:

Smokers pay far more into the NHS than they get back, and in some circumstances are denied treatment because they smoke. Continue the nannying, drive industries out of Britain, and enforce the closure of businesses (like the pubs no longer open because of the smoking ban), and for sure you will very soon reach a bankrupt state.

Pat Nurse

Well done Pat! Saved me the bother.

(Another cunning plan I dreamed up this morning is to set up a Big Tobacco Fund, similar to the Big Lottery Fund, i.e. each packet of fags will show a list of all the "good causes" which tobacco duty is paying for, and all tobacco advertising (once re-legalised) will be emblazoned with slogans saying "For every packet you buy, we donate ten pence to [worthy cause]" and non-smokers will be looked down on as being uncharitable so-and-so's. The plan needs a bit of work.)

Killer Arguments Against LVT, Not (203)

From today's FT:

... Any property owner considering improving or extending or in some way enhancing their property will surely think twice if the value added above the suggested £2m threshold is then effectively taxed annually at 1 per cent or more. Every £1 of potential tax could immediately defer £100 of contribution to the economy.

Robin Creswell, Downton, Wilts, UK

That is of course an argument for taxing the rental value of each site, over which no individual owner has the slightest influence*, but even so, it is a complete and outrageous lie.

Under current rules, if you buy £10,000's worth of kitchen, that triggers an immediate tax liability of about £4,000 (VAT and the retailer's and installer's tax bills), but people still have new kitchens fitted. And extending your house can bump it up a Council Tax band (which bizarrely only kicks in after the next change of ownership), but £300 a year extra Council Tax pales into insignificance compared to the cost and hassle of having the work done or moving home etc.

I myself had a loft conversion done, which must have triggered about £15,000 in VAT and income tax liabilities and bumped up the Council Tax by £300 a year, but as the total cost of £35,000 added £5,000 to the enjoyment or rental value of the house; and about £50,000 to the selling price, it was still money well spent (the ideal thing to tax would have been the £15,000 windfall gain; not the £35,000 real economic activity). And to earn that £35,000 net I had to earn £60,000 gross, etc etc. The loft conversion still happened (and a very nice one it was too).

And if his logic were correct (rather than being an outright lie) then there would not be a single commercial building in the UK, as all improvements are liable to Business Rates (effective rate about 2% of the cost/value of improvements).

* So as per usual, the Homeys have two arguments which are not only wrong in themselves but which contradict each other: we can't tax improvements because they are under the control of the owner and we can't tax the site rental value because it is not under the control of the owner. But of course we can tax incomes because they are... under the control of the worker? Not under his control? Which is it to be?

Killer Arguments Against LVT, Not (191)

So far, the Home-Owner-Ist élite (the bankers and large landlords) have kept above the fray and relied on the fact that their foot soldiers (from owner-occupiers to journalists with BTL portfolios to Faux Lib's) will do the campaigning for them, but now the gloves are off. The paid-for editorial in yesterday's CityAM was a long rant against the Lib Dem's idea that we could/should scrap the 50p top income tax rate and have a Mansion Tax instead.

His argument seems to be that our entire economy depends on a few foreign money launderers and tax evaders who will pay insane prices for housing in a very small part of London. In his view, they don't care about investing in UK productive businesses (so there is no advantage in reducing income tax rates, that's for us grateful plebs to pay); they don't trust our banks enough to just deposit money with them as a safe haven; and he falls for the fiction that not having land value tax makes it cheaper for them to buy land and buildings (it doesn't - in the long run it makes it more risky and more expensive):

A key reason the UK, for all its unattractive characteristics, remains a safe haven of sorts for global investors, is its history of legal stability. Foreigners know the UK takes property rights seriously and that their wealth will be protected – that is why they spend so much here and why Greeks fleeing crumbling banks are converting euros into London homes.

This is great for our current account deficit, means we remain at the heart of capital flows and that the world’s entrepreneurs and financiers will look at the UK kindly when they decide where to create jobs. It helps preserve London’s role as a global city.

Right. So if we reduced taxes on income, all those foreign money launderers and tax evaders wouldn't see the UK as an excellent place for inward investment into productive businesses? I don't see why the average Brit should be called on to pay extra taxes on their hard earned just to subsidise 'wealth protection' for these people anyway, bearing in mind that lower taxes on land push up the purchase price of land, thereby increasing the likelihood that owners of land will suffer nasty capital losses, which is hardly 'wealth protection', is it?

The rest of the article is a long list of KLNs, all of which I have rebutted before...
- LVT is neither a jealousy surcharge nor a tax on 'wealth' in any sense of the word, it is a user charge.
- Replacing income tax with LVT is not a 'war on the rich' (many truly rich people, i.e. high earners, would end up much better off).
- LVT is the thin end of the wedge, but that wedge was a lot thicker decades or centuries ago. Historically, taxes on land values were the main source of UK government revenue before they starting introducing all these stealth taxes like income tax (and all its variants). It's these stealth taxes on income which are the ever thicker end of the wrong wedge.
- Because LVT has no Laffer effects, a tax shift would make us all better off in the long run (apart from the current Home-Owner-Ist élite, of course).
- LVT is not an attack on 'private property', income tax is.
- He plays the Poor Widow Bogey twice.
- He claims that wealthy people will all move abroad (nonsense).
- He points out what he sees as "crippling practical flaws" which are no such thing if we apply commonsense.
- A tax on land is a tax on land. It is not, and will never be, a tax on pension fund assets; we already have those - everybody who doesn't save into an approved pension is paying the largest part of £44 billion's worth of tax breaks/subsidies for those who do and there's a privately collected tax of between £40 and £60 billion a year on pension assets (being the fees and commissions earned by the pensions companies).
- He ends the article by citing some mythical past which, on the facts, did not exist (see above).

If you ask the wrong question, you'll never get the right answer (2)

UKIP's press office asked me if I could respond to HM Treasury's Consultation Document on merging income tax and Employee's National Insurance. I set aside last Sunday afternoon for a bit of fun with numbers, but didn't get very far: the document itself kicks off with this (click to enlarge):
I duly responded as follows:

Dear Sirs

Your Table 1.A suggest that you are not taking the matter at all seriously:

Against 'Entitlements provided' you state that Employee's National Insurance gives 'Entitlement to contributory benefits, such as state pension; also helps fund the NHS'.

You know as well as I do that Employee's NIC raises less than £50 bn a year, but the state pension costs about £70 billion a year and the NHS costs over £100 billion a year. So there's a bit of a mismatch there.

Not only that, but Iain Duncan Smith proposed - quite rightly in our view as this was a key part of UKIP's Pensions Manifesto for the 2010 General Election - that the contributory principle for the state pension should be scrapped and the state pension and Pensions Credit be merged into a flat rate Citizen's Pension.

As to the substantive question 1, we agree wholeheartedly that there is no difference in principle or in practice between income tax and National Insurance, and that the two should be merged into a flat-rate tax on all incomes as soon as possible.

Regards [etc]

His memoirs must be rubbish

FakeCharities provide us all with a bit of welcome light relief

It's almost reassuring to see the same old idiots plough on with the same old lies, despite these having been debunked countless times. I bet Alcohol Concern and "researchers from Sheffield University" must be feeling a bit left out, as they weren't invited to provide rent-a-quotes.

From The Daily Mail:

The cost of treating people with liver disease, usually caused by excessive drinking, is expected to soar by 50 per cent in four years. A leaked Government report says the bill will reach £2.1billion – 2 per cent of the entire NHS budget. (1) Yet the stunning figure is only the tip of the iceberg, as it does not include alcohol-related cancer, accidents and injuries from violence...

The final bit of the article is textbook fakecharity:

Alcohol consumption in this country has soared over the past 30 years, (2) and more than 10million people regularly drink beyond safe levels. Last night a Department of Health spokesman said: "We have been working with partners to develop a Liver Strategy which we aim to publish later this year. The Government is also taking action to encourage responsible drinking and responsible alcohol sales, and will publish a new alcohol strategy soon." (3)

1) As against alcohol duty revenues which are forecast to reach £11.7 bn by 2015-16, to which you can add about £6 bn VAT.

2) That's a complete and utter f-ing lie, of course.

3) Who are these 'partners'? Would that be the people whom the government paid to ask the government to do what it intended to do in the first place? Like I say, this is textbook stuff.

Peter Mandelson on top form

The Prince of Darkness tries to beat his own record for 'most factual and logical inaccuracies in one article' in today's FT:

Strike One: We [the EU] are attempting to reconfigure the largest economic space in the world since the United States of America was created.

When the first former colonies declared themselves independent and began coalescing into a new country, they accounted for a tiny fraction of the global economy. Even by today's standards, the size of the economies of all the EU member states is larger than that of the USA (I think - it's certainly one and a half times as many people).

Strike Two: But the fact that is rarely mentioned in this debate is that it is a choice between bailing out these states, or bailing out the German, as well as other, banks that are their creditors.

Nope. The choice is between extending further loans to Greece or just allowing it to cancel some of its debts (with infinite shades of grey in between). Funnily enough, the Statists (nominally left wing) prefer the former and free-market types (nominally right wing) prefer the latter. And by bailing out Greece we automatically bail out the banks - that is the same thing.

Strike Three: ... the “lifting” of the economies of Greece, Spain, Portugal and Ireland over the past decade was driven by what was demonstrably an unsustainable credit-driven boom. A boom that lessened the pressure on these economies to address underlying structural issues, while lack of adequate financial regulation facilitated the recycling of financial surpluses in the form of imprudent lending in Ireland and the southern member states.

I'm sure there's a country to which exactly the same applies which he's deliberately missed off the list - possibly because he and his mates ran it for thirteen years?

Strike Four: The writer is a former UK business secretary and EU trade commissioner.

That's NewSpeak for "The writer currently receives various annual payments from the EU, and will receive an annual index-linked pension of £31,000 at age 65, provided he continues to promote the cause of the EU"

Nice bit of Indian Bicycle Marketing

Zoe Williams, kicks off an article on Comment is Free titled "The reason mothers work – and Tories try to stop them" with this bald claim:

Benefit cuts, childcare costs and marriage tax breaks are forcing families back into a single breadwinner model"

1. None of her assertions or inferences are true (to any great extent), but you must always remember that the behaviour of the three big UK parties is summed up in the book 1984:

2. Under this lies a fact never mentioned aloud, but tacitly understood and acted upon: namely, that the conditions of life in all three super-states are very much the same... It follows that the three super-states not only cannot conquer one another, but would gain no advantage by doing so. On the contrary, so long as they remain in conflict they prop one another up, like three sheaves of corn. And, as usual, the ruling groups of all three powers are simultaneously aware and unaware of what they are doing.

3. To wit, if a stereotypical Tory voter reads that article, he will think "Hurray! Stick it to those benefit scrounging cheats! A mother's place is in the home and so bring on those marriage tax breaks!" and a stereotypical Labour voter or feminist will think "Boo! Those nasty Tories are slashing benefits, preventing mothers from going to work and imposing their patriarchal view on society!". A Lib Dem voter probably muddles his way between the two.

4. So, that first sentence reinforces whatever prejudices people had anyway, and makes them more likely to vote for whichever party they were going to vote for anyway. The interesting bit is why the Tory government doesn't point out that these claims are not true; benefit rates have not been reduced, the Tories have merely tinkered at the edges a bit; childcare costs are dictated by childcare providers, not the government; and there is not, as yet, an actual tax break for marriage (unless I missed that memo?)

5. The answer is, there would be no advantage to the Tories of doing so; no stereotypical Labour voter is going to vote for them anyway, and if they admitted that welfare policies have developed piecemeal under both Labour and Tory governments without any big swings in either direction, then they'd lose the support of the stereotypical Tory voters.
----------------------------------------
When you read the article, the only example of benefit cuts she can actually point out is that the childcare element of Working Tax Credits now only covers 70% and not 80% of eligible childcare costs, which is true. However, this does not mean that people have to pay 30% rather than 20% of childcare costs - which would be a fifty per cent increase - it is far less dramatic than that:

a) You couldn't claim for 80% of the full amount anyway, the amount for which you can claim is capped at £175 a week for one child and £300 a week for two or more children. You had to pay the rest yourself.

b) For children aged three to five, there is a much better system, a leftover from the Tory government of the 1990s, called Early Years Funding. If you send your child to nursery, the council just gives you a voucher/part payment of 15 hours x about £4 a week, i.e. £60; non-means tested, non-contributory, sorted. Remember: the Tories increased this from 12.5 hours to 15 hours last September, so that's an extra £10 a week for millions of parents.

c) The eligible amount from (a) was reduced by the amount of EYF you got anyway, you only were entitled to claim 80% of the net amount.

d) The fact that you can claim for 80% or 70% of something does not mean that you will get it; the childcare element of Working Tax Credits is reduced by 41 pence for every £1 that either parent earns (this used to be 39 pence, long story) above a certain threshold. So if the two parents earn e.g.£22,000 between them a year, they lose £6,388 a year of their tax credits, i.e. £123 a week.

e) So let's assume that these two parents have two children at nursery and one is aged three to five, and it costs them £350 a week. They can only claim for £300 minus 1 x £60 EYF = £240 a week, their maximum entitlement is £240 x 70% = £168, and they lose £123 of this, see (d), so they get £45 tax credits plus £60 EYF = £105.

f) Using 80% and 12.5 hours EYF, they would claim for £300 - £50 = £250 x 80% = £200, reduced by £123 = £77, plus £50 EYF = £127.

g) So their net nursery costs have gone up from £223 to £245, which is only a ten per cent increase, and not the fifty per cent increase which the article suggests.