I thought the Tories were meant to be the low tax party

There's a danger that, come the end of the day, it will be the Tories who are being least adventurous in their plans for cutting taxes in order to help beat the recession. That, to me at least seems a bit against the grain.

First we have the Lib Dems who have plans to cut up to £20bn and target these tax cuts at low to middle income earners and pay for it by closing tax loopholes for the rich.

Now we have the Tories who are restricting their promises to cutting NI payments for employers who take on people who have been jobless for more than 3 months.

I suspect that, in about an hour's time, we will get the usual blizzard of credit system proposals from Labour which will benefit some of the lowest earners, particularly families, but cost more in paperwork than they manage to give out to real people.

Let's look at the Tory proposals for a moment. They seem perfectly worthy to me. But just so very, well, timid. They almost seem like something that Gordon would propose. Tories don't do this sort of fiddling about at the edges. They do big bold gestures. Except now they haven't.

I think that when it comes to public understanding, the Tory proposals are going to seem very small beer indeed.