The Labour Party's response to last week's Budget saw the final nail hammered into the coffin of New Labour, with a response laden with class war rhetoric. The Socialists are clearly back in charge.
As Labour went on the offensive claiming that the budget was one for millionaires, I was given to thinking that we could do with a few more. Millionaires spend money and employ people. We won't get more millionaires if we keep taxing them out of existence.
This used to be something that the Labour Party recognised. Who can forget Tony Blair famously saying that "It's not a burning ambition of mine to make sure that David Beckham earns less money". Unlike many on the Labour benches today, Tony got it.
But of course Tony Blair is being airbrushed out of Labour's history as the court of Brown is in the ascendant. Somehow I am not sure that airbrushing from history their most successful prime minister is the most sensible political tactic, but who am I to worry about that?
The fact is that Labour did used to recognise that rich people were mobile. Indeed Ed Balls himself made exactly this point when he was City Minister. It is probably why Labour failed to introduce the 50p rate until 37 days before they left office. Call me a cynic, but it looks to me like a political trap set for an incoming Conservative government. If it was, it shows a set of tactics based more around playing the game of politics than doing the right thing by the economy and the country.
In my experience the electorate will recognise when a government is acting in good faith and doing the right thing. This was a budget that rewards work. This was a budget which saw the largest ever increase in the personal tax allowance to the benefit of 24 million ordinary families.
As someone who thinks everyone pays too much tax, I would have liked to see more from the Chancellor, but we do still have the legacy of Labour's debt to tackle. And keeping the 50p rate would not have made an iota of difference. It doesn't raise any additional money; it is the highest tax rate in the G20 and the tax changes announced by the Chancellor will raise more from the rich.
When Labour left office, £1 in every four spent by the government was borrowed. It is simply not sustainable to keep living beyond your means. And it wasn't just down to the financial crisis. Labour were already spending more than the country could afford.
Until Labour face up to the unpleasant truths of their role in the country's present economic crisis, their rhetoric is going to fail to convince. Playing the political game with aggressive putdowns which play to the gallery will only get them so far. The electorate want to hear what they will do - but that is just all too difficult.
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"........When Labour left office, £1 in every four spent by the government was borrowed. It is simply not sustainable to keep living beyond your means. And it wasn't just down to the financial crisis. Labour were already spending more than the country could afford......."
......no doubt true, but why did Labour have to borrow?
Couldn't be because the top echelon, through the monetarist policies embedded by the previous Tory administration, under Thatcher, had reduced the tax levels to levels that made the running of our nation unsustainable, or have you any alternative cause to offer.
It's easy to make a bald statement about what the Labour government did, or did not do, but where is your analysis of the cause?
Typical one shot Tory, make a claim then leave the room before the fight breaks out.
I meant to say "losing it" and "bellweather"
You are so out of touch. The fact is that the current Tory government (with tame Whig support) is loding it. Your leader is accident prone, clumsy, prone to makeing appaling gaffes that reveal his shabby innermost thinking, and you are falling in the polls.
Your NHS plans, which everyone warned you about, are going to cost your dearly at the next election. Your traditional Tory values of getting backhanders from rich donors are not playing well with us, the voters.
And Thurrock is a bleeweather seat, isn't it?
Tell me, Jackie - you know all that work you in the Tories and Whigs are doing to eliminate what Clegg calls "gold plated public sector pensions" - how are you doing on reforming your own pension scheme?
Between 1997-2007 (aka 'the good years'), national debt was lower every single year under the Labour Party than what it inherited from John Major's Government (around 65% GDP) - in fact, national debt was as low as 22% of GDP in 2002. As for Labour spending too much, public investment by the 1997-2010 Labour governments was almost the same as a proportion of GDP as it was under the Major government of 1992-1997.
It wasn't until our £1.5 TRILLION bailout of the banking sector that debt (which is still comparatively low, in any case) even became an issue.
Make no mistake, the reason we're facing an austerity package and a budget for millionaires is because Jackie's friends in the City have turned their private debts in our public debts.
But why would Tory MP Jackie Doyle-Price be defending the right of top earners to squirrel away ever greater sums for themselves, while at the same time helping to obfuscate for the fact that her chums in the City have wrecked the economy? It wouldn't have anything to do with the fact that she's a former employee of the City of London Corporation would it?
The economic and social elite that fund Jackie's Conservative Party have wrecked the economy and now we're paying for it while they lobby (successfully) for lower rates of tax to benefit themselves and, at the same time, avoid and evade £120 BILLION in tax every year.
Anyway we are not as much in debt today as a nation as much as we have been in the past. The debt that is the problem is the personal debt and this is something which the present government is willing to carry on with that is why students can get in a lot of debt, people will get into debt due to the cutting of legal aid and soon people will get into debt to pay for health costs.
For somebody who evidently regards themselves as an authority on matters of taxation, you also seem to confuse progressive and regressive taxation, and fail to invoke any evidence to support your 'theory' (based on the conventional wisdom of the wealthy) that reasonable headline rates of progressive tax will result in capital flight. Not only is there little evidence to suggest this is the case, but, even if it were correct, the UK-adjusted Laffer Curve suggests that such flight would only begin with a top rate of tax at around 70%. On both counts, it is your arguments that come across as weak, not those who expect the wealthy to contribute in accordance with their income - something, of course, that Adam Smith himself was a proponent of.
My advice would be, stop passing your Right Wing, monetarist ideology off 'economic fact' in the hope that the ignorant won't notice.
Sorry madam, but you really expect us to listen to your cant? Keep ion mind, without the Falklands, which gave her a out we would have seen the back of her and her corrupt political monetaryist policies.
We would probably have had a Labour government back in sans Blair and his populist and ultimate destructive march to war.
maybe even a return to regulation of the money markets thereby preventing the sub prime debacle.
And now your really expect us to worry about lightweight Milliband, who with any luck will walk the walk long before the next general election.