Monday, March 22, 2010

Watch for rabbits out of hats

An essential feature of the Brown spin machine is the pulling of rabbits out of hats. It's all trickery and often as not the rabbit is as dead as a dodo, often the roadkill victim of a political story or posture adopted by Labour. Scrapping the 10p income tax rate was one such roadkill rabbit plucked out of a hat to gushing acclamation by Labour backbenchers who praised it when it was announced, ran scared of it when they woke up to the effects and voted for it anyway because they are backbench cannon fodder.

So, I am wondering what rabbits will be extracted from the political hat by Darling on Wednesday in the budget. He has less room for tricks this time but I wouldn't put it past Labour to announce some incredible scheme to grab the headlines. If past practice is anything to go by, it will be a re-announcement of a scheme that has already been agreed with the cash quietly extracted from something else. We shall see.

---
Sent via BlackBerry

1 comment:

Anonymous said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.