Here’s a better way to run Gordon’s asylum: pay attention to the inmates

To put the lunatics in charge of the asylum makes admirable sense. They are the market for its services. They know where the straitjacket pinches. The Commissioner in Lunacy may think that he knows better, but the sum total of their knowledge must be more than he, cocooned in some distant office, could conceivably deploy. The Treasury pays lip service to these principles, but it always expects to know best, and better, certainly, than the two million customers for its tax credits who seem to have been sent the wrong amount of money. These credits were Gordon Brown’s invention, based on an idea that his factotum, Ed Balls, had brought back from America. The tax system, they believed, could be operated like a two-way vacuum cleaner, adapted so that it could blow as well as suck. Money could move in both directions through the sturdy old PAYE machine, and employers would be left to make it work. The proud inventor pushed out variants in every direction — credits for pensioners, credits for children…. Quite soon we would all be dependent on his credits for our marginal income. Enough of the money he sucked from our wallets would be blown back to us to buy his party a perpetual payroll vote. It is not working out as he intended. The machine is playing up and the market is resistant.

Give it back, it’s mine

The first sign of trouble was an advertising campaign, with a picture of a five-pound note and a slogan: ‘Pick it up, it’s yours.’ This was meant to promote pension credits. Half the people who would be entitled to them had not bothered to apply. How baffling. Didn’t these people know what was good for them, or didn’t they realise that other people knew better? Were they so deranged as to think that struggling with a lengthy form and answering intrusive questions wasn’t worth a fiver? Now the Treasury needs a new slogan: ‘Give it back, it’s mine.’