This is not the 1970s. Tory pledges to cut taxes are absurd

theguardian.com:

Whenever I told him things were going from bad to worse, my father used to nod sagely and say: “It was ever thus.” However, I wonder what he would have said now about the state of the country and the “governing” Conservative party.

In a leadership race whose inanity almost beggars belief, the two very rightwing contenders seem obsessed with establishing their Thatcherite credentials without, as far as I can see, having a clue what Thatcherism was really about.

Take this obsession withcutting personal rates of income tax. When Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979, the top rate of income tax was 83%. In his first budget Sir Geoffrey Howe reduced it to 60%, and the basic rate from 33% to 30%. They decided it would look bad to lower the top rate alone, even though it was absurdly high. But to balance the books they were forced to raise VAT. They had committed themselves not to double VAT – in those days campaign commitments were serious – so they raised it from 8% to 15%.

In his budget of 1988, my old friend Nigel Lawson brought the top rate down to 40% and the basic to 25%. These days the basic rate is 20% and the higher rate remains at Lawson’s level, except for the additional rate on incomes above £150,000, which is 45%. This history puts into context the absurdity of Truss’s and Sunak’s obsession with cutting present tax rates – she now, he later – when the nation’s infrastructure and public services have become an embarrassment. Current rates of taxation are miles, and years, away from the situation that faced the Thatcher government of 1979, and low by international standards.

Oh and by the way: do these fanatics really want to emulate the Thatcher government’s “achievements” of presiding over a doubling of the