Tax row will cost Livingstone

THE 10p tax row is wrecking Ken Livingstone’s bid to win London’s mayoral election.

 

Voters are blasting Labour on the campaign trail — with senior advisers admitting doubling the lowest rate of income tax is a huge issue on the doorstep.

 

They fear that anger will hit them at the ballot boxes on Thursday.

 

A YouGov poll has put Tory hopeful Boris Johnson ELEVEN points ahead of current Mayor Mr Livingstone. It is a significant jump on last week’s seven per cent.

 

The new survey puts Mr Johnson on 46 per cent to Mr Livingstone’s 35 per cent — but one key factor could also be the legions of undecided voters.

"We made two mistakes," Gordon Brown told BBC radio about the tax change, announced last year and in force from this month. "We didn't cover as well as we should have, that group of low-paid workers and low-income people who don't get the working tax credit and we weren't able to help the 60 to 64-year-olds who don't get the pensioners tax allowance," he said

ADMITTING MISTAKES IS ONE THING MR BROWN.... Putting those mistakes right, is something altogether different. That hill to climb, has just become a mountain.

Gordon Brown will unveil new policies next month in an attempt to fight back after what Labour expects to be disappointing local election results tomorrow.

The Prime Minister is expected to promise that Labour will "listen and learn" if the results are poor. He will seek to fight back by showing that Labour has not run out of steam. A draft Queen's Speech for the parliamentary session starting in November was discussed by the Cabinet yesterday and will be published next month. The measures include reforms to health and education and constitutional reforms designed to devolve more power to ordinary people. Longer term reforms could include a largely elected House of Lords and a new voting system for Westminster elections.

The maverick Labour MP Kate Hoey has offered to act as Boris Johnson's adviser on sports and the Olympics if the Tory candidate becomes London's new mayor. But Hoey, a former sports minister and a long-standing critic of mayor Ken Livingstone's administration, denied suggestions that she was defecting to the Tories or had embarrassed the government, saying she had agreed to work for Johnson "on a non-partisan basis".

In his final interview of the six-week race for City Hall, Mr Livingstone told the Evening Standard that Mr Johnson would suffer from the “hovering pencil” syndrome when electors finally made up their minds in the privacy of the polling both.

He claimed that when faced with a brutal choice between himself and someone who was a “risk”, the public would conclude that they could not take a chance on his Conservative rival to run the city's £11 billion budget.

The Mayor added that if he did lose tomorrow, it would not be through any fault of either the Government or even his own policies.

The main cause would be the Tories' success in getting their supporters out and Labour's failure to similarly mobilise its core vote, he said. “If I lost, it would not be because we lost the argument.

It would in part be because the Tories would have run a superior campaign and in part because of differential turnout. Older voters who tend to vote Tory are three times more likely to vote than younger people, for example,” Mr Livingstone said.