Richard Murphy states:

So please don’t tell me special taxes on banks don’t work.

They unambiguously do.

Having spent some time trying to find where he might have said what they were actually supposed to do, the best I could find was this:

Alistair Darling is about to introduce a windfall tax on banks, and bankers. It’s an idea that, as Larry Elliott has noted, is timely and appropriate. It is also fraught with problems if the action is to match the rhetoric. And let’s be clear: this is important. Tax is not just about revenue raising: tax is also about pricing unacceptable behaviour out of the market and redistributing income and wealth – especially wealth considered by many to be unearned.

Was unacceptable behaviour priced out of the market? At best the jury's out on that one; a more sober analysis would suggest that it hasn't been, judging by the media furore over bankers' bonuses during reporting season last month. So, it's easy to claim something has worked when you never laid down what your criteria were in the first place.

As for the FT piece referred to by Murphy, I'm amazed that a so-called serious newspaper could write something so idiotic as the bonus tax giving the government "an unexpectedly large windfall to spend ahead of the general election". Any "windfalls" need to go into paying down our horrendous debt, not pre-election gimmicks.

Update: Over at the Telegraph, Jeremy Warner agrees.

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Filed under: Other blogs, Politics, Taxation with tags banks, deficit, financial times, idiots, richard murphy