Blair To Brown: Spin To Spinelessness

Posted on February 15, 2008
Filed Under Politics |

The art of spin is, by its nature, underhand, artificial, duplicitous and deceiving.

It was what ordinary people, less skilled in the black arts of politics, would call lying.

During the First Coming of Tony Blair (zealots across the world are awaiting his Second Coming as Emperor of Europe later this year) spin was all the rage. Real news was blotted out by fairytales; concoctions of pipe-dreams and wishful thinking were paraded as reality; newspeak became the political lingua franca.

Under Gordon Brown, of course, all that changed. Creating as much distance as possible from the new pariah Blair became essential. All well and good.

The downside of this, however, is that we can all now see that the new emperor has no clothes.

We thought that Tony Blair’s oleagenous toadying to the rich and famous would be consigned to history and not be the shape of things to come. Looks like we almost got conned again.

As Paul Routledge says in The Mirror:

If you want to change this government’s mind, don’t be poor, don’t be old and don’t work in the public services.

No. Be wealthy, have influential friends in high places and the power to blackmail weak politicians.

Chancellor Alistair Darling spurns the claims of pensioners and people on benefit, and insists that low-paid government employees accept real cuts in living standards.

But he’s caved in to the rich and powerful. He backed down on plans to tax traders who sell their business. Cost to the taxpayer? £200million a year.

And now he’s backtracking on proposals to soak the super-rich who live here but don’t pay taxes, the so-called “non-domiciles”. Cost? Many hundreds of millions.

The Telegraph is no more charitable to Darling of the Treasury:

HM Revenue and Customs has written to tax lawyers withdrawing some of the most contentious aspects of the non-dom plan.

Mr Darling’s retreat follows last month’s climbdown on plans to raise capital gains tax and threatens to make his first Budget next month a public humiliation.

The Chancellor still plans to charge long-standing non-doms a £30,000 annual levy, but other measures are significantly watered down.

These include no longer asking for detailed information about offshore trusts, not taxing works of art brought into the UK for public display and not taxing money brought into the UK to pay the £30,000 levy.

According to Forbes:

‘This clarification is a victory for common sense,’ said John Cridland, CBI deputy director-general.

‘The proposals were clearly cobbled together in a hurry … we need the government to be more careful in future about sending out a message that Britain is no longer interested in attracting talent and ideas to our shores, or that those people already here, who contribute over 23 bln stg to the UK economy each year, are no longer welcome,’ he added.

From the day that Mrs Thatcher told Rupert Murdoch that Tony Blair was “a safe pair of hands” and therefore allowed him to be elected, to the tea-party with Mrs Thatcher when Gordon Brown had only just moved into 10 Downing Street, the signs that New Labour is just the old Nasty Party in disguise have been there for all to see.

Tony Blair tried to disguise it, but Gordon Brown is just blatantly shoving it in people’s faces.

If you are not rich New Labour is not interested.

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