The spinning compass
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Much is understandably being made of the political ramifications of the quite remarkable mess Gordon Brown is now in over first his decision to scrap the 10p tax rate and then double back on himself by cushioning the blow for assorted vulnerable groups. First he denies there are to be many losers – according to the Telegraph he
even assured Tony Blair last year that scrapping the 10p rate would hurt only a few thousand workers, not the 5.3 million even the Treasury now accepts will lose outthen he performs a U-turn but announces a rescue scheme of such arcane complexity no-one can understand it (but you can be sure the benefits of it will melt away under scrutiny). And the only reason he did this at all, as David Cameron observed in the Commons exchanges today, was to buy off the serious rebellion amongst his seriously upset MPs who believe quite simply that he lied to them. His olive branch has thus turned into a boomerang; once again, this Prime Minister is on the floor, felled by a combination of gross policy error and maladroitness. So no wonder people are asking whether this is yet another ‘defining moment’ for the implosion of the Brown premiership.
But what leaps out at me is that this is the Gordon Brown who bangs on and on and on about ‘lifting people out of poverty’ – ostensibly his life’s mission -- and then goes and clobbers the poor. This is the Brown who seeks out every possible way to take money and privileges away from the middle class in order to help the poor, whom he then makes even poorer. We all know that his poverty agenda has in fact grossly failed the poor, but that’s a different matter. What we are looking at here in the abolition of the 10p tax band is a cold-eyed, deliberate mugging of the poor for a portion of their already meagre earnings.
It was never about helping the poor at all, of course. It was always about power.
So much for the rock of Caledonian granite. So much for the moral compass.