Jonathan M Scott: Darling, the tax-cutter? No. It's Brown, the Sub-Prime Minister

Dr Jonathan M Scott, an enterprise educator and an entrepreneurship policy researcher at Queen’s University Belfast and author of the Wilted Rose blog, looks at the significance of Labour's pre-by-election tax bribe.

Perhaps one of the most remarkable outcomes of the contest at Crewe & Nantwich is the resultant positioning of Alistair Darling as a “tax-cutter”.  The Chancellor has achieved tax cuts, something that has been unthinkable in recent years, in an attempt to win a crucial by-election.

The tax debacle was self-imposed, as one of Brown’s last careless actions as Chancellor in 2007 when he too tried to position himself as a “tax-cutter” by reducing the 22p income tax band to 20p to produce sensational headlines.  Maybe the Brown bounce that followed his coronation as Supreme Leader of the Labour Party, and our Prime Minister, was partially caused by people’s elation that Brown had cut tax when the Tories didn’t dare do so due to the myth of public opinion?  (This myth is the left-liberal notion that the electorate was prepared to pay higher taxes because they believed, falsely, that the alternative was reductions in public services).  The Brown bounce lasted an even shorter period of time than the misguided belief that the tax cut was without a hidden stealth tax. The myth of public opinion has also evaporated: people are now hurting financially, and need some immediate remedy.

Jonathan Scott: Is Cameron's message being heard in the North?

Jonathan Scott is a former Conservative councillor and head of the Yorkshire based Tory supporting think-tank, Conservative Vision.

Following the local elections in May, up and down the country, David Cameron said, the Tories had made big gains in what were once Labour and Liberal strongholds. Understandably, Cameron could barely contain his glee – having successfully spun the idea that the party might actually lose seats he was able instead to savour the sweet taste of electoral success.

So unfamiliar has this taste been for the Conservatives over the last fourteen years that there is a danger the party could allow its intoxicating effects to blind them to the geographical limits of our success.

Winning key seats in London is, of course, vital to the Conservative renaissance, but victory in the South should not be allowed to obscure the party’s real shortcomings in the North.

Indeed, if Cameron is not careful the geographical boundary between our growing strength in the South and our continuing relative weakness in the North, could harden into a political divide that will take years to overcome.

No one should doubt Cameron is moving fast, that he his changing the public and private face of the Conservative Party. But on the doorsteps in the cities and towns of the North of England, few Tory canvassers found the Cameron message of voting blue to go green, resonated with the party’s core vote or those contemplating switching their vote to the Conservatives.