Blink and you will miss it! After all the hyperbole, David Cameron has announced what the Conservative party would do to stimulate the economy and quite frankly it is pathetic. What a missed opportunity, he is so beset with trying to prove that he is ‘prudent’ that he fails to grasp the extent of the economic downturn on business and ordinary people. Quite frankly he is a fool. I did not think it was possible for the Conservative party to lose the next election given Labour’s pathetic 11 years of tax and spend, then spend even more and borrow. But I have to hand it to David Cameron, he is doing an excellent job of trying.

Now I know that Cameron relies heavily on his advisors, after all, what would he know about being unable to pay the bills? You could be forgiven for believing that I am a die-hard Labour supporter, but regular readers will know I am nothing of the sort. I have only ever voted Conservative, but I am now politically homeless, because I could never bring myself to support a party that lacks backbone, initiative and orginality, nor one that actively supports a leader that is clearly weak, patronising and lacking any conviction. Tony Blair didn’t win because he was young, it was because he was believable, love or hate his policies and beliefs, he divided public opinion in the same way that Thatcher did, but he was a conviction politician. For what it is worth, I also found him superficial, but that is my personal view because I didn’t like him either, I always felt he was quite prepared to heap icing on a biscuit and sell it as a wedding cake.

David Cameron proposes that business and the unemployed could be supported by a stimulus package which would provide national insurance tax breaks for those employers that are prepared to take on anyone that has been unemployed for more than 3 months. Now, this idea is not original, here is what I said on the 28th November 2008

Small business should be encouraged to take on the long term unemployed and those that are in receipt of disability benefits (some 2.5m), but can work. Small business employers could be offered a full rebate on all employer NIC’s for employees that are classed in either of these categories. This will assist small businesses, increase the opportunities available for the long term unemployed and result in a massive reduction in the burden on the state from those who are in receipt of benefits, rather than contributing. This initiative could be self-funding or even offer a surplus.

So clearly I would be supportive of this measure, but it just doesn’t go far enough, because it demonstrates a complete lack of understanding of the needs of small business. If a patient is bleeding to death, a bandage may make the first-aider feel as if he is making a contribution, but it will take a tourniquet to save the patient’s life. This tax initiative is okay, but it must be part of a package of measures, as I suggested in my original post on helping small business. Let me remind you Mr Cameron, in case your advisors haven’t told you, 12.5m people are employed by the SME sector, over 50% of all those employed. Something else many of your advisors will not have told you is that businesses will fight a lot harder to save a job, than they will to take on new people. In other words, you should be targeting help to keep people employed as well as supporting firms to take on new employees.

Of course no-one can criticise David Cameron for insisting that any tax cut measures need to be paid for, I couldn’t agree more. However, sometimes circumstances will dictate a variation in policy and outlook, even if it is short-term, of course natural leaders already know that. The current economic downturn in one such instance and a visionary, competent and an open-minded leader would recognise that. There are many government projects that could and should be shelved and this would save money, but equally, as Cameron rightly pointed out, it costs £8,000 per annum to support someone on benefits and there is the loss of tax revenues and national insurance to add on top of that. In other words, damned if you do, damned if you don’t. In this type of situation, I would sooner be seen as someone that was prepared to take risks, both financially and politically if I felt the results could save jobs and reduce the length and depth of the recession.

David Cameron’s tax tinkering would do more harm than good, he really needs to get out more. Relying on meetings with 3 business people for a TV show or advisors that have never run a business is not going to provide him with the depth of knowledge that is necessary to understand business, particularly small business. If he is relying on the same people to advise him of what to do on personal taxation, then I suspect there is no point in turning up to the press conference. David, get a grip, be a man for once in your life. Leaders lead, they don’t tip their toe in the water to see how cold it is, they must have the courage of their convictions but they should also be able to listen, digest and expand on new or radical ideas. This country does not need an also ran, to follow the Labour loser.