Let them eat inquiries
The 10p rate losers must be feeling very honoured this afternoon. The government are moving heaven and earth for them. The momentous shift should happen sometime around 2009 in plenty of time for a general election.
Chief Secretary to the Treasury Yvette Cooper told MPs an inquiry into helping low paid families with children will now include those without children.
Is there anything that can’t be booted into the long grass with a review by these guys? Back in the age of nuclear paranoia they would have lobbied for the four minute warning to be reformed to a four month warning giving time for an inquiry to report back after the local elections.
Gordon Brown can deny this is hurting people all he likes. New Labour can say that ‘most’ people are better off. The fact is that a Labour goverment is making some of the poorest people in this country even poorer. On a day when Alistair Darling threw £50 billion at the banks and coming from a government only happy to bend over for anyone with a suit and a fat cigar, it’s all the more twisted.
Still, the parliamentary vote on this next Monday is going to be framed as a vote of confidence in Gordon Brown’s leadership which will tuck it all up nicely. I’m sure all those disgruntled Labour backbenchers will find bags of confidence between now and then.
Posted on April 21st, 2008 at 5:48 pm
| See also • So you run down to the safety of the town • A view from the opposition benches • Back (door) to Basics |
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What I don’t understand about the £50 billion bail out of the banks (apart from the fact that no meaningful conditions are being imposed - like for instance a cast iron requirement to lend out at the BOE base rate and on longer time periods instead of above the rate for 3-5 year time periods) is why they don’t cut out the middle man in the form of the banks and just provide the money direct through some form of mutual arrangement with small or no interest fees?
I mean, £50 billion would buy a £200,000 property for a quarter of a million families. And BLAIR knows how many council houses you could build for that much money.
Given that indications are that the £50 billion may not be the end of this taxpayer largess by the Government this seems to break all the rules of efficiency and effectiveness on any scale of measurement or assessment.
There can’t be a more stark or stupid example of the ideological dogma of “public bad, private good” than this waste of taxpayers money on a bunch of incompetant fly boys.
Sometimes it’s difficult to determine whether the country is being run by Arthur Mullard or Arthur Daley?
[...] Dave Hansell in the comments on the Bank of England’s £50 billion ‘mortgage rescue plan’: £50 billion would [...]
I like your idea, Dave.
The comment by Yvette Cooper, the continuance of policy by Gordon Brown and the lack of change of policy by Alistair Darling are all, simultaneously, disingenuous and arrogant - or all incompetent over some period of time.
It is just not credible that a competent government department would, unknowingly, come up with such a policy as abolishing the 10p income tax rate. They would have carefully considered all those who gain and lose, the fairness thereof and the political implications.
Likewise, the same criticisms must be laid at the feet of the New Labour majority in the House of Commons, who voted last year’s finance bill into law.
What actually is the case is that the whole shabby lot of the New Labour Party wanted the credit last year for cutting the ‘main’ income tax rate from 22p to 20p, whilst hoping that the bad news (of upping the introductory rate from 10p to 20p) would be forgotten, or forgiven as ‘history’.
It was just smoke and mirrors (as seen at the time by those with foresight and objectivity). However, the issues are not the transitory entertainment of the fairground, cinema or theatre, but the management and financing of the country.
The same approach has been effected in the slashing of pensions, through taxing their interest and gains more heavily, and then continuing to tax the pay-outs as before.
It all comes down to ordinary people (the electorate) only complaining loudly when they are actually disadvantaged, not for some future possibility, close or distant in time. This is one of the reasons why we have a representative democracy, rather than a direct democracy: so that people may elect those with foresight to represent them, and agree to pay them for the exercise of that foresight.
That the New Labour government is reduced to penalising their own constituency (on abolishing the 10p tax rate) is an indication of the desperate financial straits into which the whole country has been placed by the profligate incompetence of the Blair/Brown years.
I predict it will get much worse before it gets better.
Best regards