Cramp

It has been quite a week. A former top civil servant breaks the code of anonymity and confidentiality between government and official to criticise Gordon Brown. Labour was criticised when it came to power for bringing in Special Advisors by politicising the civil service - quite a detailed account can be found here. It seems that now civil servants themselves have no problem with acting political. Anyway, it created opportunities for cartoonists and Tory speech writers to make their Stalin jokes.

The 2% cut in the basic rate of income tax at the expense of the 10% starting rate "simplifies" our tax structure to one where we only have two rates. This gives Britain a proportional tax burden rather than a progressive one. This means that someone on £20000 pays about the same proportion of their salary in tax as someone on £30000 or £40000. Income Tax is clearly a political "sacred cow" and Brown clearly wanted to cramp to Tories for space. For that I think the 2% cut was a good move.

Budgets over recent years have been labelled dull - I think that is testament to Brown's succefful stewardship of the economy. This is something all Labour activists nned to remind people of. When I was growing up under Thatcher and Major from bust to boom to bust the economy wasn't stable and was a serious political issue. Today it seems that the substantive part of economic policy isn't an issue. We have to ensure people don't take it for granted because economic stability isn't guaranteed.