It used to be Tony Blair who regularly faced the worst week of his political life; now Gordon Brown is getting to know what it means.
In the past seven days the prime minister has been forced to make a humiliating compromise on the abolition of the 10p tax band and has seen hundreds of thousands of teachers, lecturers and civil servants go on strike. Next week, Labour faces meltdown in the local elections.
But no-one said that running the country would be easy, and some of the adversity is clearly of Brown’s own making.
The 10p tax rate debacle is a case in point. As Peter Wilby explains opposite, the announcement of the abolition of the 10p band in the 2007 Budget was a piece of political theatre dressed up as an anti-poverty drive.
Parliament, and the public at large, was given the impression that there would be few, if any, losers. In fact, it turned out that up to 5.3 million people could be worse off.
MPs were not aware of this and, as a result, have not been able to properly scrutinise the government’s tax and spending policies.
This absence of financial scrutiny is not a one-off, however, as the House of Commons liaison committee pointed out in a damning report .
This described the hour and a half allotted for parliamentary discussion of last year’s Comprehensive Spending Review as ‘absurd’ and a ‘mockery’.
Budget debates are given more discussion time, but there is no opportunity for individual amendments. It’s all or nothing: defeat on the Finance Bill is tantamount to a vote of no confidence in the government.
Committee members called for more comprehensible financial information and more time for debate and inquiry on spending plans.
It’s a noble goal and one shared by the Hansard Society, which advocated a similar approach in a report two years ago.
We live in hope that the liaison committee will have more success in encouraging the Brown administration to modernise a system that is no longer fit for purpose.
