Pulling down the shutters on Council Tax

The election warfare took a strange turn today as the Tories unveiled yet another tax plan - this time on Council Tax, where their big idea is to.... do nothing. They're proposing to abandon the revaluation of homes scheduled for 2007, thereby (apparently) saving "middle England" - which in this case means the South, where house prices have risen further than in the North since the original valuation in 1991 - from the massive tax hike that Labour is (apparently) going to push their way.

Even given the fact that an election campaign attracts hustles, hysterics and half-truths the way Wetherspoons attracts heavy boozers, this is a blatantly cynical piece of short-term electioneering. To be sure, the Tories have done well on this ground before - anybody remember Norman Lamont's £140 off poll tax bills just before the 1992 election? But the idea that the way to fix a fundamentally badly designed tax is to abolish (or even postpone) its one sensible feature - the idea that the CT bill is linked to house price values - is like saying that the way to sort out the electoral system is not to have any more boundary changes. Labour and the Lib Dems should be able to shoot this one down. Labour has no real policy on CT at the moment and will probably have to patch together a regional banding or transitional relief system after the election, but either of those would be a work of genius compared to the Tories' Ostrich manoeuvre. The Lib Dems' policy of local income tax is miles better than council tax, or indeed than poll tax or the rates. A tax on land value would be even better in many ways. But it's really come to something when the Tories are reduced to a policy of fiscal stasis to try to grab a few votes.