The tipping point?

Jim Callaghan remarked that every so often there is a sea change in politics, and if you're caught on the wrong side of it there's nothing much you can do.

Are we witness to this now? Mr Brown was scuttling towards an election for his own benefit, the poster sites were booked, Mr Suit and Mr Tie had been dropping teaser hints. There's no doubt that Brown was orchestrating it all, and no doubt that he lied about why he chickened out. All this even though the electoral arithmetic never worked.

This teasing united the Tories and they had to pull together. Comment has focused on Cameron's relatively vacuous memorised Conference speech, and George Osborne's pledge on Inheritance Tax.

Labour questions whether the tax cut is funded. Jeff Randall gives three reasons why it doesn't matter whether it is or not.

1. Gordon Brown's promises at the Labour conference were unfunded
2. £3bn is a pimple when state spending is over £600bn
3. Even if the sums are wrong, huge amounts can be saved elsewhere. For instance, welfare payments cost £161bn and "other expenditure" is £59bn.

If Labour pursue accountant-like claims that it can't be afforded, they'll look grey and niggardly, out of touch with the concerns of voters in those southern England marginals.

Let's not forget there was more to the Conservative conference than that. Iain Duncan Smith is to lead a task force to find ways to cut the soaring welfare benefits bill (see above). The Business commented that -

Mr Cameron stressed that people on benefits who were found jobs but refused to take them would have their benefits stopped. The importance of this is that it means the Tories are finally sold on moving the welfare state from being a passive donor of benefits to a transition mechanism for work; they also agree that those who refuse to play by the rules need to be penalised.

Most important of all, it shows the Tories finally understand that Britain must follow America’s lead on welfare; the famous reform bill that Mr Clinton signed into law in 1996, ending the automatic entitlement to hand-outs, helped slash the welfare rolls from 12.2m to 4.5m in a few years. By the end of the Clinton administration, child poverty was as its lowest level since 1979 and the poverty rate for children of single mothers the lowest since records began.

It does actually need to go beyond that since so few Britons on benefits get offered jobs in the first place - 54% of new jobs in Britain were taken by foreigners between 1997 and 2006. Sainsbury's, for instance, say that immigrant workers have a "superior" work ethic to British employees. Soft options won't deliver the goods.

Michael Gove announced an education policy which would finally break the stranglehold of Local Education Authorities, allowing charities (hurrah), voluntary groups (hurrah), and faith groups (boo) to set up their own state-funded schools with a minimum of bureaucratic hassle.

Money will follow pupils; each child in these new privately managed schools will be funded to the tune of £5,263 per head, the average spending per pupil in state schools, with a significant extra top-up for the poorest children. Although its not quite a voucher system, Milton Friedman and FA Hayek would have been proud of Mr Gove; this is the most radical yet practical educational proposal ever endorsed by the Tories.

So is this the tipping point? Brown has fundamentally damaged his image very early in his premiership. It's conventional wisdom that southern England marginals will be hugely important in the electoral arithmetic. Just one proposed tax cut has played stunningly well there in a way that won't be forgotten, and this may intensify as the reduction in households' free disposable income keeps biting (it's at its lowest level for a decade). And the Taxpayers' Alliance keeps pegging away the truth that government is hugely incompetent in the way it wastes taxpayers' money.

Perhaps there is a sea change against more tax and more spend. It's too soon to know. But just maybe historians will say this was a tipping point.