Gordon Brown: Champion of the Middle Classes?

Preposterous.  Utterly preposterous.  Gordon Brown is now seeking to present Labour as the party of middle class aspiration.  He and Ed Balls have clearly lost the core vote argument with Darling and Mandelson.  So Brown has had to emerge from his comfort zone — and very uncomfortable he looks.
 
Let’s just recall what Labour has done in office — and remember that everything they’ve done for the last thirteen years has Gordon’s finger-prints all over it.
 
Pensions:  Gordon’s first act was to over-tax our pension system — in 1997 arguably the best, and best funded, in Europe.  It’s estimated that the cumulative effect of his tax grab exceeds £100 billion.  Of course there were other factors at work, not least the poor performance of the stock market over the last ten years.  But Gordon provided the coup de grace, and now few companies offer final-salary pension schemes, and we seem to hear daily of another company that has closed its pension scheme.  Gordon’s own pension, of course, is secure.
 
Council tax:  Labour has systematically shuffled off its costs and responsibilities to local authorities, forcing up council taxes.  In a new raid on Middle England, Labour is planning a wholesale property revaluation after the election.  Already civil servants are poring over Google Earth to see if you’ve built and extension, or a conservatory, or whether (shock horror!) you enjoy a country view.  Raising taxes is the name of the game.  Labour promised to hold tax rates, and (until now) they have kept that pledge to the letter — but abandoned the spirit of it by raising NICs, which has essentially the same effect as raising tax rates.
 
The 50% tax rate:  Labour is finally breaking its pledge on tax rates by introducing a new 50% rate on high earners (no special pleading here, by the way — I’m nowhere near the 50% threshold!).  Everyone knows that this new rate will contribute virtually nothing to the Exchequer.  Indeed it may drive high earners abroad, and reduce the tax take.  It’s gesture politics, sheer spite against the better off, a sop to Labour’s core vote, and will damage the British economy.  It’s class warfare in action.  And it leaves the UK with the highest tax rates on high earners in the developed world (as if designed to drive entrepreneurs away).
 
The Hunting Act: No one who has followed the evidence thinks the Hunting Act has anything to do with animal welfare.  It’s all about “Targeting the toffs” and “Getting our own back for the miners”.  Sheer class-based spite.  And mis-directed spite: most hunt followers are middle-class, and they take the hit.  Meantime Labour has systematically down-graded agriculture and the countryside, believing (until a very recent change of heart) that we could export financial services and import food.  And of course part of their enthusiasm for on-shore wind-farms is that the turbines mainly impact on the shires, and leave inner-city Labour fiefdoms unaffected.
 
Schools:  Labour continues to persecute grammar schools and private schools, with their ideological hatred of élitism and quality.  Through the Charities Commission, they are applying absurdly onerous tests of “public benefit”, as though educating children, and relieving the public purse of the costs of educating hundreds of thousands of children, were not public benefit enough.  This is scandalous, class-based persecution of the middle classes, that also damages education and our economy.
 
Universities:  They carry through their class prejudice against private schools by setting socially-engineered admission standards for Universities which deliberately discriminate against the middle classes and against private education.  Universities should be free to set their own admissions criteria without government interference.  The problem is not disadvantage in isolation, but disadvantage arising from the poor quality of many (not all) state schools.  That is the problem they should address.
 
Debt:  Gordon Brown’s long-term spending binge, plus the current down-turn, has landed us with an average debt of something like £30,000 for every man, woman and child in Britain.  Most of that tab will eventually be picked up by the middle classes, through tax on their incomes, their savings, their investments and their businesses.
 
Labour has led a sustained assault on the middle classes over many years.  And Gordon’s now posing as their friend, and a supporter of aspiration?  Yes.  And pigs fly.