In more than 220 years The Times has published many historic reports; few of them have been more significant than last Saturday’s exposure of the Civil Service briefings before Gordon Brown’s 1997 stealth tax on pension funds. There had been no doubt about the original facts: the July 1997 Budget deprived pension funds of £5 billion of tax relief on their income. There was no doubt of the consequences: the British system of final-salary pensions was wrecked, though the public sector was largely spared.

A vital question could not be answered for the past ten years: had the Chancellor been alerted by his officials to the possible consequences of this decision? Using the Freedom of Information Act, after a two-year battle, The Times was able to force the publication of the Treasury advice. These papers show that Mr Brown had indeed been given warning but had decided to go ahead. The disaster that followed had been foreseen. The Chancellor decided to take the £5 billion, knowing that he might be damaging both the pension system and the stock market. He has nobody to blame but himself; equally, the public has nobody to blame but him.

The Chancellor had been told that his decision would knock “a big hole” in existing pension plans; he had been warned that “final salary” pension schemes would have to be closed; he had been warned that there would have to be increases in council tax to pay for the raised costs of council pensions; he had been warned that pensions for the lower paid would have to be cut. All of these consequences did in fact follow.

As a result, the 1997 stealth tax destroyed what had been, when Labour came to power, one of the strongest pension systems in the world. Some £100 billion of capital was lost to the pension funds. Millions of families have lost part of the pension income they were depending upon. This is the biggest financial disaster of Labour’s period of office, and it was caused by the decision of a chancellor who had been fully alerted to the likely damage. The desperation with which he has fought to prevent the publication of these papers is a sure sign that Mr Brown knows how damning they are.

The papers were finally released late on a Friday afternoon before Easter. The original 1997 tax was a stealth tax, that is to say, a complex tax with a long-term impact, likely to attract relatively little public attention when first announced. When the Information Commissioner ruled last summer that these papers would have to be published, the Treasury still appealed, and that delayed publication for another nine months. At every stage there has been prevarication and concealment.

David Cameron, the Leader of the Opposition, is now calling for a full independent inquiry into the circumstances surrounding the Chancellor’s decision to scrap tax relief on the dividends paid into pension funds. He thinks that this inquiry should be carried out by the Government Actuary. This seems an altogether reasonable proposal, but it will no doubt be resisted by Mr Brown and his friends.

Ed Balls, the Economic Secretary to the Treasury, has already said: “David Cameron’s words once again show his spineless lack of principle and his talent for rank hypocrisy.” It might be tempting for Mr Cameron to retort: “Ed Balls’s words once again show his spineless lack of principle and his talent for rank hypocrisy.” After all, Mr Balls, together with Geoffrey Robinson and Gordon Brown, shared the responsibility for the original disastrous decision and for the secrecy in which it was cloaked.

Why is this pensions issue so important? It is because so many people have suffered severe financial loss at the point in life when they are least capable of recovering from it. When people are in their fifties, or have retired, they are not usually in a position to make new pension arrangements if their existing ones have gone wrong.

In the Enron case, in the United States, there was some attempt to excuse the people responsible for the company’s collapse on the ground that white-collar crime does not involve physical violence. People, it is said, can recover from the mere loss of money. Judge Simeon Lake was trying Jeffrey Skilling, one of the key Enron executives. He said Skilling’s crimes had “imposed on hundreds, if not thousands, a life of poverty”.

The damage that Mr Brown has done to the pension system was done by stealth — there appeared an attempt to conceal at almost every stage. That is not criminal, but equally it is not transparent. It would be cynical to suggest that this is just the normal practice of politics. As a consequence some £100 billion has been drawn out of the pension system. However one thinks that huge sum might have been distributed, it means that many millions of people have lost money, and that tens if not hundreds of thousands are likely to have imposed on them an old age of poverty.

In the circumstances, it is absolutely proper for Mr Cameron to call for an inquiry. Indeed, he would be neglecting his duty if he did not. On the most charitable reading, Mr Brown’s 1997 stealth tax was a serious blunder that did substantial damage to Britain’s pension system. The public interest has suffered and large numbers of individuals have been impoverished.

Mr Balls has tried to make his own defence for the Chancellor which, in my view, is quite unconvincing. Mr Brown is entitled to make his own defence. He is an able man, a powerful debater, well able to explain why he acted as he did — and why he tried so hard to keep it secret.

Mr Brown is in a delicate position. In a few weeks he may be asking his party to elect him leader. Surely he needs to justify himself before he can reasonably ask the Labour Party to make him Prime Minister. Mr Brown has a lot to answer for; pensioners have a lot of votes.

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