If you’re going to talk about unpleasant things, why do it when everyone is listening? Baffled Labour whips were certainly asking the question of their education team after not one but two new tax threats were smeared across the festive front pages, when there was no other news - or decent television, according to the viewing figures.
Come day three of Christmas, The Times was carrying an account of how “Labour backs plans to levy lifetime tax on graduates”.
Labour had done no such thing, as the stuff below the headline made plain. It was merely “considering proposals” in a somewhat vague and wholly unseasonal fashion.
But the story proved to be just a taster for the bigger tax “bombshell”, duly splashed in the Mail on Sunday and the Sunday Times. Labour’s “plans” to levy VAT on the allegedly charitable private school system.
These “plans” were hastily dismissed by the party leadership on the grounds that it holds several policies at once depending which spokesman you talk to.
In this case treasury boffin Brown carried more weight than poor old David Blunkett who thought there was only one policy - to consider levying VAT as suggested by Tony Blair in his leadership campaign.
To abolish charitable status, or impose VAT would in any case be a fiendishly difficult task, according to Peter Kellner in the Independent. As the Labour education secretary Fred Mulley learned in 1974, any attempt would require workable definitions of a public school and of the institutions which run public schools; and any attempt to remove tax benefits would involve distinguishing between different sorts of charity.
Not to mention the non-cooperation of the civil servants charged with doing all this.
But whether the plans were serious or not, the story gave Tory supporters in the press a rare chance for Blair-baiting. Headlines like “One more bungle in class war shambles” and “Blair’s schoolboy howler” from the Daily Express reflected a successful Government offensive which repeatedly condemned Labour as “vindictive”.
