The Tories have a total tin-ear on tax and the super rich. Ed Balls must be delighted today

As Ed Balls peruses this morning’s papers, he must hardly believe his luck. An announcement made at a conference on Saturday morning has led the news cycle for 48 hours now, and each newspaper that self-preservingly decried the planned return of the 50p tax rate served only to re-enforce the Shadow Chancellor’s message. Labour want the top 1% of earners to shoulder more of the burden, Osborne wants to cut their taxes.

That so many otherwise smart thinkers on the right would be so blinkered to walk into Balls’s trap beggars belief. This is a policy that is not only backed by 60% of the population – and more than half of Tory supporters – it also brings in more money than a 45% tax rate, as the HMRC data shows.

It’s a plan that both increases the tax take to the Treasury – allowing the deficit to be paid down sooner – and has the broad support of the British people. By defending Osborne’s tax cut for Britain’s highest earners, the Tories merely succeed in reinforcing their key negatives – out of touch, party of the rich, looking out for their own. Smart Tories who pushed Osborne towards a higher Minimum Wage must be despairing that the basest instincts of the Tory Right have seen the party lurch back towards socialism for the rich, and capitalism red in tooth and claw for the poor.

That said, today’s salvo launched against Balls was a thorough one. CCHQ have done a sterling job of getting two dozen businesspeople to sign a letter condemning the proposed top rate tax rise. But what’s obvious is that these signatories are signa-Tories. In fact eight of those names have given a total of nearly £800,000 to the Tory Party. One of the most vocal opponents of the tax rise is Charlie Mullins of Pimlico Plumbers – a man of such political neutrality that he emblazons portraits of Margaret Thatcher on his vans. Their critiques should be taken with a dumper truck of salt. So far no credible evidence has been presented to show that such a tax hike would have a negative impact on the economy, merely a negative impact on the exceptionally well off.

Of course what the Tories are doing is defending their base – and most importantly their donor base. But the very fact that they consider the top 1% of earners to be their base shows what a daft position the Tories have got themselves into on earnings, tax and wealth. Decrying a moderate top rate of tax as harking back to the 70s is empirically wrong (Balls isn’t advocating a tax rate of 80%+) and politically tone deaf. You’d need to be in your fifties to have voted in an election in the seventies. By making such wild and outdated claims you leave most of the electorate out of the conversation.

What opponents of the Balls tax hike have failed to grasp is that 95% of British taxpayers will never get anywhere near paying the top rate of tax, and so are more inclined to believe that those with the means to pay more should do so. If we’re “in this together” then the deeds must fit the words. It’s not good enough to slash support for the working poor and call it deficit reduction, whilst lambasting modest tax rises for the ultra-rich as class war. If I were lucky enough to earn £150,000 a year – placing me in an earning super-elite – I’d happily pay whatever taxes were demanded of me. What many Tories believe – wrongly – is that because most want to be super-rich, they also want the super-rich to pay lower levels of tax. Such a position is, frankly, delusional.

Yet what is most foolhardy about the right’s attack on Balls over the 50p tax rate is that they’re pushing him into the arms of a welcoming British public – especially those who are Labour voters or potential Labour voters, when they had an opportunity to place him in a position of discomfort. Everyone seems to have forgotten now, but the pre-briefed headline of the Balls speech on Saturday was about deficit reduction, cuts under Labour, balancing the budget and even promising to run a surplus. If the last 48 hours had seen the Tory Party sticking to their core deficit reduction line, praising Ed Balls for promising not to reverse cuts even when the economy has recovered, then the Shadow Chancellor might have been facing the ire of many in his party today.

Instead, Ed Balls is on the side of the British people, whilst the Tories are on the side of the somewhat unsympathetic caterwauling of the super-rich. The Shadow Chancellor will doubtless be delighted today. And so he should be.