UK Current Affairs

Comment Is Free, But Death Could Soon Get Pricey

Samuel HooperLeave a comment
One day, Timmy, all of this will be seized by the government to stop you from gaining an unfair advantage in life
One day, Timmy, all of this will be seized by the government to stop you from gaining an unfair advantage in life

 

Never mind tinkering around the edges and tweaking the rates for inheritance tax or the level at which it takes effect – those arguments are so 2013. The real movers and shakers of the left are now questioning the right of anyone to pass on anything to their children at all, and their self-appointed spokesman, James Butler, has taken to the Comment Is Free pages of The Guardian to argue his case.

In high dudgeon, Butler points to several universally-acknowledged flaws in society, wildly extrapolates from them and reaches the conclusion that we would all be much better off if parents were actively discouraged from working hard and getting ahead for the benefit of their children. Apparently, goes this argument, the natural human instinct to provide for one’s offspring should be forcibly curtailed by government in order to ensure a strictly level playing field for everyone – and what is more, the government should have the right to enforce this usurpation of property rights:

Why do we permit this? The transfer of wealth between generations is an injustice: it is a reward for no work, and a form of access to privileges that are otherwise beyond reach.

The ‘we’ that are permitting this is never fully identified by Butler, but appears to consist of himself, his friends and others of a similarly cataclysmically communist bent. Butler clearly does not start from the basis that the people determine the powers that government may wield, instead approaching the issue from the basis that government should decide which powers and rights to grant the people. And to Butler’s mind, free agency and the ability to do what you like with your own assets is a liberty too far:

Far from a Keynesian “euthanasia of the rentier”, we are seeing the triumph of a rentier economy: in such conditions, rather than further accumulation by the sons and daughters of the wealthy, we should instead demand an end to inherited wealth entirely.

An end to inherited wealth entirely. Quite how such a policy would ever be implemented remains conveniently unmentioned by Butler, but would clearly happen only over the dead bodies of the thousands and millions of people who believe in the right to pass on to their children that which they have built or preserved during their lifetimes, to do with as they see fit.

None of this is to say that Butler does not hit on some of society’s ills; indeed, he is quite right to point out the fact that too many people in Britain are born with almost impossible odds of achieving success in life, whilst for children of privilege, failure is next to impossible. He detail many of the ways in which this problem perpetuates itself in a way that is impossible to refute:

Despite nominal efforts to curb this kind of [tax] minimisation, there remains a booming market in financial advice tailored to avoidance. The knock-on effects of this minimisation are huge: it permits further concentration of wealth in the hands of those who already possess it, rewarding those cunning enough to avoid taxation, and cushioning their children with an influx of unearned wealth. There are obvious uses to which this can be put: paying off student loans early, thus avoiding interest, investing in buy-to-let property, or high-return financial products. It permits the children of the middle classes to sustain themselves through unpaid internships or unfunded study into secure middle-class careers, while locking these off from those without such resources.

The diagnosis is spot-on, but the prescription that follows is barking mad. And as is all too often the case with solutions from the left, Butler seeks a remedy by tearing down the successful or privileged rather than building up the weak or disadvantaged. He legitimately seems to believe that Britain’s societal ills can be cured if the counter is reset to zero as each generation expires, with all of the winnings confiscated by the government and scooped into a big pot for the communal good.

Neither does it occur to Butler or other death tax proponents that the human brain and spirit – if given an adequate starting point via a good quality education, a safe upbringing and ambitious goals – is capable of outmatching and overtaking others born with far more advantages but much less motivation or natural ability.

So here is a different prescription: what if Butler and others of his persuasion placed more trust in human ability properly nurtured, and less reliance on the government to be the final arbiter of who gets to keep what when the music stops at life’s end?

Not all rich and wealthy people achieved their favourable position in life through the fruits of their own talent and labour – this is abundantly and indisputably clear. But equally, not all poor or less successful people arrived at their less favourable position because of a lack of resources and opportunities.

So why do people like James Butler and his inheritance tax-supporting friends on the left continue to clamour for a one-size-fits-all remedy to a complex problem?

At Last, A Debate On Europe

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

 

Europe: The LBC Debate
Europe: The LBC Debate

 

Tonight at 7PM, the British public will finally be granted what they have wanted – and been consistently denied – for years: a debate on Britain’s continued membership of the European Union. This would be a great milestone to celebrate, were it not for the fact that the two most important protagonists in British politics – Prime Minister David Cameron and opposition leader Ed Miliband – are entirely absent from the festivities.

Nonetheless, the match-up between Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg and UKIP leader Nigel Farage should be one to watch.

Tim Stanley at The Telegraph has the best preview of the debate, which is well worth a read:

We might wish that Ed and Dave were debating the EU, but at least someone is. It’s proof that the Europhiles realize they can no longer rely on public uninterest in what Brussels does to keep the status quo and proof that Euroscepticism has finally come of age.

So we shouldn’t expect a debate that changes the course of history, but we ought to welcome the fact that continued membership of the EU is up for discussion at all. I’m old enough to remember when the argument for leaving was the preserve of clinically insane Tory backbenchers, half a dozen pig farmers in Devon and Edward Fox. Times, they are a-changin’.

Indeed they are. For all the efforts of the pro-European apologists to cast any Eurosceptic thought as little-England lunacy bordering on outright racism, and all of the falsely apocalyptic suggestion that Britain’s trade with Europe is solely contingent on membership of the political superstate-like entity that the EU has become, the debate could not be suppressed any longer.

This blog will offer trademark semi-partisan analysis and commentary after the fact.

Rich Divorce Lawyer Chastises British Public For Envying The Wealthy

Samuel Hooper2 Comments

SPS_canary_wharf_tower_hamlets

 

Wealthy people contribute a tremendous amount to Britain, filling the Treasury’s coffers and bestowing no end of positive good on society. The unsung heroes of the economic recovery, the fact that their actions are ever criticised and their worthiness questioned is an intolerable affront towards those fine people whose labours benefit us all.

And who is better placed to lecture us on this topic than Ayesha Vardag, the ‘Diva of Divorce’ and Britain’s top divorce lawyer, herself the midwife to so many acts of social good?

The Guardian chronicles the Divorce Diva’s long list of grievances against the poor and the dispossessed:

Miss Vardag said: “There’s a strange, underdog culture in Britain whereby the rich and successful are bashed repeatedly.  It’s the antithesis of America, where hard work and success are celebrated. 

“We revile the successful and forget that they pay taxes and generate employment, but at the same time we complain about a culture of failure and layabouts living off the state. 

“You don’t get the prosperity and economic success that funds a world-class welfare state by sending all the rich people abroad.”

A few observations are in order here. Where to begin?

A world-class welfare state? Seriously? Has Ayesha Vardag seen or experienced the British welfare state? Of course she hasn’t. Nobody who has could call it ‘world class’ and keep a straight face. But we can discern her point – if it were not for people like her and the clients that she represents, us poor serfs would not have our self-perpetuating, callously undifferentiating, woefully inefficient and ruinously expensive safety net.

But the crux of Vardag’s argument rests on the assumption firstly that the wealthy are under some new and unprecedented attack (supposedly by the covetous forces of the greedy working classes), and secondly that these beleaguered people are all engaged in work that greatly contributes to the nation and for which we should be grateful. Neither of these assumptions is true.

The truth is that many of the super-rich, while perhaps not being worthy of envy and hatred, are also not worthy of praise, respect and a free ride in the press. It is quite possible to become very rich by doing and contributing nothing at all, while it is equally possible to contribute an enormous amount – to the community, to people in need, to any area or aspect of life where the market fails to assign the correct (or any) monetary value – and be incredibly poorly remunerated. Vardag offers no recognition of this basic fact.

You don’t have to be a foaming-at-the-mouth socialist to realise and acknowledge that there is rich variety within the ranks of the “rich and successful”, not all of them the modern-day job creating heroes that Ayesha Vardag would have us believe.

This blog is the very last place that would ever advocate taking any portion of person’s wealth out of envy, or as a punishment for hard work and success – Labour and the Liberal Democrats can squabble between themselves for that honour. But unlike Ayesha Vardag, who makes her own money profiting from a definite societal ill, neither does this blog believe that the wealthy should be immune from questioning that may sometimes be sceptical and vaguely hostile. That’s the nature of democratic free speech.

The nascent Organisation of Aggrieved Moguls , now firmly embedded in the United States of America, seems to have established a franchise in the United Kingdom. If it follows the trajectory of its US parent, we can soon expect to read newspaper columns penned by the likes of Alan Sugar, Philip Green, James Dyson and the Duke of Westminster in which they bleat about being persecuted like Jewish people on Kristallnacht:

From the Occupy movement to the demonization of the rich embedded in virtually every word of our local newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle, I perceive a rising tide of hatred of the successful one percent … This is a very dangerous drift in our American thinking. Kristallnacht was unthinkable in 1930; is its descendant “progressive” radicalism unthinkable now?

This ludicrious utterance by Tom Perkins in the letters page of the Wall Street Journal was just one of several recent pronouncements by paranoid rich guys in which they see in fairly mainstream Democratic party policies and public opinion the genesis of some terrible coming pogrom.

But Perkins, Vardag and the lot of them do the general public – in both Britain and America – a huge disservice. We may sigh ruefully when a senior neurosurgeon rolls past in her expensive car. We may daydream when walking past a solid, beautifully built house in Hampstead or on the Upper West Side. And we almost certainly gulp when we learn exactly how much Wayne Rooney will earn every week under the terms of his new contract with Manchester United. But we can do all of this within the context of understanding that rare and highly demanded skills fetch a high price in the labour market.

And while Wayne Rooney has to demonstrate his continued value by performing for his team in front of fans and television cameras every weekend, there is a great deal more opacity when it comes to the wealth of some of those working in banking or in the C-suites of many large corporations. Quite how they earn their multimillion pound or dollar bonuses is far less clear to people, particularly when they continue to be awarded regardless of whether the bank or corporation has had a bumper year or incurred a massive loss.

Policies and actions such as Gordon Brown’s punishing 50% top rate of income tax or the Liberal Democrats’ musings about a mansion tax may well be bad, counterproductive policies, but they hardly represent the dawn of a new age of wealth-bashing or concentration camps for the rich.

If Ayesha Vardag is truly curious as to why the elites (she incorrectly identifies them as only the wealthy) are mistrusted and vilified, she needs only look at the divorce proceedings case to which she is counsel and which compelled her to enter the debate in the first place. The Telegraph summarises the background quite nicely:

[The husband] is represented by Baroness Shackleton of Belgravia, a Tory peer and solicitor whose previous divorce clients have included Diana, Princess of Wales, and Sir Paul McCartney.

Pauline Chai, 68, his wife, has spent £920,000 on legal costs after starting divorce proceedings in London in February last year, and a further £92,000 in Malaysia.

She is represented by Miss Vardag, a lawyer who made her name acting for Katrin Radmacher, a German heiress, in a landmark Supreme Court case on pre-nuptial agreements.

A serving House of Lords peer taking time out from legislating to go head-to-head with Vardag,another lawyer who made her career fighting a case for a German heiress. The sums of money involved are only secondary – what is most striking is the complete detachment from the normal issues and travails of life experienced by most people.

Rather than sneering at the little people for being envious of their betters in the City of London or Wall Street, the Ayesha Vardags and Tom Perkins of the world – and particularly those working in banking, since it is this industry above all that generates the vast majority of public ire – would be better off explaining and educating why their high salaries and bonuses are at their current levels, so that there is finally some public understanding of the inputs which lead to such astronomical outputs. Many people may be keen to hear Vardag’s own personal justification.

Then we can have a real debate, not based on green-eyed envy from below or sneering class warfare from above, but on the facts.

 

What Do The Tories Stand For?

Samuel Hooper2 Comments
Interchangeable
Interchangeable

 

Iain Martin poses an excellent question to restive Conservative ministers and backbenchers currently jostling for position in a 2015 conservative leadership election that may very well never transpire – what would they do for the country if they actually got the job?

A very pertinent question. Watching the unseemly attempts of cabinet member after cabinet member manoeuvre for advantage and brief against perceived rivals provokes unpleasant flashbacks to the time when Gordon Brown finally had his way and muscled Tony Blair out of Number 10 Downing Street, only to become prime minister and realise that he had just fulfilled the extent of his ambition.

With more than a year to go until what will undoubtedly be a closely-fought election campaign, now is really not an appropriate time for self-interested ministers to be promoting their personal prospects at the expense of stable governance. And if they absolutely must indulge in such counterproductive, selfish shenanigans, they could at least give the public some semblance of a reason to believe that they offer a better alternative to David Cameron.

As Iain Martin points out, none of the would-be plotters have yet risen to this challenge:

Some people are positioning ahead of a potential vacancy and talking seriously in private about who the next Tory leader will be. So far it has all been very heavy on personalities and score-settling.

What we hear less of is ideas. What do those who want to succeed Cameron, if he loses, want to do with or for the country? This is, I know, a hopelessly naive question, although I never tire of asking it during a leadership race.

We already have a coalition government that stands for next to nothing. Blaming Labour for the country’s economic predicament and the state of the public finances may be correct, but it doesn’t amount to a platform for governing. And with little more than a year left in the lifetime of this parliament, we can expect precious little more in terms of radical or effective new policies. This mean that the electorate has to make up their minds based on what we can see today. So what is there?

Michael Gove’s education reforms spring to mind as something both tangible and in line with conservative principles, but aside from that, what else can the Tories point to? The period from 2010, when the United Kingdom finally escaped the Gordon Brown terror, has been characterised by retrenchment and burden-sharing and sacrifice-making and painful compromise at every turn. There has been almost nothing positive. Whether it is fiscal policy, defence policy, welfare reform (though credit to Iain Duncan Smith for at least trying), privacy or constitutional reform, it has been an exercise in damage limitation on all fronts.

If the conservatives were (heaven forfend) to elect Boris Johnson as their new leader, or Theresa May, or George Osborne or anyone else, what would they do differently? Why go through the trauma of ditching Cameron and choosing someone else who may be identical, or worse?

Iain Martin proposes a good set of questions, well worth asking, that could help distinguish one candidate from another and maybe tease out some real talent or independent thinking amidst a sea of caution and homogeneity. Making the valid point that voters will not warm to a new leader who only attained his or her position by virtue of being ‘next in line’, he issues the following challenge:

Eventually, the rest of us in the audience – taxpayers, the people who live here, Tories and non-Tories alike – might like to hear what applicants to be Conservative leader and trainee prime minister have in mind, other than stopping each other.

Here are his ten questions:

1) How can the country be more productive?

2) How can we maximise the advantages of globalisation without having to concrete over the whole of southern England to accommodate the millions more who want to be here?

3) Are our banks still too big and how do we get more competition to aid consumers and business?

4) Why is the tax system such a mess of conflicting incentives?

5) Is EU membership really compatible with being a self-governing nation state?

6) Is it even possible to be truly self-governing any longer in the age of the EU, big tech and giant corporates that operate across continents?

7) The Blair/Gove education reforms are up and running – how might they be built on?

8) What is the UK’s foreign policy?

9) What are the threats and how will we defend ourselves?

10) Can the UK be remade to give all its constituent parts, especially England, greater autonomy while still holding together the Union?

While it is absolutely right to challenge those seeking to be David Cameron’s successor to answer these questions, in reality it would be good for all politicians and party leaders to have a stab at addressing them, because these ten questions really form the basis of how we currently see ourselves as a country, and where we want to go from here.

Take the first question on productivity. This could lead to an interesting debate along any number of lines, including trade union reform, European Union membership status, working conditions for interns and apprentices, and more. Already we would see a divide between the mainstream Conservative party MPs who remain deeply eurosceptical, and the more Europhile fringe. Similarly, a contrast would be drawn between the mainstream anti-union position and those such as Robert Halfon MP who have been trying to reintroduce a trade union heritage to the party.

The tax system question is also one that urgently requires answering, not just to help search for the ideal future Tory leader but because the current tax code is such a mess. Some are quite keen to continue incentivising certain ‘good’ behaviours such as marriage through the tax code while others (one dares to hope) might argue for a radical stripping down and simplification of the system. While none of the potential candidates are likely to come out in support of a genuinely interesting idea such as a flat tax, we might see ideas about eliminating the myriad of tax credits in order to lower rates for everyone gain some traction.

Martin’s list is not perfect, and some of the questions are more philosophical than immediately useful. The brace of questions on the EU, for example, are the type of topic that one could imagine being debated at length over canapes at Davos or Bilderberg, but which are of no help in distinguishing future Tory leadership candidates. EU membership is clearly increasingly incompatible with being a self-governing nation state, and will remain that way for as long as the Treaty of Rome’s ‘ever closer union’ call continues to be advanced with no democratic mandate from the European people. And no Tory leader is ever likely to publicly surrender British policymaking to the forces of the EU, multinational business or big tech, no matter what compromises may take place in secret.

The questions on foreign policy and preparing to meet future threats are of extreme importance. While Russia’s annexation of Crimea and continued slide back toward authoritarian despotism is not about to herald a new age of big set-piece land wars in Europe, it will at least hopefully remind UK policymakers that the next unknown threat to the UK will by definition come from out of the blue. Having been chastened by that reminder, Tory leadership candidates might have some refreshing opinions on the size, strength and scope of our armed forces, perhaps with a view toward undoing some of the recent damage done.

The final question on remaking the UK to allow greater (and ideally equal) autonomy for all constituent nations of the United Kingdom, and the need to clearly set out those powers that belong at Westminster, those that belong with the home nations and those that should be devolved to local level is perhaps the most important of all. This blog has long advocated for answering this question by holding a UK constitutional convention to decide these matters once and for all. While this is an extremely unlikely prospect, it would be interesting to know the potential candidates’ thoughts on these matters.

But of course we will hear no opinions on any of these matters, because there are no Tory leadership candidates. And there are no Tory leadership candidates because there is no Tory leadership election on the cards.

The bottom line is this – there are a lot of important questions about the current state of our country and how best to move forward. Iain Martin has done a good service by listing some of these, and any politician who can disengage from the daily grind of politicking and governance for long enough to answer them would be making a valuable contribution to the debate.

But those Conservative ministers and prominent backbenchers inclined to look past the 2015 general election to burnish their leadership prospects while refusing to engage in real debate on the issues are just being opportunistic and cowardly, and do not deserve the air time or our attention.

Those who want to replace David Cameron as leader of the Conservative Party ought to try believing in and standing for something themselves – something other than their own selfish career advancement – before the jostling for position and knife-sharpening gets out of hand.

GCH Who?

Samuel HooperLeave a comment
Who?
Who?

 

Watching the debate on government surveillance and citizen privacy play out differently on opposite sides of the Atlantic is both astonishing and depressing.

While the issue has become a hot political topic and an electoral issue leading into the 2014 midterms – with candidates and incumbents lining up to praise Edward Snowden for whistleblowing and revealing the extensive activities of the NSA, or condemn him as a hypocritical traitor – in Britain, the debate has caused barely a murmur.

Despite the fact that as closest allies, the United States and United Kingdom cooperate intensively on surveillance and national security issues, sharing the front-end technology as well as the intelligence results, those responsible from the United Kingdom side have escaped serious political pressure and questioning almost completely.

The closest to uncomfortable scrutiny that anyone from the British security apparatus came was when former GCHQ chief Sir David Omand was asked a softball question at the Home Affairs committee, and used it as an opportunity to bemoan the fact that all of this pesky, pedantic oversight of the intelligence community is harming their morale and making them feel sad.

John Naughton, writing in The Observer, has a theory about this relative lack of interest in Britain. He proposes that people would sit up and pay more attention to the erosion of their right to privacy and protection from unreasonable search if only the technological aspects of the question were explained in a more accessible way:

As someone who is supposed to know about these things, I’m sometimes asked to give talks about computing to non-technical audiences. The one thing I have learned from doing this is that if you want people to understand technological ideas then you have to speak to them in terms that resonate with their experience of everyday things.

Naughton believes that the problem is a lack of technical understanding in the British population – that if only the man on the Clapham omnibus knew what it meant to tap transatlantic fibreoptic cables to eavesdrop on data, to use computer malware to snoop on untargeted citizens or to maintain logs of telephony metadata, he would suddenly take to the streets in anger. This seems somewhat naïve. After all, American citizens are no more technically sophisticated than the British, and yet they managed to generate and sustain a sense of outrage that their privacy was being routinely violated by a government that would have happily continued doing so in secret were they not caught red-handed.

Naughton continues:

One of the things that baffles me is why more people are not alarmed by what Edward Snowden has been telling us about the scale and intrusiveness of internet surveillance. My hunch is that this is partly because – strangely – people can’t relate the revelations to things they personally understand.

The average Brit may not be conversant in the technical details, but they know the broad strokes – that the government is and has long been collecting and sharing data on us all with our international intelligence partners, that this was done without ever bringing the question up for national or parliamentary debate, and that the government is more interested in bullying people who try to report on the truth than in making their activities more transparent and democractically accountable.

The problem is not that the average Brit simply doesn’t understand what it means when GCHQ or the intelligence services collect reams of data indiscriminately with no targeting and no proof or suspicion of ill intent – they understand all too well. The problem is that far too many British people, when asked, simply shrug their shoulders and say something along the lines of “well, if it keeps us safe we should probably keep doing it,” or “if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to worry about.”

And more worrying still is the fact that some elements of the press also seem willing and eager to promulgate this attitude.

The reason for this apathy among both the people and the press is the fact that the British people have no real terms of reference when it comes to thinking about what government actions are good and which are bad. In the United Kingdom, the law of the land is only as cast iron and certain as the whims of the current government and current parliament. Aside from the European Union and European law (which act as brakes on British government ambition in almost every other sphere than this), the British citizen has no real defence against any action taken against him by the elected dictatorship of the day. And where it comes down to interpretation of existing law by the intelligence agencies, the cases are fought in court in a very opaque way that hardly anyone understands.

Contrast this to the situation in our closest ally, the United States of America, where precisely the same debate is playing out but at a much louder volume. The debate is much more accessible to the average American because the US government is structured in a much more understandable way and the powers and limitations of each branch of government are delineated by the Constitution. Though ambiguities and disagreements naturally always occur, the Constitution at least provides a frame of reference.

When issues such as bulk collection of telephony metadata or the recording of international telephone calls or the intercepting of emails come up, Americans can point to the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which clearly states:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

There it is, in black and white. And it protects Americans in perpetuity until such time as it may be repealed or replaced with a new amendment (for which the bar for passage is prohibitively high).

That’s not to say that the US Constitution has done anything much to help American citizens defend themselves from unwarranted government intrusion. The Obama administration, and the Bush administration before, are able to come up with all manner of tortured (no pun intended) interpretations of the law to justify both the illegal things that they do and the fact that they try so hard to keep them secret.

But the mere fact that the highest echelon of law concerning search and seizure of property is so comparatively well known in the United States means that shady government activities suspected of falling on the wrong side of the line between legality and unconstitutional overreach are noticed much sooner and debated much more vigorously. By contrast, it would be astounding if any more than one in a thousand Britons of voting age could point to the relevant laws and statutes which define the British government’s legal powers to monitor the communications and data of its citizens.

The sad irony is that the Fourth Amendment protections enjoyed (or at least referred to) by American citizens derive largely from British legal doctrine, and yet it is the former colony which now tenuously keeps alive something which has been slowly and deliberately extinguished in the mother country.

John Naughton is right to be alarmed at public apathy toward the growing British surveillance state – it is perhaps the greatest threat to our democracy and free speech currently in existence. But public opinion will not be inflamed by holding a national technology seminar to explain the small print; there will only ever be opposition to government overreach on spying or anything else when we sit down together as a country and agree exactly what should be the limits on government power.

Holding a constitutional convention for the United Kingdom – as this blog has consistently advocated – to determine once and for all the powers that we are willing to grant the government and those which we would keep for ourselves may not be popular or sexy. But it is needed now more than ever.