A tale of two Gordons: why Gekko is right and Brown is wrong

The Eighties mantra ‘greed is good’ may be unfashionable, says Fraser Nelson, but it is still true. We have forgotten that wealth generates revenue, while high taxes crush prosperity and pauperise nations. Will the Conservatives have the guts to declare this economic truth?

Before Gordon Brown was writing books about political courage, the subject that fascinated him most was greed. He detected plenty of it when the Thatcher revolution was in full bloom. In 1987 he wrote a polemical book entitled Where There’s Greed, denouncing both the Conservatives and the ‘sinister insights of Adam Smith’. The surge in wealth on both sides of the Atlantic had that year been brilliantly caricatured by the Oliver Stone film Wall Street, in which the anti-hero, Gordon Gekko, proclaims that ‘Greed is good.’ To Mr Brown, people like Gekko with their brazen belief in untrammelled wealth creation were the enemy: morally, politically and economically.

It has taken this Gordon two decades to serve up his revenge on the other. And, for Brown, the sweetest feature of his 50p tax on the affluent is that — thanks to electoral timing — it will be imposed on his class enemies by his political enemies. As Mr Brown correctly calculated, David Cameron has said he would keep the tax but that it would be — as Pitt the younger said of income tax — a temporary measure. This is not a battle Mr Cameron and George Osborne dare wage: attacking the very idea of high taxes for high-earners. It would expose them to the attack line they fear most: that they lead a party of the rich, for the rich. The Gordon Gekko party, in other words.

The pollsters, who have all too great an influence in the shaping of Tory policy, report that the proposed tax on the rich is popular.