One answer is ‘more than 300 council seats’
These tax changes were part of a deliberate policy from Brown when he was the Chancellor of the Exchequer. I can remember how he announced it right at the end of the Budget speech. There was a tremendous cheer from the Labour MPs and it was seen as a real victory by Labour.
This isn’t meant to be a political blog, but it is obvious that politics influences people’s daily lives.
A lot of people have been affected by this tax change. The higher income earners have benefited from this change to the tax regime (because the top rate was reduced from 22% to 20%), the loss of the 10% band was more than offset by the tax savings.
The Government say that it would cost too much to reinstate the 10% tax free band. The people seriously affected by this tax change are those on low incomes and the government are trying to find all sorts of benefits to compensate them. I am not sure why they cannot simply reinstate the tax free band for those on low incomes, it would be much cheaper to implement than the adminstration costs of a range of different benefits.
Doing it this way might be a bit simplistic for those financial whizz kids on high salaries, but it could have saved Brown and New Labour the thrashing that it received today at the polls from Labour’s traditional supporters.
Tags: brown, labour, new labour, tax changes
May 2, 2008 at 9:30 pm |
[...] michael wrote an interesting post today on What is the cost of dropping the 10% free tax band?Here’s a quick excerptThese tax changes were part of a deliberate policy from Brown when he was the Chancellor of the Exchequer. I can remember how he announced it right at the end of the Budget speech. There was a tremendous cheer from the Labour MPs and it … [...]