Instead, both Conservatives and Labour hug a suffocating consensus on tax and spend that substantially ignores the deep structural reforms the economy so badly needs.
On both sides of the fence, the message is instead tailored to give the least possible offence in the key marginals that will decide the election’s outcome. It’s a deeply uninspiring show of status quo politics.
Business leaders tell me that after the chaos of the last eight years, they crave policy certainty above all else. Yet looking at the incumbents, they see only a ruinously divided party split almost beyond repair into multiple warring factions.
Sunak has thus far been unable to unite this seething mass of dissent. Even if by some miracle he does manage to defy the polls and secure a renewed majority, there’s little reason to believe he can restore discipline.
It feels like John Major in 1997 all over again, but without the charismatic and pro-business figure of New Labour’s Tony Blair to provide a reassuring alternative.
Labour’s offer this time around is as anodyne and unconvincing as Sir Keir Starmer himself – a largely vacuous and unknown policy agenda hiding behind the tired old political promise of “change”.
Beyond a crackdown on middle-class tax perks and a ramping up of workers’ rights, it’s hard to see anything that might notably be different under a Labour government.
This threatened assault on higher-income earners, by the way, might in itself give disillusioned Tory voters pause for thought. Labour policies we know about include VAT on school fees and the reimposition of the lifetime limit on pensions saving.
Other initiatives might include an attack on the tax-free lump sum from pension savings, making pension pots subject to inheritance tax, introducing capital gains tax on transferred assets after the death of a spouse, and increased income taxes via the back door of a social care levy.
Labour will need to scrape the bottom of the barrel in staying within the fiscal constraints that Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor, has imposed on herself to keep the markets sweet.
There are many such anomalies in the tax system that the Treasury would be only too happy to take aim at given the chance.
Yet sadly for Sunak, Project Fear won’t be enough. The gap in the polls is too wide to be closed by scaremongering alone. “Better the devil you don’t know than the one you do” is for now the prevailing mentality.
