Indian Bicycle Marketing

Those who stand above the fray know that in many respects, Labour and the Tories nick policies off each other and sometimes it's difficult to remember who proposed it first.

Let's take the proposal to give land bankers a kick up the pants by some combination of imposing a tax on undeveloped sites, cancelling unused planning permissions, compulsory purchase orders on land with unused planning permission etc.

@traderpaulfx on Twitter found a superb example of Indian Bicycle Marketing - compare and contrast these two Daily Mail articles.

27 April 2015:

* Red Ed [Labour Leader Ed Miliband] wants councils to encourage building by hiking tax on unused land
* Sites still left idle could be compulsorily purchased by another developer
* Property analysts say it would take UK back to 'dark days of the Seventies'
* Tory candidate said it's 'sort of policy you might expect from Soviet Russia'

5 March 2018:

* [Tory leader] Theresa May has launched a major push to restore the dream of home ownership
* The PM wants to encourage new houses and more storeys on existing buildings
* Threatened crackdown on developers who 'bank' land and wait for value to rise

Admittedly, today's Tory proposals are a little vaguer than Labour's, but the actual details aren't be that much different.