One of the Tories most effective attacks on Labour during the 2010 general election has just come back to haunt them.

When Labour proposed a 10% levy on estates to fund social care, the Tories branded it a “death tax” on billboards featuring a gravestone bearing the words: RIP OFF.

It’s not looking so clever now.

The Tories are facing exactly the same accusation over their newly announced social care policy – including from their own supporters.

The Tories abandoned their commitment to capping the cost of social care and have instead announced plans to make pensioners pay for their own care out of the value of their homes.

They won’t have to sell their homes while they’re living, but their relatives will once their gone to pay-off the care costs debt.

The Bow Group, which is the Tory party’s oldest think tank, have described the proposal as the “biggest stealth tax in history”. Chairman Ben Harris-Quinney said:

“It is a tax on death and on inheritance. It will mean that in the end, the government will have taken the lions share of a lifetime earnings in taxes. If enacted, it is likely to represent the biggest stealth tax in history and when people understand that they will be leaving most of their estate to the government, rather than their families, the Conservative Party will experience a dramatic loss of support.”

Added to an end to the triple lock on pensions and cuts to winter fuel payments, the Tory manifesto hammers the elderly.

I think they call it a blue rinse…