Politics | 13 August 2008

Irwin Stelzer reviews the week in politics 

There are several ways one might look at Gordon Brown’s leaked plan to send £150 to each of the seven-plus million families receiving child benefit. The first, and kindest, is as an attempt to ease the coming winter’s budget strain on what Sir Brian Bender, permanent secretary at the Department of Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, during a first-class train ride from Leeds to London, too loudly dubbed ‘ordinary people’ — not the needy, the more numerous ‘ordinary’.

The second is as a straight-out election bribe, part of the ‘fight-back’ that the Prime Minister is planning for the autumn. Why he imagines that this will offset the unpopularity his policies and dithering have brought down upon his head escapes most observers. The voters have come to understand that what Brown giveth, Brown taketh away — he can only give them a portion of the taxes he has taken from them either directly or by stealth. The most likely result is that the voters will do a Woody Allen: take the money and run, in this case to the polling booths to vote for the Tories at the first opportunity.

The third possible interpretation is that the Prime Minister knows that the game is up, that he will soon be Leader of the Opposition, or worse, and that it would be fun and shrewd politics to leave the public finances in such a mess that the Tories would never be able to sort things out. After all, £1 billion here (the fuel allowance), several billion there (to compensate 22 million people for the loss of the 10p band), and soon you’re talking about real money, to paraphrase a politician in my country.