The Conservatives have dusted off the George Osborne playbook ahead of conference season, with rumors that the party will promise to scrap inheritance tax at a cost of nearly £9 billion.

This is political strategy in its simplest form. Inheritance tax is very unpopular, with 58% of the public seeing it as unfair, and especially among higher-income, older voters in the “Blue Wall” of southern England. Kemi Badenoch’s line of thinking seems to be: scrap the tax, win back those voters, and stop the loss of support to Reform UK and the Liberal Democrats in the shires.

However, the only problem is that the party tried to do the same last year with a pledge to abolish stamp duty on primary home sales. Stamp duty is also unpopular, but it would be extremely costly to scrap — roughly as much as the same action on inheritance tax. Unfortunately for the party, the policy didn’t have much impact on support. Before the pledge, the Conservatives were third in the polls, trailing Labour and Reform; one year on, the Conservatives are third in the polls, trailing Labour and Reform. Although Badenoch’s personal favorability has improved, the party’s overall position has not.

The inheritance tax proposal hints at a sense of confusion about the Tories’ overall strategy. Labour is unpopular with large parts of the country and, despite the Andy Burnham bounce, the Government can barely get a third of the country onside. Reform lurches from scandal to scandal. The obvious conclusion is that the Conservatives should be building momentum to become Britain’s largest party. This tax proposal is clearly part of a “one more heave” approach to victory.

There are good reasons to be skeptical about whether this strategy can work. Firstly, pledging to cut inheritance tax and stamp duty is hardly a dynamic new narrative. If there is one thing the public knows about the Conservative Party, it’s that it likes to promise tax cuts. The problem is that the public does not trust the Conservatives to deliver them, given their record in office since 2010. The second big reason for skepticism is the terrible state of the public finances. The Conservative Party has repeatedly criticized Labour for not doing enough to cut the deficit and public debt, including on Badenoch’s own social media account. Claiming the state is running out of money and then offering a tax cut that will benefit just 30,000 families is hard to justify.

In this sense, scrapping inheritance tax and pledging to abolish stamp duty speak to a broader question: what is the Conservative Party offering? Polling from earlier this year found that 69% of the public believe the political system needs radical change and 66% say Britain is heading in the wrong direction. Tax cuts for wealthier families do not address that, nor do they show recognition of the public mood about the broken state of the British economy.

The Conservative Party is stuck in a rut, defending a status quo that very few people want, except perhaps wealthier voters in the shires. Letting go of this status quo is risky, because the Tories are closely associated with it. This fear of the new leads the party right back to the same old tool: tax cuts.

But, with politics in flux, there is a chance to capitalize. Further scandals may wreck Reform, and the Burnham project may fall apart. However, the Conservatives is far from promising because the party does not want to take risks. The promise to scrap inheritance tax is the latest sign that it is out of fresh ideas and waiting until other parties completely unravel. It’s a gamble that doesn’t look as though it’s working out.

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Andrew O’Brien is the former Director of Policy at the think tank Demos and currently Head of Secretariat of the Independent Commission on Neighbourhoods. He writes in a personal capacity.

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