Polly Toynbee's response to George Osborne's speech merely illustrates how debased political debate has become.
First, we get Osborne utterly misunderstanding the case for tax cuts. In ruling out a promise to cut taxes he said:
That will be a disappointment to a few in my party. They think the key to winning general elections is to make up-front promises of tax cuts.
No, George. Conservatives don't want tax cuts because they're popular. They want them because they are the right thing to do. They believe the state is too big, and should be cut back. Osborne never addresses this point.
Then we get Polly's almost wilful stupidity. First, she interprets Osborne's speech in a completely opposite way to almost everyone else, so as to fit in with her pre-conceived worldview: "'Simplification' is new Tory code for cuts."
Then she utterly misunderstands the point of a flat tax, describing it as "the most regressive". This is plain false.
And then she misunderstands Tax Freedom Day:
Who exactly are the "people" who stop working for the state on June 3? Only the very, very rich, of course - the Notting Hill people. [Tax freedom day] can't be calculated exactly, since you can't apportion to individuals such things as corporation tax, nor individual VAT spending habits.
First, the Adam Smith Institute is open about the fact that the day applies to the average tax-payer, not to the rich.
Second, Polly's idea that you can't apportion VAT to individuals is true, strictly speaking, but misleading. In table 21 of this pdf, National Statistics does apportion VAT to deciles of the population.
And it finds that the tax burden upon the rich is actually lower than that on middle incomes. In 2004-05, the fifth decile of households with children - those with average incomes of £30,052 - paid 35.8% of income in direct or indirect taxes. The top decile paid just 35.6%.
Polly's idea that the tax burden is higher on the rich than on average earners is, therefore, just false. It's a fiction designed to give the impression that Gordon Brown is an egalitarian Chancellor. He's not.
Granted, these numbers are lower than the 42.2% implied by Tax Freedom Day. But that's because the latter include taxes upon companies.
Of course, these can't be apportioned to income groups. But it's a fair bet that corporation tax reduces some combination of wages or jobs, or means higher prices. So they fall on average earners.
And finally, she boasts that tax credits have reduced child poverty at the fastest rate since records began, without asking the question: could other arrangements have done so more efficiently? She thus perpetuates the illusion that the only policy alternatives are Cameron's statism versus Brown's statism.
I don't mention all this merely to bash Polly. What's really frustrating here is that there is a political vision that both Osborne and Toynbee are oblivious to. It's a vision of a smaller state which taxes the poor less and redistributes more.