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Westminster News from Paul Waugh
The Waugh Room
News, gossip and insight from PoliticsHome Editor Paul Waugh
Thursday 26th January 2012 | 09:19
Taxing times
Nick Clegg's unusual approach to pre-Budget negotiations - using the TV sofas as well as Cabinet sub-committees to make his argument - paid off politically today.
He got lots of newspaper headlines (as well as telly and radio coverage) for a message that the Lib Dems see as one of their 'big wins' of the Coalition: lower taxes for the lower paid.
With the Tories ahead in the polls, the constrant struggle for their junior partners is to let the voters know they are making a difference.
Libs are hoping that they can sell this as a distinctively yellow policy and believe that when people see their pay packets in April they will at last have very concrete proof of the Clegg Effect in Government.
George Osborne is of course far too smart to allow low taxes to become a Lib Dem branding exercise and we'll hear loads from him about how Tory the policy is.
But on the Clegg idea of 'further and faster', Conservative sources are studiedly neutral this morning, pointing out to me that the DPM is setting out Lib Dem priorities rather than Government policy.
Of course, one attraction for the Coalition of putting up the tax threshold is that it is redistributing wealth in a way that squeezes Labour out of the debate.
Giving money to the working poor directly into their pockets is the kind of Keynesian stimulus that many economists support, precisely because the poor are more likely to spend the cash rather than save it.
And when everyone remembers the disaster Gordon Brown made on the 10p tax rate, Labour has a lot of ground to catch up here. I wouldn't mind better that going 'further and faster' on cutting taxes at the lower end is an Ed Balls manifesto pledge - once he's worked out how to fund it.
Speaking of funding the tax cuts, it's hard to see how a cobbled old combination of 'closing tax loopholes' will cut the mustard. I'm told the Treasury is ruling out one simple option - hiking the bank levy. That would be a space Balls could occupy if he got away from his bankers bonus plan.
November 2010
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