A thin offering

So what’s left? Bits have been falling off New Labour like body-parts off a leper. Prudence is long gone. Today, as I blogged earlier, we lost the all-important principle that wealth creation is the basis of enhanced social justice. Which leaves the famous statement of ideological eclecticism that defined Tony Blair’s premiership if not his record: What Counts is What Works.

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Ross Clark

Britain is living beyond its means

And I cannot see how today’s package will work. This was an overwhelmingly political PBR, as one would expect of Gordon Brown: its ideological centrepiece was the fiscal stigmatisation of the well-off and the overt declaration by Alistair Darling that, since these voters had supposedly “done best out of the growth of the last decade”, they deserved to be walloped. No mention of the revenues these individuals have provided to the Exchequer as entrepeneurs, employers and income taxpayers.