Creating the Client State

Brown had first commissioned work on scrapping the 10p rate in 2003; he considered it for the 2005 and 2006 Budgets. (writes John Rentoul in the Independent).

This was no unconsidered effect of a coup de theatre for his last budget. Brown planned impoverishing those who were not already caught in his spider's web of high taxes and benefit claims, planned it for years.

"...it is his intention to return to this issue in future Budgets and the Pre-Budget Report. He does want to look more at what we can do for those on the lowest incomes, just as we have done in previous budgets...We will be consulting with stakeholders, with MPs, and with different groups on the next phase...' He plans to entangle, too, the young and newly employed, the old and newly retired, and the lowest paid without children in his Shelob's lair.

"A little way ahead and to our left..., issuing from a black hole of shadow under the cliff, the most loathly shape that we had ever beheld, horrible beyond the horror of an evil dream. Most like a spider..., but huger than the greatest hunting beasts, and more terrible than they because of the evil purpose in her remorseless eyes... there they were lit with a fell light again, clustering in her out-thrust head. Great horns she had, and behind her short stalk-like neck was her huge swollen body, a vast bloated bag, swaying and sagging between her legs; its great bulk was black, blotched with livid marks, but the belly underneath was pale and luminous and gave forth a stench. Her legs were bent, with great knobbed joints high above her back, and hairs that stuck out like steel spines, and at each leg's end there was a claw.
As soon as she had squeezed her soft squelching body and its folded limbs out of the upper exit from her lair, she moved with a horrible speed, now running her creaking legs, now making a sudden bound.'

Come on Frodo, I mean Frank!