Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Ed Balls’s secret: he doesn’t care whether his tax plan makes sense

Plus: What's next for RBS, and Karl Slym's brilliant career

There were a million people who voted Labour in the 2005 general election but not in 2010, when the party fell from a 66 majority to 48 seats behind the Tories. Thanks to the Lib Dems’ spiteful rejection of boundary changes that would have helped their coalition partners, the 2015 poll is already rigged in Labour’s favour by about 30 seats, so the number of floaters who have to be won over to give Miliband and Balls a working majority is likely to be well down in six digits rather than seven. No doubt Labour’s pollsters know how many to the nearest thousand, and have them segmented and profiled to the last housing estate.

Not many are likely to be business leaders, wealth creators, tax economists, Today listeners or Spectator readers. But as one of the party’s gurus explained to me gleefully last week, those million-minus are the only people Ed Balls needs to talk to. He doesn’t give a toss what the rest of us think of him — being hated by true blues actually helps his mission. And he doesn’t have to come up with sensible, costed policies. He just has to reach out to the electoral slice — thinner than the iceberg lettuce in the national Big Mac — that has the power to put Labour back in Downing Street. Since this obviously can’t be done by talking about their record in power, and ‘the cost of living crisis’ is rapidly running out of road, he and the other Ed think the path to victory is to persuade their chosen audience that Tories, banks, energy companies and people who prosper by their own efforts are all part of an evil conspiracy to keep everyone else poor.

And that of course is the entire rationale behind his pledge to restore the 50p top rate of income tax.

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