Clunk goes the mailed fist. Gordon was right ten years ago. He would do it again now and it would still be "the right decision for Britain".

And if bleeding hearts wittering on about the ruin of their pension schemes don't like it, they should know him better by now.

Gordon doesn't say sorry. He doesn't "regret" the slave trade like Tony Blair. If he had a hand in it in some former life, he would be up there telling it like it was - "right for Britain".

We know that by now. One of the (few) appealing prospects of Gordon Brown premiership is that the apologies will cease from day one. "Sorry" will go back to being a dirty word.

Even so, he set a new standard in gold-plated brass-neckery yesterday when he declared that his tax on pension fund dividends in his first Budget, brash and over-confident after the 1997 election triumph, was not just "the right decision for investment", but "the right decision for the future of our pension system".

What would happen if ever he took the wrong decision for the pension system, or anything else, heaven forfend. No matter, he won't, not so that he would notice.

No matter this time that Geoffrey Robinson - then a member of Gordon's self-publicising Treasury team and destined to become, the only Minister ever sacked for lending money to a fellow-Minister - gave the game away years ago. They needed the dosh and were going to grab it where they could.

In his outburst yesterday, Gordon did remember one thing right. In that Budget speech, he made out that this wasn't a raid on the pension funds at all, just a lofty strategy to encourage companies to invest.

It went something like this. If all dividends, even those paid to pension funds, are taxed like other profits, there will be no incentive to fritter away heard-earned earnings in dividends. Companies will cut back those dividends and invest the money virtuously instead. That was the "right decision for Britain" bit.

It was mighty nonsense, even then at the height of the tech share boom, when near-teenagers running companies nobody could understand went round telling each other dividends were for wimps, paid by directors too stupid to think of anything better to do with their shareholders' wealth.

Gordon never quite got round to that. But it was the idea. He made out that he handed back the dividend tax by cutting corporation tax. In real life, he changed the timing of payments so that many companies were out of funds for a while.

Plenty grumbled, but I don't recall any saying they were investing cash they would otherwise have paid in dividends.

Instead a new fashion developed. The wimps became directors who fail to return spare cash to investors in - tax-free - one-off share buy-backs rather than boring old taxed dividends that shareholders like to see increased year after year.

Ask if Gordon got that right, if you dare. You know the answer. Clunk.

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