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Jackie Ashley writes in today's Guardian about the 10p rebellion, arguing for Labour backbenchers to step back from the brink:

Brown's selling point as a politician has always been his concern for the poor. To fight and lose a key vote about taking hundreds of pounds of extra cash from more than 5 million of the poorest voters would be too big a humiliation to survive. Ahead of every knife-edge vote, government whips go around implying to possible rebels that the prime minister could resign. It happened with Blair and the Iraq war, as well as on foundation schools, and it happened time and again in the John Major years. This time, with Brown, it cannot be a bluff. He has stamped his authority on this so clearly that to lose would finish him.

I agree with her that it would be a massive risk for Labour to ditch its leader now: things could get considerably worse: the party might implode if the leadership is reopened now, and the loss of power could be more imminent than it seems, if the public feels a government defeat should result in a general election.

But the real blunder of course was Gordon Brown's, in cutting the 10% rate in the first place in his last budget, last year. Why on earth did he do it? After all, he'd proudly introduced it much earlier in his time at the Treasury as a flagship policy to ease the tax burden on the least well paid. The only possible explanation is that he thought cutting the standard rate by 2% was such an eye-catching stunt, attracting middle-class voters like mad and outmanoeuvring David Cameron, that it was worth abandoning social and fiscal principle for. Or perhaps he thought no one would notice - it took a little while for the Tories to realise he'd not made a tax cut overall, if you remember.

But it was madness. My immediate reaction was to be opposed to what had been done: a Labour government should be reducing taxes on the low-paid, which is why I liked to 10p rate in the first place. What's more difficult to understand is why it's taken so long for Labour MPs to make similar noises -  the truth is that genuine ideological opposition has now teamed up with general unrest about the state of the government, and panicky urge to assert themselves.

Brown has reason to worry, and if I were him, I'd offer as many concessions as were needed to quell this rebellion. if I were a Labour MP, I'd tell him I didn't want him to go, but that I'd want something very like a reversal of the tax rise - very like a reversal indeed - if he wanted me to vote with him.