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Neil Reddin: Shifting the centre rightwards

Neil Reddin, a Councillor in the London Borough of Bromley, looks ahead to the election after next.

We no doubt benefited from protest votes last Thursday, only some of whom may be likely to turn voting Conservative into a habit come the General Election. Even so there are also those who, as Boris Johnson identified, had their pencils hovering for a moment before voting for us. Come 2010, the hoverers could well make the difference between us winning and losing - or, being optimistic, between a wafer thin or a stonking majority. It will be the likes of the NUT member who admitted to voting Conservative, on a radio phone-in show last Friday, who could make that difference.

The bigger challenge in our first four years in government will be to crystallise those pencil wavers into habitual Conservative voters. Part of that process, of winning the 2014 General Election, must begin now.

The best way to sustain the new Conservative revival, in the long term, is not so much to keep the party closer to the centre of the political spectrum (though that is invariably where elections are won from), but to shift that centre point rightwards. We have a window of opportunity in the next few years, a period when people are no longer shy of admitting voting Conservative, a period when we have the ear of the media at last.

Neil Reddin: The right to avoid tax

Neil is a Chartered Certified Accountant and is also the cabinet member for Resources in the London Borough of Bromley.

Backdating legislation, double crossing small businesses, holding public services hostage – who really has the moral high-ground on tax avoidance?

One of the earliest charges that the Conservatives levelled against the “New” Labour government was that of taxing by stealth – and it has stuck and become embedded in the lexicon of politics. Not bad for a party that had then only recently suffered the biggest electoral defeat for ninety years.

Yet beneath the top of the stealth tax iceberg is a chaotic web of loophole-plugging and amendments that have left the UK’s tax system one of the most complicated in the world. A system where many “simplifying measures” only add to a complexity that even those operating the system – those working for HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) – have difficulty keeping up with.

This leads us to another aspect – it is to do with the volume of tax legislation which serves to tackle anti-avoidance. Of course, so much of any tax statute is aimed at plugging “loopholes”, but there has been a discernable shift in the attitudes behind the measures - from a reluctant acceptance that anti-avoidance is part of the game played between the tax authorities, taxpayers and their agents - to something more insidious.