Taxing

In all the fuss about the 10p tax rate, no one seems to have mentioned a crucial factor. These things are decided by people with little or no concept of a period between one’s children’s leaving home and one’s own retirement. No one they know had children much before the age of 30, and no one they know is or will be working much after the age of 55. Their last child’s departure and the end of working their life will coincide almost exactly. The idea of a 15 or 20 year gap between these two events, as is entirely normal among people previously paying 10p tax, is completely lost on them.

Meanwhile, isn’t it funny how the money can always be found for wars, or to rescue banks, but not to help the working poor, or indeed any other type of poor? And remember when it was unconscionable folly to give the young the same minimum wage entitlement as everybody else? Right up until Tuesday, in fact.

The whole thing has given the BBC a hardly needed opportunity to emphasise how much better Tony Blair was, with Nick Robinson passing on the bitter carping of Blair’s inner circle as if it were a matter of earth-shattering importance. Blair is turning into what Thatcher was in the Nineties. Except, of course, that Thatcher quite liked her party in the country, and it loved her in return. The Labour Party never really liked Blair all that much, he has always hated it with a venom not consistent with sanity, and what little of it remains after his tenure now fulsomely returns the compliment. Still, he’ll always have the BBC.