Your two-page guide to the positions of the candidates vying to become Conservative party leader in your print edition was very instructive as far as it goes (Form guide to potential prime ministers, 11 July). But while the column on “Tax and spending” refers to their views on tax, there is virtually no information on their policies on public expenditure.
This is hardly surprising, as none of the candidates outline their position on expenditure when interviewed, apart from Nadhim Zahawi’s initial pronouncement on a 20% cut in the running costs of every government department, later clarified to mean to a 20% cut in civil service headcounts, plus occasional references to defence spending.
While there is general agreement on the need for economic growth, there is no strategy focusing on how to achieve it, including the need to invest in public services.
But a high-growth economy requires investment in education and skills, and it requires a healthy workforce – and this relies not just on a well-resourced health service but also on satisfactory housing and a good diet, both dependent on adequate wage levels. Cutting taxes won’t pay for these.
What we need is policies, not platitudes.
Sheila Cross
Newby Wiske, North Yorkshire
• I read the candidates’ policy ideas with increasing alarm. It’s all very well dangling tax cuts as a pitch, but how does that square with paying for more NHS staff and new hospitals; rebuilding crumbling schools and providing more money for school meals; properly funding the woefully inadequate care system; supporting increasing numbers of households on or below the breadline due to rising food and fuel prices; and keeping our roads in at least a reasonable state of repair?
Taxes pay for all of that, so what items in that list are they prepared to sacrifice?
Val Harrison
Birmingham, West Midlands
• Most of the candidates for the Tory leadership claim, without evidence, that tax cuts lead to economic growth. But to claim that there is a simple causal connection is economic illiteracy for at least three reasons. First, there are many other factors involved, such as the amount of investment firms make in advanced technology and the skills of their workforce. Second, countries such as Germany, France and those in Scandinavia have both higher taxes and higher growth. Third, there’s nothing to stop companies giving the money saved through tax cuts to their shareholders and/or senior managers.
We need interviewers to challenge this fallacy every time it is uttered, to prevent us getting a prime minister who will cut taxes and so make inflation much worse than it already is.
Frank Coffield
Durham
• Labour is right to demand that all Tory candidates in the leadership contest come clean about their tax arrangements (Report, 11 July), but it would certainly carry more weight if Keir Starmer and his shadow cabinet colleagues made public their tax records too.
In fact, Starmer should be insisting that all Labour candidates in the next election make all of their recent tax records public. In Labour’s manifesto, there could be a commitment to legislation making this compulsory for all top public servants. I can’t see many voters finding fault with that, and it could be the opening shot in what should be Labour’s war against tax avoidance and evasion.
Bernie Evans
Liverpool
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