This week started with Jackie Ashley's suggestion that a Labour rebellion could lead to Gordon Brown's resignation.  We end it with a slew of articles wondering if the U-turn will result in the same thing - but on a more drawn out time scale..

As it happens, even the most hostile commentators don't suggest the effect of doing a u-turn will be as imminently disastrous as Ashley was suggesting.  But its progressive commentators who are most interesting.

Polly Toynbee in The Guardian gets to grips with the detail ('Stop tinkering, Gordon.  Be bold, and show whose side you are really on') - but ignores the implications of the IFS study earlier this week that taxing the rich won't necessarily bring in more revenue.

Nick Clegg has sparked an intense round of comments and reactions with his article 'A clunking climbdown', also in The Guardian.

Thirdly and, for the sake of brevity, finally The Economist looks to what the fallout will mean for the Labour party with an eye to next week's elections ('Beleaguered Mr Brown').

It concludes:

"Labour has been similarly keen to downplay hopes for May 1st. A modest set of results—Mr Livingstone scraping home in London and a slight improvement on last year's share of the popular vote elsewhere—may end up being seen as a spectacular double-whammy. Mr Brown's underlying problems—a declining economy, his shortcomings as a communicator—would remain; but even a short respite from them would be welcomed."

With a 21 year high poll result from a YouGov poll in today's Telegraph - Labour will do well to achieve even that.

How the tax and benefits system should be structured has been a hotly contested issue in liberal circles over recent years. The IFS today released a study commissioned by the Mirrlees review of the British tax and benefit system.  The FT picked up on one aspect of the story - that a higher tax band of £100,000 plus is unlikely to raise much, if any, revenue ('Targeting rich will not work, says study').  However, the study is much broader and a better summary can be read in the IFS's own press release.

We're still going through the detail in the report , but its interesting how much the ideas seem to dovetail with our own work on welfare issues which can be read in 'Working on Welfare' on the CentreForum website.

Also in today's news

If you thought the Labour party might be in crisis, read Jackie Ashley in The Guardian today who will confirm all your suspicions. In her article, 'If the rebels prevail, Brown could be ousted in days', she maps out the terrible consequences for Gordon Brown of the 10p Income Tax rebellion.

"The Tories, it seems, will line up with an amendment from Labour's Frank Field to insist on a compensation package for those who will be worse off under the new tax rates. If Labour lost that vote, it would be all up for the prime minister."

The whole piece is well worth reading.  It seems amazing that one of Brown's strongest supporters should be so negative.  The likely explanation comes towards the end of the piece:

I am 100% against the official government view and, with every instinct, on the side of the Labour rebels. But disaster is looming and the real parliamentarians have carefully to weigh in the balance what they now do, and ask how much likelier it will make a Tory landslide a year hence.

So in actual fact the whole piece is really a message directed at troublesome MPs, and those that goad them on, to be loyal.  However, the fact that a commentator has to paint such a lurid picture of destruction in order to pull them back from the edge shows just how bad things are at the moment.