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The credibility crunch

Wednesday, 14th May 2008

The Spectator on Alistair Darling's 10p tax compensation package

In the Crewe by-election, Labour is defending the majority of 7,000 won by the late Gwyneth Dunwoody. After the disaster of the local elections and Boris Johnson’s triumph in London, Mr Brown knows that the loss of the seat to the Tories would make his position deeply vulnerable and might well transform the leadership speculation explored by Fraser Nelson on page 14 into an outright challenge. The PM is prepared to pay any price — literally, it would seem — to avert this outcome, and is painfully aware that David Cameron’s decision to make the by-election a mini-referendum on the 10p fiasco is proving successful. So Mr Brown is seeking to buy the seat on the never-never. Assuming that he wants to preserve Labour’s majority in Crewe, he is spending £385,714 for each of those 7,000 votes. And this from a man who said he wanted to purify campaign finance.

Herein lies the deeper problem facing Mr Brown, and one which will not be solved by any number of panic measures. On Tuesday, the government unveiled its mini-Budget and by-election sweetener; on Wednesday, Mr Brown delivered a preview of the Queen’s Speech, intended to relaunch his premiership and restore faith in his claim to office as man of substance and conviction. The trouble is that no inventory of policies, however worthy, can address the much more fundamental crisis now afflicting Labour.

It is no accident that Mr Brown’s fortunes turned around the time of the general-election-that-never-was last autumn. This protracted folly of speculation, arrogance and then loss of nerve dramatised the sense that the PM, far from being a man of iron, was a chronic ditherer — evasive, slippery, uncertain. The corollary has been a growing public distrust of what the government says about anything. To the credit crunch has been added a credibility crunch.

The crisis over the abolition of the 10p tax rate has entrenched this impression. Mr Brown’s first instinct was to deny furiously that there was a problem at all, insisting that the tax credit system would make up the difference. ‘There aren’t any losers,’ he told the Labour MP Eric Martlew at a meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party on 31 March — even though it was quite clear that the proposals would disadvantage 5.3 million people. Since then, Mr Brown has had to reverse his position, but only grudgingly and under the greatest parliamentary and electoral pressure.

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Nick-O

May 17th, 2008 3:31am

I hope Mr brown has not been watching Uncle Bob too closely.

Susan Wade Weeks

June 22nd, 2008 8:00pm

A little late in the day to be commenting on this, but Gordon Browns biggest mistake - because it informs all his mistakes - is his underestimation of and alienation from the public.

Never having had to deal with his own crazily complex systems of paralysing tax credits, an expensive and wasteful paper -shuffling farce involving snooping neighbours, humiliating and offensive gestapo-like fraud enquiries and other time-consuming and ruinaceous nonsense- well and truly milked by those who realise that the whole point of it is to just STAY ON IT and lie low-he cannot understand why people would prefer to keep more of their own money in the first place rather than have to beg for it back from an ever-burgeoning bureaucracy of impertinent, intrusive, fingerwagging, holier-than-thou, comfortably-pensioned bossy boots.