Gordon Brown's 10 worst financial gaffes-Vote now

The Times are giving people the opportunity to vote on Gordon Browns worst financial gaffe.

You can vote, HERE


1. Taxing dividend payments
"Tax relief was scrapped, reducing the amount collected by pension funds by around £5 billion a year. Pension funds holding the cash that you, me and almost everyone else in the country plan to use for our retirement have lost around £100 billion over the last 12 years. That's one hell of a stealth tax."





2. Selling our gold- "Experts believe that the poorly timed decision to flog our national treasure has cost us all around £3 billion. Granted, that doesn't seem much nowadays, but more of that later."



3.Tripartite financial regulation- "The system of financial regulation dividing powers between the Treasury, the Bank of England and the Financial Services Authority, established by Brown as Chancellor in 2000, missed what amounted to the biggest financial crisis of our lifetime. Whoops."

4. Tax credits- "Introduced in 1999, reformed in 2000, tax credits have been "a complete disaster zone", according to tax experts"


5. The £10,000 corporation tax threshold- "In 2002, Gordon Brown introduced a new tax regime to help small businesses. He announced a new zero per cent rate of corporation tax on profits below £10,000. It was designed to boost the ability of small businesses to grow and prosper. A Treasury Minister later commented that "the Government did not realise how many people would engage in abusive tax avoidance", despite the fact that it was "blindingly obvious" to tax experts "within 5 seconds" of the budget announcement that this would happen. "


6- Abolition of the 10p tax rate. "Mr Brown rarely apologises. In fact, he never apologises. But occasionally he acknowledges "mistakes", albeit begrudgingly. Over the abolition of the 10p tax rate in 2007, Mr Brown told Radio 4's Today programme that "we made two mistakes. We didn't cover as well as we should that group of low-paid workers who don't get the working tax credits and we weren't able to help the 60 to 64-year-olds who didn't get the pensioner's tax allowance." Experts use stronger language to describe the Budget of 2007, which was designed to produce positive headlines for the 2p cut in income tax. Accountants calculated that the scrapping of the 10 per cent tax rate, coupled with the increase in the proportion of tax credits withdrawn from higher earners, would leave 1.8 million workers earning between £6,500 and £15,000 paying an effective tax rate of up to 70 per cent."


7. Failing to spot the housing bubble- Gordon Brown said he ended boom and bust, and in those innocent days before the collapse of the global finance system we believed him. In 1997, he outlined his plans. "Stability is necessary for our future economic success", he wisely informed an audience at the CBI. "The British economy of the future must be built not on the shifting sands of boom and bust, but on the bedrock of prudent and wise economic management." The other components of that bedrock including a trillion-pound debt mountain and a decade of unchecked and unparalleled house price inflation presumably slipped his mind. In 2003 a mild-mannered Liberal Democrat MP by the name of Vince Cable dared to question the mantra of "the end of boom and bust". He asked Gordon Brown: "Is it not true that...the growth of the British economy is sustained by consumer spending pinned against record levels of personal debt, which is secured, if at all, against house prices that the Bank of England describes as well above equilibrium level?" Gordon replied: "The Honourable Gentleman has been writing articles in the newspapers, as reflected in his contribution, that spread alarm, without substance, about the state of the economy..." We all know what happened next.




8. 50 per cent tax rate- Robert Chote, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, has said the tax hike which heralded the end the new Labour may actually end up losing the Government money."



9- Cutting VAT - "two problems. It costs £12.5 billion a year and it has made little discernable difference to those hard-pressed families because it is shopkeepers, rather than shoppers, who have pocketed much of the benefit."


10. Public-sector borrowing- If Gordon had only saved a little more in the good times, we might have had a little more to fall back on in the bad, economists sigh. Last month saw public-sector net borrowing hit £19.9 billion, the highest on record, according to the Office for National Statistics. The chancellor of the exchequer, Alistair Darling, has forecast that Government borrowing will reach £175 billion this year. It is forecast that total government debt will double to 79 per cent of GDP by 2013, the highest level since World War 2. Mr Chote recently warned that "the scale of the underlying problem that the Treasury’s detailed forecasts identify will require two full parliaments of mounting austerity to repair.”
Even after he leaves office in 2010, as is almost certain, it seems that we will all be paying for Gordon's gaffes for many years to come.