"It's OK, if the plan fails, we can just blame Labour for coming up with it in the first place..."
The Artful Tax Dodger's Fiendish 'Bribe the Nation' Masterplan
One of the bigger problems for Labour in taking the line, “we told you so months ago” on the matter of the windfall tax is that sadly they weren’t the government to actually deliver it.
I gather one of the aspects the Conservatives have in their favour is that they have the opportunity to actually deliver on the policies, even though it took them such a ridiculous amount of time to do it and the timing of the announcement was awfully convenient.
[NB: ‘having the opportunity to deliver’ is not necessarily the same as ‘actually delivering’]
As alluded to in a previous article, when you’re staring down the barrel of two by-election defeats and numerous investigations that could feasibly see the collapse of your government, you need to dazzle the public with the political equivalent of a ‘Moonwalk’ on water.
The Conservatives believed that to be possible following a major announcement of fiscal policies that were - mostly - Labour ideas, and in some cases, according to the Director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies Paul Johnson actually went further.
“Hugely redistributive,” he said.
The Prime Minister himself described it as a “big bazooka,” of course.
Indeed, Conservative-ultra and multi-millionaire, descendant of slave traders Richard Drax MP accused the Chancellor of: ‘throwing red meat to socialists’ - because as the Chancellor learned at the beginning of the pandemic, everybody loves the magic money tree he has repeatedly said doesn’t exist, and especially when he plucks fruit from it and throws it at the general public as though we are caged orangutans.
It’s a sort-of-winning strategy for the Chancellor that bolsters his credentials and paves way for the onslaught of meaningless hyperbole where people describe him as the “greatest Chancellor ever.”
But Conservatives feel “like prats” having voted against it only last week.
Conservatives needn’t feel “like prats” however, because - get this: when the government whipped “prat” Conservatives into voting against the windfall tax, “prat” Conservatives didn’t know that they were eventually going to get it.
But here’s the smart bit - what they voted against isn’t the same as what Rishi Sunak delivered. It isn’t called the windfall tax any more.
“Prat” Conservatives got a 'Temporary targeted energy profits levy’ instead. So it’s different from what they were whipped into voting against.
Pretty clever, right? They just changed the name! Genius!