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The credibility crunch

Wednesday, 14th May 2008

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

No less robustly, Mr Darling insisted to the BBC’s Andrew Marr on 20 March that ‘what I can’t do is to rewrite the budget’. Yet — no less wretchedly — that is precisely what he did on Tuesday, desperate to prevent by-election disaster and backbench rebellion over the Finance Bill.

So much for Mr Brown’s fixation with ‘long-term decisions’. His decisions, we now know, are entirely provisional and subject to reversal depending upon the political context of the day. As Chancellor, Mr Brown’s favourite mantra was that there would no return to the supposed ‘boom and bust’ of the Tory years: no short-termism, no opportunism. As PM, he has routinely attacked Mr Cameron for putting political expediency first and for economic illiteracy. This will be a much harder charge to make now that Labour has dug its own £2.7 billion black hole, throwing fiscal caution to the wind in a last desperate bid to win a single by-election. And next time you hear a minister or Labour spokesman accusing the Tory party of promising ‘an unfunded tax cut’, remember Mr Darling’s panic measure this week. This is a government that talks grand strategy, but lives hand to mouth.

Which in turn should give Mr Cameron pause for thought. Yes, he faces an enfeebled, exhausted Prime Minister fighting for his life. The Conservatives are more confident and energised than for many years, and with good reason. But the shamelessness with which Mr Brown has used the nation’s credit card in a last-ditch bid to buy next week’s by-election shows how brutal and bloody the months ahead will be. This is a Prime Minister who will do anything — anything — to cling to power.

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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.

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