A 50p-sized elephant trap for David Cameron?

By David Higgerson on May 1, 09 11:41 AM

The 50p top rate on tax, announced by the chancellor in his budget last week, has been seized upon as a final nail in the coffin of New Labour, and as such, has been presented as a bad thing.

But is it? While political commentators left, right and centre have used the 50p top-rate for those earning over £150,000 to be proof that Gordon Brown will for certain lose the next election, a poll in one of the most unlikely places painted a different picture.

The Sunday People threw in a question about the next tax in a YouGov survey it published on Sunday - and found two thirds of people supported it.

The other questions in this poll, such as who you'd vote for at the next general election, return similar results to the other polls of late - Tories have a commanding lead, Labour being battered by every new economic story, Lib Dems failing to capitalise on the need for a a white knight to bust through the political sleaze of late.

But in announcing this new tax rate, is Labour being desperate or is it sensing that we are not currently in a place which suits big tent politics - and recognising that, in the current economic climate someone, somewhere is going to have to pay?

There's a bit of both in play here. Labour needs money - and fast - and it knows screwing the working and middle classes will cost it even more of its heartland support than it has already waved farewell to.

But, whether by accident or design, it has also delivered one heck of an elephant trap for the Conservatives. David Cameron has a choice: He either sticks with it, and risks alienating his core vote, or he drops it, and risks alienating those voters he hopes to win across from Labour.

So far, he has pursued the sort of line which, when adopted by Gordon Brown, prompts people to accuse him of dithering. He started off by saying he didn't like it but he'd have to stick with it because of where we are (thus accepting Gordon Brown was right to do it) but is now coming under pressure from Boris Johnson to say he'd scrap it straight off.

Surely, as a result, he is effectively saying to his heartland voters "Listen, I won't be changing it straight away" thus disaffecting them while at the same time telling the lower and middle income voters he needs to win "I don't like it, even if you do, so it will go in time."

To those lower and middle income voters, he's also dished out his spending plans. No benefits for families on £50k or more? I suspect that will be unpopular. Pay freezes or cuts for the police and health service? That's two swathes of the public sector, and perhaps the two which carry with them the most public sympathy, alienated.

David Cameron likes to talk about having to take tough decisions. That's true, but it doesn't mean the public will like those decisions, and therefore he needs to tread carefully if he doesn't want to start handing those voters wooed by the soft-focus, aspirational but policy-confirmed Tory Party of late back into the hand of a struggling Labour administration.