The Tories' Council Tax Freeze was a pure Home-Owner-ist electoral gimmick, of course: vote Tory and we'll reduce taxes on land ownership.
It's nonsense, because the central government has to bribe councils to freeze their council tax with higher grants out of centrally collected taxes; so people think they are "saving" £100 in tax (highly visible Council Tax) but they are not, on average, saving anything because they have to pay an extra £100 in income tax, VAT etc.
(That said, I don't know whether to laud Council Tax for at least being a distant cousin of Land Value Tax or to damn it for being, in practice, a Poll Tax. In the grander scheme of things it is an irrelevance, raising only about 5% of all taxes).
Labour were no better when in power, Tony Blair used to boast that Labour councils had the lowest average Council Tax. This is quite possibly true, but that was not because they spent less, it was because they got much higher grants from the Labour-controlled central government.
On The Sunday Politics today, a Tory MP pointed out that the reason why the Tories had lost control of so many London borough councils to Labour was precisely because of the Council Tax freeze; voters could merrily vote for Labour to run their council, knowing that the Tory central government will protect the from Council Tax increases.
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