This is not a 10p tax moment
Last night, one minister came up to me nervously and asked, ‘is this our 10p tax moment?’ He was talking, obviously, about the decision to take child benefit away from households with a higher rate taxpayer in them. My answer was no. The comparisons with Brown’s removal of the 10p tax rate miss a crucial point: Brown tried to hide what he was doing. In his final Budget statement to the Commons, the abolition of the 10p rate wasn’t even mentioned. Instead Brown boasted about a 2p reduction in the basic rate, to huge cheers from the Labour benches. By contrast, the Tories have been upfront about the