Election 2010: Readers point out a few more Labour blunders

According to IFAonline readers, both Blair and Brown have a lot still to answer for.

Our list this morning - CLICK HERE - included Brown's selling off, in May 1999, of more than half of Britain's national gold reserves (good call!) and the Government's abolition of the 10p tax rate.

But apparently, there are a few more...

Reader David Levin says we missed Brown's biggest blunder. He says the fact he continued to borrow to fund what he calls the Government's "hare-brained" initiatives was the Prime Minister's biggest error. "Now we are skint, he wants to just keep on borrowing", he says.

Another, calling themselves Green Eyed Monster (where do you get these names?), says the Government's errors creating the FSA are glaring omissions from our list.

"[The Government] failed to build in public accountability," ol' Green Eyes says. "[It] burdened the financial services community with the entire cost of this 'public body', it allowed [the FSA] a free hand in budget raising and spending - even [allowing it] to borrow to maintain unfettered spending - and burdened the financial services community with the debt."

Robin Bennett, meanwhile, challenged one entry on our list. "The taxing of the income of pension schemes when Brown became Chancellor was hardly a blunder," Bennett says. "It enabled him to give tax credits to poorer families."

But more than one individual said the Government's u-turn - during the run-up to A-Day on 6 April 2006 - on the inclusion of residential property in SIPPs merited its place among our ‘blunders'.

The Government was set to expand the number and type of assets eligible for SIPPs, including residential property, but later reneged on this idea and said people would no longer be able to place fine wines, classic cars, art, antiques, or residential property, in SIPPs after all.

Elsewhere, reader Ian Lees says Brown has reduced banking competition by "permitting, if not assisting" the merger of TSB with Lloyds (although this did happen in 1995, two years before Labour came to power) and RBS's "purchase" of NatWest.

Finally, ‘Tim', another reader, lists the things we've all got to "look forward to" should Labour win a fourth term:

"The top rate of tax [will] rise to 50%, which will drive high earners out of the country (thus bringing to an end London's pre-eminence as a financial centre) and lead to a higher tax burden for the poor souls still working here," he says.

"Oh, and VAT going up. Did I mention ridiculously-high fuel duty, which is a regressive tax since the poor suffer more than the affluent?"

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