Two excellent articles from today’s Guardian that are well worth a read, whilst another poll sees the Tory lead down to single figures. 

First, Polly Toynbee’s piece This is class war – carried out by Cameron against the poor.  Brown’s reference to Cameron’s tax policies being dreamt up on the playing fields of Eton clearly got under the Tory leader’s skin, as his performance on the Politics Show demonstrated. Though Cameron complains that Brown’s attack was spiteful, Toynbee rightly points out: “background becomes significant if people go into parliament and devote their lives to preserving the privileges of people like themselves.”

Polly’s article is particularly useful for nailing the implications of the Tories’ tax policies.

So far every single one of Cameron and Osborne’s tax plans promote the wealth of the exceedingly wealthy. Not the middle or upper middle but the top 2%. It is astonishing that they have been so overt about it. No previous Conservative party ever sought power on the basis of promises to divert so much revenue from so many to so few.

It is not class war or engaging in scare tactics to point out that Cameron and Osborne’s only known tax plans gift £1.2bn to the top 2% of wealthiest estates in inheritance tax. Their marriage tax relief gifts 13 times more cash to the top than the bottom. Giving back extra tax relief on pensions of the richest gives £3.2bn to the top 1.5% of earners. Reversing Labour’s 50p income rate gives £2.4bn back to the top 1%. The total sum taken from 98% of voters to donate to the top 2% is £11. 7bn. That really is class war – the rich looting everyone else.

Whilst Polly Toynbee is quantifying the scale of the redistribution that the Tory frontbench millionaires’ club would carry out on behalf of the most well-off, over in G2 John Harris has an in-depth examination of the state of the Tory party.

He says Labour’s essential charge is that “many of the undecided voters Cameron needs to seduce are not convinced the Tories have undergone any kind of transformation. This chimes with a recent Populus poll, in which only 28% of people agreed the party has ‘really changed’.” Exactly: even many of those voters who appear to like Cameron are suspicious of the people who stand behind him – his party – whilst his economic proposition is deeply unattractive. A longer working life, pay freezes, cuts to public services…and tax cuts for the richest.

Harris quotes the Liberal Democrats’ director of policy and communications, Chris Fox.

“One of the things we did was take 20 or 30 people in the south-west who said they were thinking about voting Conservative, and spent four hours with them. The overriding thing that came out was even people who were thinking about voting for them weren’t doing it because of any real endorsement of their values. And as soon as you got them to pick imagery for the Tory party, it was all about class, looking after one part of society, and all those things. That’s in the south-west; further north, it becomes even more ingrained.”

This blog has argued for some time that the Tories are not where they need to be. Conservative supporters wished to dismiss one recent poll that showed a reduced poll lead for the Tories of just six per cent. But since then a succession of polls have shown a reduced Tory lead, at around ten per cent. Of course, Conservative supporters will point to other recent polls that show a bigger Tory lead. But a situation in which several polls show a declining Tory lead, and in which some are now dipping into single digits – such as today’s Populus poll which has the Tory lead down to eight points - is a significant headache for the Conservatives. At best for Cameron the polls are volatile – at worst for the Tory leader they show a trend towards a  tightening of the gap.  The cause of this problem for the Opposition has to be the profoundly alienating economic message that is now clearly associated with the Conservatives and which is symbolised by the inheritance tax cut for the richest.

As John Harris argues, “seven of last month’s 10 British opinion polls gave the Conservatives less than 40% – the figure they need if they’re to achieve a majority of Westminster seats.” Peter Riddell says in the Times today that “the latest Populus poll, undertaken over the weekend, confirms the recent trend: 8 of the 12 polls published since early November have put the Tories below 40 per cent, against only one of the previous 25.”

ConservativeHome editor Tim Montgomerie thinks Cameron is not at his best. His prescription is essentially to tack right. “We are not seeing the best of David Cameron at the moment. He is neglecting the base of the Conservative Party. He is not setting a clear direction on deficit reduction.” But it is precisely the traditional Thatcherite economic message of cuts and austerity for the many, but protecting the most privileged, that is causing the Tories to run up against public concern about what a Conservative government would do.