The most remarkable poll of the week was the one which suggested the British public find Ed Miliband more of a toff than David Cameron. It takes something to out-toff an Old Etonian with a patrician air and liking for green wellies. But is it so very surprising? Ed has, after all, just shown himself to be on the friend of wealthy idlers, by hinting that the brunt of tax rises in a Labour government would fall instead on those who work for a living.
Ed Miliband began well in the last Prime Minister’s Questions before the election. He noted David Cameron’s direct answer to James Landale’s direction question on his future as prime minister and then posed the Prime Minister a direct question of his own: could he rule out a rise in VAT? Then it turned horribly into an own goal. Cameron caught Miliband off-guard by replying yes, he could rule it out, and then posed a direct question of his own which Miliband ignored altogether: could Labour rule out a rise in National Insurance contributions?
It is fairly clear, then, that a Miliband government would carry on where Gordon Brown left off: it will jack up National Insurance in the belief that this is a form of taxation which taxpayers notice less than income tax. Brown may have been right on this: there was a lot less squealing when he upped rates than there would have been had he broken Labour’s 1997 promise to increase income tax rates. But it does leave Labour in a peculiar position: as a party which claims to represent working people and yet which imposes on them a higher rate of taxation than it does on people who live off rents and dividends.
In the 1970s Labour punished unearned incomes with a punitive, extra rate of taxation. Now it does exactly the opposite. Maybe jacking up National Insurance makes for a slightly easier budget day, but I cannot believe that your average Labour voters are not one day going to notice the contradiction of a party which claims to favour strivers yet actually favours trustafarians.
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