Not Even Basic

No increase in the basic or top rate of income tax after all? Your Party has split before it even had a name, but that pales into insignificance next to the Government's public abandonment of the central measure in a Budget that had not yet been delivered. It is less than two weeks away, yet it is being rewritten from scratch. Might Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves lower the thresholds, thereby keeping the letter if not the spirit of the manifesto? They ought to restore the taxation of capital gains at the same rate as earnings, as obtained under Margaret Thatcher and Nigel Lawson, but do not hold your breath for that.

It beggars belief, as they themselves beggared so many people, that by far the longest tenures as First and Second Lords of the Treasury in the last 15 years have been those of David Cameron and George Osborne. During a General Election night when it looked as if those Great Offices might have passed to Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell, the likes of Wes Streeting, Peter Mandelson and Morgan McSweeney would have communicated to Buckingham Palace that such appointments would not have commanded a parliamentary majority. But if Corbyn and McDonnell had indeed made it to Downing Street, then while plenty of people would have disagreed with a lot of what they would have done, there would have been nothing remotely comparable to this chaos.