What's all this fuss about the 10p tax rate? Of course, it's nothing to do with their Lordships!

It's a hundred years since Mr Asquith and Mr Lloyd George presented the first in a series of Liberal budgets that introduced the first ever old-age pensions and provoked a battle with the rich landowners who dominated the Lords.

That stand-off resulted in two "Peers versus the People" General Elections and the first Lords reform when their power to block Commons legislation was restricted to two years.

The convention that the Lords do not interfere with taxation was firmly established long before then - it was the Lords breaking this convention in the face of Lloyd George's radical budgets that provoked the crisis.

So the abolition of the 10p tax rate is a matter for MPs.

And they seem to have made rather a bodge of it.

The effects are now coming to light and it's causing a real panic among Labour MPs who are discovering just how many of their poorest constituents are being made worse off by their own, supposedly "Labour" government.

What is happening is that the first £2,230 of taxable income will now be taxed at 20p in the pound instead of 10p.

Most people will be better off because the overall tax rate has fallen from 22p to 20p in the pound.

But the poorest won't earn enough for this cut to offset losing the 10p rate.

There are 5.3 million people who stand to suffer, mainly people who do not qualify for tax credits as parents of children or pensioners.

They include single younger workers and women between 60 and 65 on low incomes, plus part-time workers.

It's a lot of people - on average more than 8,000 in each constituency and in low-wage areas such as ours it could be more.

The Labour Government making more than 10,000 of the poorest wage-earners in constituencies such as Burnley, Pendle and Rossendale constituencies worse off?

When the changes were announced by then-Chancellor Gordon Brown a year ago, only the Liberal Democrat shadow chancellor Vince Cable spoke out against them.

Now the 10p has finally dropped. The Tories and the national media are making hay and Labour MPs are running scared.

And the effects may be momentous.