BRITAIN: Tensions over Tory tax plans - or the lack of them - exploded on the Conservative conference fringe yesterday as Lord (Norman) Tebbit reminded delegates of Margaret Thatcher's tax-cutting, election-winning ways.
However, the party leadership continued to hammer home its "future versus the past" message with a steely insistence by shadow chancellor George Osborne that, while agreeing with lower taxes, he would always make economic stability his first priority.
Shadow home secretary David Davis also told conference that a David Cameron government would provide more prison places in Britain, while improving education, job opportunities and drug rehabilitation in a determined effort to get people off "the carousel of crime".
Mr Cameron is awaiting the proposals from a series of policy commissions tasked to rethink the Tory agenda on everything from economic competitiveness to quality of life, public services, social justice, globalisation and global poverty. He is being encouraged by some advisers to avoid a detailed policy prospectus three years ahead of a likely general election date, and certainly before Labour has elected its successor to Tony Blair.
However, Lord Tebbit yesterday voiced the concern of many party activists that Mr Blair's most likely successor, Gordon Brown, could steal a march on the Cameron leadership by committing to selected tax cuts of his own.
"If we aren't careful, the way things are going, we are going to be the only party at the next election that doesn't believe in lower taxation," he warned.
As a straw poll sponsored by Channel 4 and the Daily Telegraph suggested a majority of Conservative members think tax cuts should be a priority, Lord Tebbit was cheered when he recalled Mrs Thatcher's election victories in 1979 and 1987. Arguing the "moral and economic case" for Conservatives to offer tax cuts, Mrs Thatcher's one-time party chairman declared: "We know tax cutting works. We have tried it and it works. We tried raising taxes and that doesn't work. The Irish have tried tax cutting and it works."
In a dig at Eton-educated Mr Cameron, Lord Tebbit noted the Tory leader's agreement that people should be free to spend more of their own money. "He knows it's true in education," said Lord Tebbit, "unfortunately most of us aren't well-off enough to have that experience."
Edward Leigh MP, chairman of the Commons Public Accounts Committee, also insisted the promise of tax cuts was essential to any prospect of winning the next election. "If the Conservative Party does not promise tax cuts then it is nothing."
However, shadow treasury chief secretary Theresa Villiers said it was not realistic to expect tax cuts from a Conservative government within months of a 2009 election. She said the traditional tax-cutting agenda had not proven to be "a silver bullet" for the Tories in the last three general elections.