alternatehistory.com

The Rise of the Outsiders: How Mainstream Politics Lost its Way, Steve Richards, London: Atlantic Books, 2017, page 108:

' . . . former Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, who died in 2005 was an MP for the Scottish constituency of Livingston, a relatively poor area. Speaking at a fringe meeting of the Labour Party conference in 2001, early in Labour's second term in power, Cook noted that his constituents in Scotland had been beneficiaries of the government's tax credits—credits that boosted the income of the poorest, especially those on low wages in work. . . '
This section goes on to say that many persons who received these tax credits thought they were merely technical adjustments made by Inland Revenue. Blair and Brown didn't talk about them because they thought middle-income voters, "Middle England and the newspapers it read," would disapprove of this income redistribution.

And actually, I think my own United States gets some of the credit for pioneering the Earned Income Credit (EIC), although this is mainly for low-wage workers with children.
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