From the budget report, I’ve attempted to knock up a simple tax graph showing you who will be worse off and who better off under Gordon Brown’s new plans. He’s announced a cut of 2p in the basic rate of tax effective next April, but he’s also abolishing the starting 10% rate of tax, with no concomitant increase in personal thresholds announced. Here’s the basic effect – the blue line is the new tax regime as if applied today, the purple line is the current regime:


There are some caveats: Brown is making working tax credits more generous, so they will continue to a higher level, helping people on the lowest incomes (that’s my attempted interpretation anyway); and the top NI threshold will be raised, increasing slightly the NI paid by the richest.

The upshot, though, as far as I can see, is that if you earn in the £7k-£18k band, you’ll pay more tax despite this headline tax cut. The biggest beneficiaries appear, from the graph, to be those earning around £36k a year.

This is all rather back of the envelope so corrections welcome…

Update: Ryan’s worked out that £18,605 is the salary figure when you switch from loss to gain.

Not a good day for the Tories today.

First off, their sole Scottish MP, David Mundell, has been slagging off his Holyrood colleagues – albeit in a “confidential briefing paper”.

Said to be a briefing for David Cameron, it accuses MSPs of failing to understand the party’s new moderate approach and reportedly says: “There are more obvious problems than solutions emanating from Scotland from a party point of view.”

Mr Mundell said Miss Goldie made a “reasonable start” as leader but had begun to attract adverse comment for “lack of activity and strategic thought.”

Not news perhaps to those living in Scotland, but interesting to hear it from the country’s only Tory MP. Topping this off, though, Patrick Mercer, the Tory frontbencher, has quit after making comments about ethnic minority soldiers.

There’s more from the BBC.

One of the reasons that this blog has been quiet the last few weeks, apart from the usual hectic pace of London life, is that I was travelling up and down the country working on a short film for Liberal Democrat conference. The video was shown at the “We Can Cut Crime” rally on Friday night, ahead of Ming Campbell‘s speech.

There are obviously things that could be improved, but for a low budget film shot on a camcorder with fairly basic sound equipment followed by just one day of editing, I’m fairly happy with it, especially as it was the first time the party has done anything like this in house. Make yourself a cuppa and press play.

For those who are interested: the two amendments tabled to the Trident motion at party conference in Harrogate were defeated, and the motion was passed with just a few lines deleted (74-76 if you have the agenda).