Whether Conservatives judge the 2024 manifesto a success or not rather depends on their definition of success.
For some, it will be enough that Rishi Sunak has not exploded his election campaign in quite the way Theresa May did with her pledge to impose extra taxes on people to pay for social care in her 2017 manifesto.
Some will be pleased that, unlike Liz Truss, Mr Sunak has not sought to introduce unfunded tax cuts (even if there are a fair few question marks about how reliable all his revenue numbers are). And for those who crave a moderately sensible set of fiscal reforms, which should incentivise people to work more and improve the nation’s productivity, this manifesto will have proved quite satisfying.
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But for anyone looking for a game-changing moment of economic bravery, this was not it.
With that said, let’s discuss the main contours of this manifesto. The Conservatives are planning to cut taxes by £17.2bn. They also plan to increase spending by around £800m. They plan to pay for that by cutting welfare spending by £12bn and squeezing an extra £6bn out of tax avoiders.
There are some pretty big question marks over whether that money can be raised as easily as the manifesto implies. There are also some other question marks buried deeper in the Tory manifesto. For instance, that relatively small spending increase is actually a net number, dependent on some pretty big spending cuts.
But broadly speaking, it’s going too far to accuse this government of trying to inflict another Truss-style unfunded mini-budget on the UK. This is significantly less radical than that.
Indeed, the problem for many Conservatives is likely to be that it isn’t radical enough.
The Conservative manifesto
For while the cuts in National Insurance will slow down…
