Mandarins voice fury at Osborne allegations
By politics.co.uk staff
The shadow chancellor has been accused of making false accusations by senior Treasury officials after he implied that they had broken the law and collaborated with Labour in a taxation cover-up.
In an unprecedented move, senior civil servants – who are sworn to political impartiality – voiced anger at the allegations and hit back at George Osborne.
“The idea that we are party to hiding something from the public has incensed people here,” a senior Treasury official told The Times .
The shadow chancellor alleged on the weekend that the government had secret plans to raise income tax by 3p in the pound if it won the next election.
However, the allegation that Treasury documents leaked to the Tories showed an “unexplained” extra £14.8 billion for 2011-2012 was “wrong”, officials said.
The reason for the increase was that the Treasury expect economic growth of 3.5 per cent in that year.
This was further backed up by schools secretary Ed Balls this morning when he said: “There is nothing in those plans which says there will be hidden tax rises at all.
“That would be against the law for the Treasury to publish those kind of budget projections.”
Foreign secretary David Miliband also accused Mr Osborne of misleading the public, telling The Times: “It is simply not serious to take publications made at the time of the Budget, splash them in a press release and pretend that they are a great revelation.
“It is the politics of the big lie and the big smear and it is important that they are held to account,” he said.
The Treasury have confirmed that they are launching an internal inquiry into the leak of the documents to the Tories.
