How Labour’s 50p tax trick has ended up helping George Osborne

Last week’s public borrowing and tax-receipt figures, headlined ‘Chancellor hails biggest monthly surplus in seven years’, received considerably less attention than the employment and wage-growth numbers a week earlier, underlining my belief that voters care a lot less (or indeed not at all) about the intangible ‘fiscal deficit’ and its implications than they do about their own prospects and spending power. And rightly so. Failure to shrink the deficit at the rate he first promised is nevertheless the one major issue on which George Osborne is seriously open to criticism as Chancellor. But what matters in political terms at this stage is that borrowing this year is 7.5 per cent down on last year and can be described as ‘on track’ — while tax revenues are up by 3.1 per cent after a long run of near-zero growth. Within the tax figures, corporate payments for January were up a billion on the same month last year, a useful answer to the accusation (even if it’s largely true) that HMRC is slack in pursuit of tax-minimising multinationals.