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"Is this the end of New Labour?" a bright young BBC producer rang to ask as I was digesting the Guardian's unexpected "Darling unveils 45p tax on rich" headlines over my first cup of tea. Agitated rightwing bloggers have been shouting "yes". So the answer is "no".
But it's interesting as well as unexpected. As commentators such as Larry Elliott rushed to point out basic tax rates have been falling since Margaret Thatcher turned her attention to supply side economic reforms – in other words, concentrating on removal barriers to economic activity – almost 30 years ago.
But Maggie's tax record is encrusted with myth. Yes, she cut the pointless top rate from 83p to 60p, but there it stayed until 1988 – two years before her fall – when boom-and-buster chancellor, Nigel Lawson, cut it to 40p.
Judging by his stern lecture against excessive fiscal giveaways in today's FT, Lord Lawson seems to have managed to forget. It is one of the perks of advancing years.
Gordon Brown has always been suspected of being a man for progressive tax rates, part of the fairness agenda which animates him, Alistair Darling too in that unflashy way of his which seems to fit these newly-austere times.
You may dimly remember that there were "50p top rate over £100,000" battles between Brown and Tony Blair in the early days of the Labour government after 1997 – with Peter Mandelson firmly on the side of pragmatism. Remember the P-word, it's New Labour's strength and - sometimes - rudderless weakness.
Here that translates as meaning that a 50p rate would not have been worth all the trouble, either in terms of revenue raised or the symbolic cost to Labour's new, pro-business credentials. Best to leave that kind of talk to the Lib Dems, who would never be in a position to do much about it.
So one important point this morning is that the pre-budget report's (PBR) proposal to raise the top rate of tax to 45p on incomes above £150,000 after the next election – hopefully after the recession too – is as much symbolic as practical.
It's worth an estimated £2bn – though you can never tell either way with tax receipts. Compare that with the structural £40bn tax-and-spending hole the Treasury will have to close by a variety of means, including higher taxes all round. Dr Vince Cable thinks the tax move trifling.
What I think today's gesture says is "the government will have to raise everyone's taxes to dig us out of the hole which we have foolishly allowed the bankers to dig with cheap money (which we borrowed too), but we will make sure the better off pay their share".
It's "hardly a revolution", as leftwing MP, John McDonnell points out. But it does represent a gesture towards fairness which excessive New Labour pragmatism has neglected.
Watch out all the same. With VAT being cut only temporarily – from 17.5% (a Lamont legacy) to 15% ( Geoffrey Howe still denies "doubling it" in 1979 because it had previously been 8% under Labour), most of us are going to have to pay more too. David Cameron is calling the whole exercise a "smokescreen" to cover that fact.
The BBC's Nick Robinson made what I thought was a shrewd, basic point on Radio 4 when he said that national insurance contributions (NICs) may rise again. Brown has always been keen on bumping up NICs and 40% taxpayers already pay a 1% surcharge to help fund the NHS.
That means they pay 41%. But tax myth allows the Treasury to say that NICs isn't tax. In case the rightwing bloggers forget to say today, Brown took this idea, like others, from the Thatcher-Geoffrey Howe playbook.
Back in the early 80s they conned a "1p off income tax" headline out of the Daily Mail on the very same budget day that Howe put up NICs by 1p. The only difference is instructive – it's very regressive because only lower rate taxpayers catch the whole payment.
Better-off people stopped paying NICs a little above the average rate in those days. They still don't pay the 10% rate at the point where they start paying 40p in the £ (apart from the special 1% for the NHS). It's called the NICs ceiling.
Who knows, perhaps Darling plans to remove that ceiling later today and is garnering positive headlines this morning (and yesterday morning) while the going is relatively good. While he's about it he could raise the 40p tax threshold which - at around £40,000 a year of taxable income - strikes me as a bit low for all sorts of deserving citizens.
Talking of leaks, Michael Fallon, Tory chairman-in-waiting of the Treasury select committee, was moaning on air about "cynical leaking" today. But Fallon is old enough to remember when the whole of a Howe budget was tipped straight into the Sunday papers 48 hours in advance.
Lawson tightened up after he took over from Howe (a very nice man) in 1983, but leaks are leaks. So far as I can tell this one initially came to the BBC's Nick Robinson in mid-evening. By accident or design? One can rarely tell for sure, but the BBC is a good conduit for spreading a line.
Footnote: it's always enjoyable to catch Guido Fawkes in a tizz, the insouciant mask of worldly, non-partisan cynicism dropping as the Tories get into difficulty.
Today Guido is punting gold as a good buy and predicting that Brown is backing "the Mugabe option" in contrast to our austere budget-slashing (ie Cameroon) neighbours in Dublin.
Oh really? Since I started typing the Republican-run US government has bought a $20bn stake in Citigroup – part-nationalisation in Guido-Speak. It's a sensible pragmatic response, very New Labour. It's that P-Word. So as I never tire of saying, Let's wait and see what happens next.
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