The chickens come home to roost

Fergus Pickering

Brown is not interested in poor people who are not, as it were, on his payroll. So he wants to make them poorer so that they will have to sign up. EXTERMINATE EXTERMINATE

The Laughing Cavalier

A year ago when this was announced Gordon was still riding high on his (undeserved) reputation for economic competence. Now he is in trouble as the potemkin nature of the economy he has created is becoming apparent. At last the backbenches have found it in themselves to protest when they didn't have the courage to do so previously.

Slim Jim

This is yet another plate that Traitor Brown is spinning. What progress has been made over the dodgy donations scandal? Yes, the May elections could well prove to be the signal that his unmandated, unelected reign is over.

Faceless Bureaucrat

The Trevor Kavanagh piece says much about quite how badly wrong Gordon Brown's premiership has gone. That such a piece should appear in The Sun of all newspapers ('It's The Sun Wot Won It') is almost as incredible as if The Guardian started supporting Boris Johnson in the Mayoral Election. Gordon Brown craved the job of PM without ever considering whether or not he might actually be up to it. The real tragedy is that the people of the UK must suffer the consequences of his ineptitude until such time as he is removed from no.10. So much damage could be done to the nation in the intervening period, some of it potentially irreparable. How did it all come to this?...

Steve

I really struggle to work out how no-one in the treasury noticed this one coming. It looks like a massive political miscalculation to me. My bet is that numbers where cynically crunched and someone calculated that winning the votes of all those grateful for the 2p reduction, would offset the loss of votes from those hit by the 10p increase. I suspect they didn't notice that there is a sense of fair play at large, and if The UK population need to tighten their belts, you don't start by targeting the very poorest in society. As for Jane Kennedys "defence" of this, which was basically "shut up you ungrateful peasants, you got quite enough last time" It made me think, so how many of your constituents (she represents a dirt poor Liverpool seat) are going to take a hammering then?

Robert Williams

Steve mentions cynicism, it appears to be continuing. First we had Greg Pope MP conned into withdrawing his critical EDM after receiving reassurances, only for the possibility of U-turn to be dismissed yaesterday by John Hutton. Then Hutton claims that the maximum loss is only 0.5% (fuss about nothing) when it is closer to 3%.

J H Holloway

if you think back to the last Gordo budget, this move was a stunt to lower middle-rank income tax and get one over on the Tories.

You might also remember the stunt of travelling to iraq in the middle of the 2007 Tory conference and all he got was terrible press.

Gordo's stunts - which have no other purpose than to try and stiff the Tories - have done him great damage.

Jennie

The Labour backbenches have suddenly discovered some moral fibre, as an imminent defeat for Ken could be the harbinger of the loss of their seats in a couple of years' time.