The Spectator’s Notes | 29 November 2008

In his speech announcing his Pre-Budget Report, Alistair Darling said that he was going to put up the top rate of income tax to 45 per cent from 2011, because he wanted the burden to be borne by ‘those who have done best out of the growth of the past decade’.

In his speech announcing his Pre-Budget Report, Alistair Darling said that he was going to put up the top rate of income tax to 45 per cent from 2011, because he wanted the burden to be borne by ‘those who have done best out of the growth of the past decade’. This was not only, as many have said, an abandonment of a New Labour article of faith about tax rates: it was also an admission that the past ten years have not worked. The Blair/Brown view was always that the purpose of holding the top rate at 40 per cent was that this, by increasing general prosperity, benefited ‘the many, not the few’.