Andreas W. Smith Some of the very faults that Camerons government has imputed to its predecessor were on display in its announcement of the withdrawal of child benefit. Every speech made by a government minister at the Conservative Party Conference this week has contained a lengthy passage denigrating Labours record in office. An order must have gone out: first rubbish your opponents. Yes, I understand that this is what politicians do. Labour was no different. Brown couldnt let an occasion pass without dumping on his Conservative predecessors. But it adds nothing to anybodys store of knowledge of how the world works. It is also tempting fate, as we shall see. There was Hague declaring that we must never mince words about the last governments economic incompetenceand national demoralisation. Osborne: We are in government after 13 years of a disastrous Labour administration that brought our country to the brink of bankruptcy. Lansley, Secretary of State for Health, declaimed: We wont make Labours mistakes....There was no coherence; no consistency....We will not make the sick pay for Labours debt crisis. Then Cameron said: They left us a legacy of spinninghalf-truths and cover-ups, patronisingunaccountable politics, 10p tax and 90 days detention, an election bottled and a referendum denied, gold sold at half price and council tax doubled, bad news buried and Mandelson resurrected... Arent the bankers an equally appropriate target? As Sir Richard Parker, a former civil servant, remarked of the last government: It was standard New Labour practice to decide on who should be categorised as a villain in any given circumstances and to take steps well beforehand so that depiction in that guise rang true when the time came. Bankers would have made a perfectly good scapegoat. Only this week, the Centre for Economics and Business Research calculated that London bankers would share a bonus pot of 7.3bn this year. They are not hurting. But the Tories cannot bring themselves to treat bankers as villains. Large families where nobody works and everybody lives off benefits, yes, but not bankers. Cameron addressed only one sentence to them in his speech: Taxpayers bailed you out, now its time for you to repay the favour and start lending to Britains small businesses again. So, that is decided. The last government is almost wholly to blame. But some of the faults that this government has imputed to its predecessor were on display in its announcement of the withdrawal of child benefit from higher-rate taxpayers. Go back to what Hague said about Labour. Economic incompetence? That has been on display this week. Recall Lansleys words: No coherence, no consistency? Yes, tick that box for the new government also. For a while, most people accept the principle of means-testing, it could immediately be seen that there were two defects in the announcement: the more favourable treatment of joint-income families in comparison with single-income families, and the lack of tapering so that, at the margin, a small pay increase might be negated by a larger loss of child benefit. On the first, Osbornes explanation lacks credibility. He sent an email to Tory MPs stating that the only way to assess these joint-income families would be to create a newintrusive means test. But as HM Revenue & Customs will have received completed tax returns from both the working father and the working mother in the same family, isnt it just a question of looking across from the one to the other to tot up the family income? More serious still is what this incident says about the new administrations way of doing business. There are two thorough discussions that should have taken place before the announcement. The first would have been a technical examination of the proposal by Treasury and HM Revenue & Customs officials. They would have been charged with making sure the proposal was workable in practical terms. And if the result was as explained by the Chancellor in his message to MPs, then one can draw the conclusion that the discussion had not been sufficiently thorough. The second discussion should have reviewed the political consequences of the decision and should have taken place between the PM and the Chancellor on the one side, and the rest of the Cabinet on the other. We are in the dog that didnt bark in the night territory here. Had the PM and the Chancellor properly consulted officials and colleagues, they would all have barked. That they did not do so tells us that no proper meetings were held. And this is, exactly the same careless approach to the business of government that consistently undercut much that the previous administration attempted to do. Camerons epitaph on the affair in his speech was fittingly restrained: Im not saying this is going to be easy, as weve seen with child benefit this week. In truth it need not have been as difficult as it turned out to be. A bad mark The Independent