Politics | 11 July 2009

The debate over the 10p tax controversy on Tuesday was more like a requiem for the Labour party than a rebellion. MPs spoke mournfully about how — yet again — their government would hit the poorest hardest. Gordon Brown had used the 2007 Budget to trick newspapers into reporting that he had lowered the basic rate of tax — when, in fact, he had doubled the 10p starting rate, and left millions of low earners worse off. The Prime Minister had chosen deceit over principle, and Labour MPs had gathered, once more, to discuss what this said about their party.

Why, David Drew, MP for Stroud, asked, is the government causing such ‘hurt amongst core Labour supporters?’ Kate Hoey (Vauxhall) read out a letter from a constituent conveying ‘outrage towards my Labour government that such an attack should be made on low earners like me’. What, Lynne Jones (Birmingham Selly Oak) wanted to know, is so difficult about raising the thresholds and taking people out of tax altogether? Taxing the many not the few, said Frank Field (Birkenhead), ‘flies in the face of what the party is all about’.

As they know perfectly well, the truth is far worse. It is bad enough that Gordon Brown’s spending has almost bankrupted the country. Worse for his own party that he has achieved staggeringly few Labour goals in the process. It is hard to argue that Labour can even be described as ‘progressive’ when one considers its recent record. To understand the existential crisis gripping the party, one must look beyond the opinion polls and deficit figures. By its own yardsticks, the Labour mission must — now that we have 12 years of hard data to examine — be judged an abject failure.

How much easier it was for these MPs to be part of the Labour tribe in the mid-1990s, when a vote for the party was a vote for the poor.