“Isn’t it rather amazing the Conservatives haven’t done research to see whether a key part of their agenda actually works?”

No.

As I’ve covered here, a lot of the Tory’s policies will actually have a negative effect on families.

Sunny – as my flatmate just pointed out, they’ve been fairly careful about claiming the policy will be effective, because even supposing there is a difference between married and cohabiting couples, they know that three pounds a week is unlikely to have much of an impact on couples marital decisions anyway.

The Tories seem to have a bit of a mental block on marriage. They are unable to grasp that it isn’t the act of marriage itself that magically improves peoples lives, but that the sort of people who choose to get married are different from the sort of people who choose not to get married, and therefore you can’t really compare the two groups directly.
Polly Toynbee was on the Daily Politics a month or two ago being interviewed on this along with Nadine Dorries. Toynbee made this point and Dorries completely ignored her and restated the Tory position “statistics show that people who get married have better lives” or something similar. Yet another lack of understanding of basic statistics.
Please let the polls be right so we can ensure that these mental midgets are never in power again.

Gaf – I know from experience that there are a lot of people who think in the same way as the Tories. It’s the same flawed thinking behind “prison works” and “diversity destroys community”. It may be largely bollocks, but it makes sense to people, so it’s very easy for them to ignore evidence that contradicts their own prejudice.

Unfortunately you can’t win public debates with regression analyses.

“Unfortunately you can’t win public debates with regression analyses.”

That’s probably true but the ascendancy of irrational and unsupported political rhetoric cannot be allowed to pass unremarked.

Cameron launched the “Britain is broken” meme so voters naturally expect him to come up with plausible solutions.

Tax breaks for married couples and the Big Society notion – whatever that means – are the answer.

There’s nothing especially novel about this kind of political con. Following the French Revolution, Robespierre proposed creating the “virtuous society”. It seemed to naturally follow that his critics were opposed to “virtue”, which meant they could be put on a fast track through a trial to the guillotine.

then see http://www.respublica.org.uk/blog/2010/04/fall-out-ifs-latest-study-marriage-time-grown-discussion for a discussion, with lines like:

“If politicians would like to see more people getting married (and being better parents) they should make sure people get a proper education, a job that is paid well enough and make it easier for people to get on the housing ladder.”

“Isn’t it rather amazing the Conservatives haven’t done research to see whether a key part of their agenda actually works?”

No, because it’s not supposed to “work,” it’s supposed to appeal to natural Tory voters and the “average British family.”

You might as well ask why the Tories think their inheritance tax policy will “work” to produce a fairer tax system and benefit ordinary hard-working Britons.

@7: “You might as well ask why the Tories think their inheritance tax policy will ‘work’ to produce a fairer tax system ”

The fact is that the incidence of the inheritance tax falls disproportionately on residents of London and the South East region simply because houses are often the largest assets in legacies and houses in London and the South East are more expensive on average than in other regions.

Besides, the nine million people who live in the South East Counties paid £17.7 billion in taxes to the Exchequer in 2005/06, nearly twice those paid by the seven million people who live in London. As one of the most economically successful regions of the UK, this makes the vitality of the South East crucial to the success of the rest of the UK.
http://www.oef.com/free/pdfs/finance_report(oct07).pdf

For a map showing the extent of fiscal regional subsidies and regional net exchequer contributions, try:
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/article-23416323-details/The+REAL+north-south+divide:+South-East+is+'bankrolling'+Britain/article.do

“As one of the most economically successful regions of the UK…”
Surely that explains right there why the south east and London pay proportionately more tax, a far better explanation that positing (but not expanding on at all) some anti-south east bias.

To say that IHT falls disproportionately on people in the SE and London doesn’t imply that the system is unfair at all, since the whole point is to tax assets and people in the SE (ex hypothesi) have more assets. The £300,000+ inherited is still worth £300,000.

Ensuring that very few south easterners are paying IHT and very few people in the rest of the country are paying IHT wouldn’t make the situation any fairer at all: the inheritance tax giveaway is demonstrably only possible at the expense of those worse off members of society who won’t ever get close to a £300,000 inheritance.

“To say that IHT falls disproportionately on people in the SE and London doesn’t imply that the system is unfair at all, since the whole point is to tax assets and people in the SE (ex hypothesi) have more assets. The £300,000+ inherited is still worth £300,000.”

Just how disproportionate does the incidence of IHT have to be before it becomes “unfair”, especially since tax paying residents of London and the South East regions are already bank rolling public spending in all other regions in Britain apart from the East region?

Some factors which could relate to this issue.

At the time of the last full population census in 2001, getting on for half the ethnic minorities in Britain lived in London:

“In 2001 minority ethnic groups were more likely to live in England than in the other countries of the UK. In England, they made up 9 per cent of the total population compared with only 2 per cent in both Scotland and Wales and less than 1 per cent in Northern Ireland. The minority ethnic populations were concentrated in the large urban centres. Nearly half (45 per cent) of the total minority ethnic population lived in the London region, where they comprised 29 per cent of all residents.”
http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=263

According to this BBC Newsnight report in April 2008 about why London is different, 40 per cent of London residents were born abroad:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7368326.stm

This may explain why there is so little popular pressure to reform the IHT, the incidence of which falls disproportionately on residents of London and the South East.

@ Bob B

Not to get into the regional funding debate but while the less productive regions continue to lose their best trained and most motivated young people to London and the South East I think those left to labour in the less productive provincial economies this results in deserve some compensatory advantages. If leaving more money to their children is one I don’t see that as a problem. I don’t really think it’s really possible to talk about inheritance tax in terms of fairness anway, as it is inherently unfair that some people inherit and others do not.

On your point about irrational politics, I don’t think it’s a particularly new phenomena. What was the reformation if not elite self interest sold to the public through irrational populism?

The problem for the left is how do you convince people who refuse to look at the evidence because they already ‘know’ the truth? How do you communicate complex information in a way that changes people’s minds, rather than simply alienates them?

@Bob B

But to what extent is the net wealth in housing in the South East the result of the effort of those living there, and to what extent is housing there worth more because of factors outside their control?

If a large part of the increase in housing wealth there (which is really a transfer of wealth from those without housing to those with it) is from things like poor planning, under-building, cheap money etc, then how much of that inheritance is really theirs?

I’m not saying that’s my opinion, but I’m curious how you’d deal with that.

@12: “Not to get into the regional funding debate but while the less productive regions continue to lose their best trained and most motivated young people to London and the South East I think those left to labour in the less productive provincial economies this results in deserve some compensatory advantages.”

One of life’s deeper mysteries is about how a relatively affluent place like Bristol manages to languish near the bottom of the local education authority (LEA) league table for England, year after year:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/8439650.stm

How come so many of Bristol’s schools in 2008 were deemed failing?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7444822.stm

I happen to live in the London borough which regularly comes at or near the top of that LEA league table yet it is not an affluent district. It doesn’t even feature in this league table of the 100 most affluent constituencies and it isn’t even a bigger spender on schools compared with other London boroughs:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-477325/League-Wealth-Tables.html

Btw some constituencies in the north of England come very high up in that league table of affluence. As an example, consider the ranking of Nick Clegg’s constituency: Sheffield Hallam.

@12: “What was the reformation if not elite self interest sold to the public through irrational populism?”

I don’t go along with that interpretation. If we look at the seminal consensus texts on Tudor history, we find that almost all of those 280+ burned at the stake for heresy in Mary Tudor’s reign 1553-58 were very ordinary, poor folk. The Oxford Martyrs, as commemorated on the wall of Balliol College, Oxford, were exceptional. By many contemporary accounts, Mary Tudor was popularly known in her life time as Bloody Mary.

The potential threat of an Armada from Spain in 1688 was widely understood – hence the beacon fires to signal sight of the Armada and the attacks on the Armada by small ships sailing out of Channel ports as compared with the large Galleons of the Armada fleet.

Why do we still celebrate the capture of Guy Fawkes on 5 November 1605? Large crowds attended his execution by hanging, drawing and quartering outside Parliament.

Why did King James II flee in 1688 and why did Parliament extend an invitation to William, Prince of Orange, to accept the throne and reign jointly with his wife Mary?

The Gordon Riots of 1780 were effectively a popular anti-Catholic pogrom which lead to fatalities and the destruction of property, including the burning down of Newgate Prison – the Old Bailey now stands on the site. The riots were not a minor affair.

How come the Duke of Wellington, as PM in the Lords, and Robert Peel in the Commons reportedly had so much difficulty pushing the Catholic Emancipation Act through Parliament in 1829?

The finer theological issues of the Reformation may have eluded the scope of popular sentiments but there can be little doubt that those popular sentiments in britain were fundamentally protestant. The empiricist and sceptical traditions of British philosophy is antithetical to the rationalist tradition of Catholic theology – which is how we got David Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion.

Sorry:

“The potential threat of an Armada from Spain in 1688 . . ”

That should be: The potential threat of an Armada from Spain in 1588 . .

Bob you’re confusing a cause and effect. England became enthusiastically protestant, that isn’t in dispute. But it didn’t become so because it was in the rational interest of the populace to read the bible in English, “take of both wine and bread” and have priests take wives. It became so because the anti-papal, anti-clerical and anti-Spanish rhetoric that was propogated to allow Henry’s divorce, Cromwell’s abolition of the monastic orders and Edward and Elizabeth’s wars struck an emotional chord within the mass of the populace.

I wouldn’t suggest that the protestant martyrs weren’t ardent believers in their faith nor that they weren’t representative of real protestant sentiment. But like the people who cling to the idea that marriage is a universal good or that prisons rehabillitate they weren’t acting in rational defence of their own interests, but in an irrational manner against their own interests due in part to the manipulations of the elites their faith did benefit.

@ Bob 10
That’s entirely missing the point. You’ve essentially not given any reason to think that the tax is disproportionate, all your figures show is that more people pay IHT in the area where people have more to inherit. That’s not a sign of it being disproportionate in the sense of unfairness or of any bias at all on the part of the system. It’s analogous to complaining that a “disproportionate” number of people living in big houses pay more council tax. Well yes, that’s the point, since the tax only targets those people inheriting a very large amount of money.

@ Bob 11
Is there any reason at all to think that there is unusually little popular pressure to reform IHT (on account of the fact that more people- are rich enough to- pay it in the SE), which needs explaining?

In fact reducing IHT seems to be disproportionately popular, with it being a very popular proposal for the Tories, despite 94% of households not paying it. Since it falls entirely on those people who are getting £300,000+ without any labour or merit of their own, it would rather be the fact that it has so much opposition that needs explaining. Of course that’s easily explained by pointing to the fact that lots of people, against all the evidence, continue to believe that there’s a half-reasonable chance of them ever paying it, and of course people emotively respond to the “death tax” but then that’s irrationalist politics for you.

@ 14 “One of life’s deeper mysteries is about how a relatively affluent place like Bristol manages to languish near the bottom of the local education authority (LEA) league table for England, year after year”:

Indeed – as a lifelong resident of Bristol and now a parent, that has always puzzled me. The Council actually celebrated the “acheivment” of moving up the table, from second to third from bottom a couple of years ago. No one seems to know the answer but it might be partly that a small number of very poor schools in the sink estates drag the average down, and partly the total incompetence of the local authority, who piss money away on self-promotion and some of whose politics make Ken Livingstone look like a right wing reactionary. The suburb I moved to is full of people like me who had to move here to avoid the “choice” of crappy Bristol schools .