The Spectator’s notes | 26 April 2008

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.