Labour's big beasts spell out their message for the budget, while party appears to be model of discipline compared to the coalition
A dazzling day on London's glamorous South Bank, so a pat on the back and a 99 to whoever booked the top floor of the Royal Festival Hall for Labour's big pre-budget preemptive press conference.
The Weston roof terrace has enormous windows and unmatched views down the Thames and past the London Eye towards Westminster and beyond, offering a commanding backdrop for a joint appearance by Eds Miliband and Balls, and a wealth of metaphors to frame their no-doubt inspirational message. A far-reaching view for the future! The bright blue skies of a Miliband springtime! The initially beguiling but in truth faintly polluted haze of coalition thinking! (Labour, you can have those for free.)
It is an intriguing feature of our current politics that with the coalition in no little disarray while the Lib Dems develop new and ever more inventive policies over which to disagree, Labour appears by comparison a model of party discipline, and its two big beasts an unshakeably united front. They had even co-ordinated their ties: Ed in purple with a bluish tinge, Ed in a slightly pinker shade of purple. It didn't say much about their politics, but goodness me they matched beautifully.
Not that there was any question of who was in charge. Miliband, even when addressing a relatively small gathering of scribbling reporters, has a habit of turning his head far to the right and left, revealing that on the crucial question of who had spent the most time in makeup, he had trounced his faintly florid shadow chancellor.
All right then Eds, let's hear it. The Tories can't decide who to please over the 50p tax rate – cut it and pacify the business lobby? Keep it because we're all in this together? – while the Liberal Democrats can't agree on which particular type of tax on the wealthy they would prefer to be deeply divided over. What we need is an unambiguous message from Labour, articulating in direct language what the country requires from next week's budget.
Happily Labour's message for the budget was clear, said Miliband, and Balls would now spell out what it was.
Around nine minutes in, he did. It was snappy stuff. Osborne, said Balls, had reversed a Labour decision, when it introduced the 50p tax rate, to limit pension tax relief on high earners to 20%, a move which would have raised £4bn for the Treasury. Instead, his preferred 50% tax relief limit had raised only £2.4bn. It was a massive £1.6bn tax cut for fat cats!
Labour's response? A "simple proposition", said Balls, that "a reduction in the rate at which top rate taxpayers can claim pensions tax relief from 50% to 26% would be sufficient to reverse this tax cut [and] if the net revenue to the Exchequer from this change was £1.25bn, then reversing this tax cut for people earning more than £150,000 would allow the government to reinstate the cuts to working and child tax credits."
You can expect to see this on a billboard near you soon. Accompanied, needless to say, by an image of the sunny Labour future just around the corner.