by Kevin Meagher
Of all Gordon Brown’s decisions – both good and bad – the most questionable, perhaps the oddest, and certainly the most irritating, was to award a peerage to Digby Jones and invite him into his government as trade minister.
What on earth was Gordon thinking? Jones – a corporate lawyer and former head of the CBI – is also a blowhard’s blowhard and has snapped at the hand that once fed him ever since. He can be relied upon as a rent-a-quote Labour basher these days and was at it again, jowls a-quivering, at Ed Balls’ pledge to restore the 50p top tax band for those earning over £150,000 a year. Reaching new heights of self-parody, he claimed:
“In the last few months we’ve got, oh, ‘if it creates wealth let’s kick it’ – really go for energy companies, really go for house-building, bankers, this time it’s going to be the high-earners.
“I am amazed he’s going to keep it at 50[p]. I’d expect if he [Balls] becomes Chancellor of the Exchequer we could be looking at 55, 60 on the excuse he gave today.”
But the outriders for the wealthy like Diggers can’t have it both ways. If raising the 45p rate to 50p is an inefficient way of raising revenue, the contention of august institutions like the Institute for Fiscal Studies, then the well-heeled clearly aren’t losing out very much, so it can hardly be catastrophic.
The economics of making those with the broadest shoulders pay the most to reduce the deficit, Ed Miliband’s phrase to describe the move, is sound enough, but the politics of tax rates are, of course, tortuous stuff for Labour.
