Right

Peter Oborne pretty much says that proper Tories ought now to vote Labour:

Ed Balls has been the object of widespread attack and ridicule since his weekend move to raise the top rate of tax to 50p.

However, I am certain that the shadow chancellor is right to make his 50p pledge, and furthermore there are solid Conservative reasons to justify his action.

It is very important to remember that the Conservative Party is not an interest group which represents only the very rich.

In fact it should not be a class-based party at all. The Conservative Party has always claimed to represent the nation as a whole.

As someone who voted Conservative at the last election, I therefore found it profoundly shaming and offensive when George Osborne lowered the top rate of tax from 50p to 45p two years ago.

The Coalition government has devoted a great deal of effort to lowering the living standards of the poor. I support this project because I believe that Gordon Brown’s welfare state forced some people into a life of dependency, thus taking away their human dignity.

There have been many people on welfare who need much more of an incentive to return to work.

But to make the rich richer at the same time as making the poor poorer – what George Osborne has been doing – is simply squalid, immoral and disgusting.

The Chancellor of the Exchequer is leading the fight inside the cabinet to strip a further £10 billion of welfare payments for the very poorest.

Any decent human being must surely feel sick in the stomach that he is taking this action at the same time as cutting the amount of tax paid by people earning more than £150,000.

Conservative HQ claimed this morning that Mr Balls move "takes Labour back to the 1970s". This claim is pure bilge, and suggests that the Conservative Party has lost the plot.

Back then the Labour chancellor imposed a tax rate of 83 per cent, which was clearly stupid, wrong, driven by socialist envy, and a disincentive to hard work.

Raising taxes to 50p in the pound for the highest earners is a completely different matter.

Have a look at the lists of people complaining today – they are mainly the very rich.

As we learnt during the Blair years, the very rich tend to support the government of the day. Some of them shamefully avoid paying tax.

A Conservative Party with decent values should not reward these people. It should support hard-working, honest people.

If the Chancellor understood this point, he would have taken middle earners out of the top rate of tax, not given a bonus to people who are already affluent.

So well done Ed Balls, who has had a hard time lately.

He has given ordinary, decent people a serious reason for voting Labour at the coming election.