I’m afraid Brown’s not as black as he’s painted

Dear Adena Johnson, widow, pensioner and Labour supporter of Ayr, this column is for you. When you appeared, cup of tea in hand, on our news pages yesterday, you told our reporters how you’d “always thought Gordon Brown was a very good Chancellor” but that now, upon learning that your eminent countryman had — as the piece put it — “defied repeated warnings over his pension fund tax raid”, you felt a deep sense of betrayal.

Before you go straight off and put an X next to the name of some Scot Nat whose idea of economic policy is to sprinkle fairy dust on the Scottish spending deficit while chanting “It’s Scotland’s oil”, I have some thoughts on what The Times described on the front page “the pensions scandal engulfing Gordon Brown”.

I did, Adena, have a slight problem with the pre-emptive use of the word “scandal” in this context. My dictionary gives scandal as being “an action or event that causes public outrage”, and given that we only broke the story on Saturday, I’m not sure that the public — yourself excepted — had really had sufficient time to be completely outraged.

Even so, the charge sheet against the Chancellor was a long and unpleasant one. In essence (the accusation runs), back in 1997 the incoming Mr Brown had come up with a wheeze for raising a few billion quid each year. But though he and his immediate band of ensofaed cronies thought it might be a splendid notion to abolish tax relief on pension contributions, the Treasury officials either (a) warned him not to do it or (b) told him that the consequences for pensions might be damaging if he did.

He didn’t care, though. He ignored the counsel and recklessly pushed right ahead, insisting that everything would be OK. As my esteemed page-mate, William Rees-Mogg, put it yesterday, Mr Brown’s “1997 stealth tax destroyed what had been, when Labour came to power, one of the strongest pensions systems in the world”. Then, when it was obvious that his “five billion a year assault on pension funds” had gone badly wrong and final-salary schemes all over the country closed down, he first sought to blame other factors, and then tried to cover up that he had been advised not to abolish the tax relief.

As a consequence, implied our splash yesterday, questions over Mr Brown’s judgment had led to John Hutton, the Pensions Secretary, reiterating his call for a contested leadership election. Good Lord, it would have been Black Monday for Mr Brown if we hadn’t already described last week as Black Tuesday.

Mrs Johnson, here’s my difficulty. What Mr Hutton also said on Sunday was that the Chancellor had not been “warned” by Treasury officials not to make the changes, and that — before 1997 — many tax experts supported such a change.

Strength is given to this view by the reminder that in 1993 Norman Lamont “proudly” reduced tax relief from 25 to 20 per cent. Of course, Mr Brown did it all at once, and that may well have been additionally damaging, but was it the main cause of the collapse of our wonderful pensions system? Many people think not. The pensions expert Stephen Yeo, a former adviser to David Willetts, was quoted yesterday as saying that he didn’t believe that Mr Brown’s decision was “even in the top three reasons”. Instead he blamed changes by Labour and Tory governments to pensions regulations, an unexpected increase in life expectancy and unexpectedly sharp stock market falls.

Of course Mr Brown chose to believe what it was convenient for him to believe, given that he wanted to raise some revenue. But was that such a sinful thing to want to do? Adena, this five billion a year, I don’t think he spent it all on wars and speed cameras. A lot of it will have helped, in the early days, to reduce government borrowing. Some may have contributed, say, to the radically reduced orthopaedic waiting times now enjoyed (if that’s the word) by your generation. Maybe someone you know got a hip? Is it also conceivable that the money helped to fund the reduction in corporation tax, thus assisting in the creation of jobs, not least in Ayr?

Under these circumstances was not the Chancellor entitled to make his own judgment about the right course of action? As Kenneth Clarke observed yesterday, it was a “bizarre idea” that senior ministers should be obliged to follow what may appear to be advice. And it isn’t a “scandal” to make a mistake — even a big one.

Perhaps, Adena, you and I should agree to ignore the accusations about stealth taxes. “Stealth tax” has become a debased term for any disliked revenue-positive change that isn’t either income or corporation tax. By this token Mr Lamont’s vigorously commended 1993 cut was a stealth tax, and one presumes that any new tax relief or tax credit is therefore a “stealth tax cut”.

This leaves me with the cover-up, or rather the attempt to prevent this newspaper having access to the Treasury advice. I think this was a huge and characteristic error by Whitehall, and that The Times was right to insist on disclosure. But Mr Clarke also reminded us that the view that Civil Service advice should not be made public is widely held among politicians of all parties.

Finally, Adena, I’d like to direct you (almost certainly unnecessarily) to something else that William Rees-Mogg said, about the pensions affair being “the biggest financial disaster” of Labour’s period in office.

This may sound a more impressive accusation than actually it is. What, in the scale of postwar governance, does it have to compete with? Since 1997 we have had no devaluations, no sterling crisis, no slumps, no mass closures, no negative equity, no real Black Tuesdays.

You might have thought that Mr Brown was “a very good Chancellor” because Britain’s economy has continued to grow during his stewardship, unemployment has fallen and inflation is also low.

Rival papers will claim that The Times is campaigning against Mr Brown — not least The Guardian, some of whose writers seem to consider that anyone who criticises the Chancellor is a Tory or a Blairite or both, that anyone who wants a leadership contest is a quisling, and that anyone who expresses any interesting Labour policy ideas is a maniac.

Nothing could be further from the truth (well, some things could be further from the truth, but it still isn’t true). We have a great scoop that our journalists worked long and hard for and we’re entitled to run it for all it’s worth. If we’re a little exuberant about it, then that’s no more than many politicians are. And no less.