Brown’s Travails
Brown just can’t get out of the rut he’s in at the moment.
Quite why he thought that abolishing the 10p rate of income tax for lower earners that he himself had introduced was a good thing to do in his last Budget last year is beyond me. It was so obvious that it wasn’t good Labour politics to get people on low incomes to pay more tax. They sure as well won’t be grateful for ‘tax simplification’ when their income drops. The only surprise in this is that Labour MPs have taken until now to register their protest.
So we now have the extraordinary spectacle of the Conservative Party voting in favour or tax redistribution and the Labour Party voting against it a few days before the Mayoral and local elections on May 1. And meanwhile the bad news on the economy continues.
The silver lining for the government is that the latest opinion poll shows the Conservative lead slipping a little. Populus for the Times has the Tories on 39 per cent with Labour on 33 per cent. Voters seem to have forgotten the Budget which had prompted widespread misery and resulted in Cameron’s lead jumping to well over ten points.