'The death of New Labour!' screamed The
Sun this week as the UK
government announced plans to raise the top rate of income tax. Another Rupert Murdoch newspaper, The Times, made the same point with more reverence. "The death was announced yesterday of the political idea first advanced by Tony Blair," it noted sadly. "News of its passing was announced by the chancellor
of the
exchequer."

This hostile reaction is bad news for Labour,
old or new. It's a truism of British politics in the last 30 years that if you go into a general
election without Murdoch's blessing, you lose.

Everyone recognises that desperate times call for courageous measures. Specifically, the global crunch requires billions pumped into the banking system to unfreeze credit markets, and a stimulus plan to reboot the
economy.

Yet the British government's critics argue that its response has been to abandon the central economic tenets of New Labour.
Gordon Brown's 'golden rules' of prudence and stability have been replaced with a strategy for Britain to borrow, tax and spend its way out of recession. In particular, the talisman of everything New Labour stands for – no rises in personal income tax – has been jettisoned. "So Labour has
chosen," said The Times. "It will fight, as it used to,
partly on taxing the rich."

To an extent, this is unfair. Giving notice of an increase of the top rate of tax from 40% to 45% for those earning over £150,000pa is a far cry from the 1970s. Then, Labour chancellor Denis Healey famously promised to squeeze the rich "until their pips squeak," and had them paying a top tax rate of 83%. Today, as Barack Obama has demonstrated in the United States – a country further to the right economically than Britain – a redistributive message can work when people feel their jobs and pensions are under threat.

Pragmatism is also a key characteristic of New Labour. When the middle classes are feeling so
battered, the government is betting that it will get electoral credit for
reflecting their concerns.

What makes many MPs nervous is that it flies in the face of the defining experience of the New Labour generation: the 1992 general election. Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and Peter Mandelson – the three amigos of the New Labour movement – vowed "never again" after Neil Kinnock and John Smith blew that election by proposing an increase in the top rate of tax from 40% to 50% and the end of the exemption for high earners from paying the full national insurance contribution.

John Major's Conservatives immediately branded this 'Labour's Tax Bombshell' – a highly effective phrase that is already being recycled by David Cameron's Conservatives.

At the 1997 election, with the lesson learnt, Blair promised that there would be no rises in direct taxation for the lifetime of a government. He repeated that promise in 2001 and 2005. This delivered an unprecedented three election victories in a row for Labour. Now the party will go into the next election promising tax increases.

On the morning after the 1992 election, Britain's biggest-selling newspaper boasted that 'It Was The Sun Wot Won It!' The previous day, with Labour ahead in the polls, they had advised readers "If Kinnock wins today, will the last person to leave Britain please turn out the lights." Whether The Sun won it or not is hardly the point. What matters is that the paper backed the right horse, as it had all the way through the Thatcher years, and would do again throughout Blair's.

"It's the times that have changed, not New Labour," Peter Mandelson observed last week. The Times and The Sun in fact. Labour will either have to buck recent history or get those papers back on side if it wants to win the next election.

Professor Richard Aldous is head of History & Archives at UCD