Gordon Brown's Tax U-Turn as Anticipated- Your Fired!
Politics / UK Politics Apr 23, 2008 - 05:50 PM GMT
Gordon Brown bottles it again in the face of escalating revolt against the abolition of the 10% tax band that hit 5.3 million of Britains poorest workers. This hit at the core of the Labour Party's values of redistribution of wealth from the rich to the poor. As stated In last saturdays article
Gordon Browns Abolition of the 10% Tax Band- Leadership Challenge? , that the logical thing for Labour to do would be a U-turn, otherwise the next election is as good as lost.
The tax hike on the poor made many Labour MP's sit up and realise that the days of Gordon Browns prudence, competence and decisiveness are long gone, first broken when he bottled out of an October 07 election. The Labour party clearly is coming to the view that the party's election prospects are not safe in Gordon's hands as virtually every major policy decision he makes backfires and therefore increases the probability of a leadership challenge.
The whole affair reminds me of episode 3 of the current run of the Apprentice, in that Gordon Brown resembles Simon to Tony Blair's Raef i.e Gordon is a great number 2 but is completely out of his depth as the project leader / Prime Minister. At this rate the Labour Party will Fire him within a year.
However the current tax storm may not be over as the government U-turn headline statements may not actually match the details. Frank Fields the architect of the rebellion initially accepted the U-turn in good faith, but given Gordon Brown's current lack of competence the U-turn may worded in such a way so as to make it unpalatable on close inspection, therefore all eyes are on Frank Fields to see if he decides the government has or has not fulfilled the rebels demands of a complete recompense for all low paid workers who were hit with the loss of the 10% tax band.
If the stated U-turn undoes the 10% tax band damage, then the pain of the U-turn will linger on for a few months more but it is in my analysis the best strategy for Labour than to let the wound fester and grow into the next election. The May elections will show exactly how much damage has been done to Labour as the voters brace themselves for Gordon's next big U-turn.
Whatever the final details, the facts are that in a time of increasing government spending and debt due to the slowing UK economy, and the continuing bailouts of the financial sector, the tax u-turn will cost the UK exchequer some £1 billion a year, which on face value is a small price to pay compared to the £100 billion so far pledged to the banks.
The whole affair just goes to show how bad a Prime Minister Gordon Brown is, he just cannot ditch the role of being a Finance Minister. The consequences of this are clear in that Alistair Darling is basically seen as Gordon Browns puppet without any real presence or clout in the city. Hence the heads of the major banks are able to get away with treating the chancellor as an idiot by spoon feeding him mis-information in support of literally unlimited amounts of free money from the Treasury in exchange for un-priceable and thus effectively worthless mortgage backed securities.
By Nadeem Walayat
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