Browns tax grab now even larger than Germany's

Brown is the best chancellor in decades, if not ever, and needs to take no lessons from centre-right 'think tanks' like Reform.

you appear to have missed the smiley off the end.

tim

He was at his best when he followed his own fiscal rules, and those laid down by Lamont (yes i know).

Do you believe that 'unemployment is a price worth paying for low inflation'?

Gaz

Lamont. Do you mean Ken Clark?

In message , "Mark, Devon" writes

Are you a troll or a deluded fool?

Clark and Brown where much better at following them, and a lot luckier, Lamont was the man who stuck to his guns when the shit was hitting the wall, for events outside his control.

Would Brown have the bottle to run a high interest rate policy to keep inflation down????

Lamont contributed to killing inflation, the British Disease.

Gaz

He is only second to Anthony Barber, you have to give them both a lot of credit, they certainly landed this country with a lot of credit!

Um, well I find it very hard to think anything good of him. I only remember Lamont running a high interest rate policy to keep the pound in the ERM. After black Wednesday rates came down quickly. I would have thought the reason for this was the strength of the UK economy due to lower taxation than Europe and less regulation.

Ridiculously increased regulation and taxation are the bomb shell legacy that Brown has left us. A legacy which I believe will prove even more damaging that Blair's costly war mongering.

The pensions mess is incredible, it as if we had a Robert Maxwell style swindle of pension funds.

Former Labour MP, Robert Maxwell plundered 400 million from Mirror pensions fund. The amount Gordon Brown has plundered in *extra* tax is that equivalent every month since Labour has taken power.

We have vast amounts of people in the middle classes who now have little or no pension to look forward. The only people who are likely to retire comfortably are public sector employees.

Gaz

Yep I worked for Maxwell Communications. Never worried about a pension though.

Are you talking about the Tax on Dividends? It wasn't entirely his fault, during the dot com boom a lot of companies failed to finance their schemes properly.

If you let someone control your money they always seem to rip you off. Its best finance your old age another way.

By their own admission the government inherited a first class set of books and spending plans from the previous Chancellor, which they did nothing to alter and religiously adhered to for two years with enormous success.

Brown also had a 27 billion windfall from the sell off of mobile phone frequencies, with the addition of 66 stealth taxes and the forage into pension funds.

Most of it spent on a huge increase in public service employees and massively increased public expenditure, not forgetting that our good fortune from the North Sea has nearly all being squandered, so not only will we lose the revenue which that generates, but in the not-too-distant future we will have to find the extra billions to pay for imported fuel.

When a government starts talking about taxing people on the views from their windows, then it tells me just how desperate things have become.