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Wednesday 9 July 2008

The Spectator's notes

Charles Moore's reflections on the week

Actually, there never was much sense in a ten pence rate of income tax. It added complication, and Gordon Brown is right to get rid of it, though wrong to charge income tax on people so low on the income scale. But you cannot help laughing when you look at the history. Chancellor Brown himself introduced the ten pence rate in 1999. In a coup de théâtre, he said then that it was such a pressing thing that he would ensure that it came in at once, rather than waiting a year, as would have been normal: ‘nearly two million people will see their income tax bills cut in half’. It was, he said later, one of his ‘major changes to reward work’. When he got rid of his own ‘major change’ last year, he thought he was paving the way for a general election. He calculated that the abolition of the rate in return for a lower standard rate was a better thing in prospect than in reality, and so promised it for 2008. There was no election, and now it has all gone wrong. The funny thing is, Mr Brown has made the same mistake twice. He suddenly lost the confidence of the business community earlier this year when he abolished the ten pence rate resulting from business taper relief on capital gains tax. Again, he was attacking his own earlier — 10p — gimmick.

A friend once told me that when she was about to be 18, she asked her mother how, physically, one voted. ‘Oh, it’s very simple, darling,’ was the reply, ‘you just go to a polling station, take the ballot paper and put an X beside the one that says “Conservative”.’ It is a great virtue of the ‘first-past-the-post’ system that almost anyone can understand it. Unfortunately, the London mayoral election next week takes place on a system of first and second preference, and I find that a good many people who want to vote for Boris Johnson are either unaware of this, or do not know how it works. So let me pass on the authoritative explanation: when you enter the polling station, you will be given a pink paper for the mayoral election. The ten candidates will be listed, with two columns against their names, one saying, ‘1st choice’, the other, ‘2nd choice’. Beside the name ‘Boris Johnson’, you should put an X in the box marked ‘1st choice’. You may leave the ‘2nd choice’ box empty if you want, but not the ‘1st choice’ box. Because of the system of redistribution, second-preference votes benefit only the top two candidates. So if you want to vote for, say, the Liberal Democrat candidate first and Boris second, that might help Boris, whereas a vote for Ken Livingstone first and the Liberal Democrat second does nothing whatever for the Liberal Democrat. Apparently the postal version of the ballot is harder to understand, so I hope it is good news for the Boris camp that far larger numbers of postal votes have been cast in Conservative boroughs such as Wandsworth and Barnet than in Labour ones like Tower Hamlets, and not some ghastly mistake.

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