Stamp duty: bloggers' verdict

Last Modified: 03 Sep 2008
By: Channel 4 News

The blogosphere gets its teeth into the stamp duty holiday debate.

Yesterday's announcement of a stamp duty holiday garners more column inches in today's papers than any other political story, according to the column-o-meter at Politics Home (the Republican Convention comes a not-particularly-close second).

Stumbling and Mumbling grabs a graph of property transactions around a previous stamp duty holiday in 1992. Although sales rocketed just before the holiday ended, they dipped right back afterwards, before starting to pick up speed more gradually.

Guido Fawkes picks up the theme - and dismisses the stamp duty package in the face of yesterday's gloomy OECD prognosis on the British economy. "Inflation is rising and unemployment is hitting Thatcherite levels, your economic plans have crashed, Gordon," he says, not entirely accurately.

Iain Dale got the impression of an Alistair Darling "completely on the edge - at the end of his tether". The chancellor's body language during TV interviews was "astonishing", the Conservative blogger reckons, and he "sounded as nervous as I have ever heard a cabinet minister sound in an interview of this nature". Anyone would think he feared for his job, Dale ends wryly.

Rumours of a stand-off between the chancellor and a PM intent on dictating economic policy abound, says the Daily Mail's Benedict Brogan.

"Those who took part in summer-long discussions between the two men over what measures could help the economy report intense discussions and frequent differences, but no terminal bust-ups of the Thatcher/Lawson variety," blogs the paper's political editor.