Charles Moore’s reflections on the week
Actually, there never was much sense in a ten pence rate of income tax. It added complication, and Gordon Brown is right to get rid of it, though wrong to charge income tax on people so low on the income scale. But you cannot help laughing when you look at the history. Chancellor Brown himself introduced the ten pence rate in 1999. In a coup de théâtre, he said then that it was such a pressing thing that he would ensure that it came in at once, rather than waiting a year, as would have been normal: ‘nearly two million people will see their income tax bills cut in half’. It was, he said later, one of his ‘major changes to reward work’. When he got rid of his own ‘major change’ last year, he thought he was paving the way for a general election. He calculated that the abolition of the rate in return for a lower standard rate was a better thing in prospect than in reality, and so promised it for 2008. There was no election, and now it has all gone wrong. The funny thing is, Mr Brown has made the same mistake twice. He suddenly lost the confidence of the business community earlier this year when he abolished the ten pence rate resulting from business taper relief on capital gains tax. Again, he was attacking his own earlier — 10p — gimmick.
A friend once told me that when she was about to be 18, she asked her mother how, physically, one voted. ‘Oh, it’s very simple, darling,’ was the reply, ‘you just go to a polling station, take the ballot paper and put an X beside the one that says “Conservative”.’
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