UK Current Affairs

Making The Rich Pay Twice

Samuel Hooper2 Comments

We recently saw the Labour Party make some potentially sensible proposals on education – moving to enhance the status of teachers by simultaneously licensing them and requiring them to undertake continual professional accreditation, and making it easier to fire consistently underperforming teachers and helping them transition out of the profession.

Contrast this good news of the Labour Party embracing a carrot-and-stick performance-based approach to educational reform, with this dismal, tired suggestion from Social Market Foundation. The Guardian reports the details of their latest proposal:

One proposal would see popular state schools being means tested, with the most affluent parents being charged for their children to attend top schools.

Families earning more than £80,000 a year should contribute financially, with those with an annual income above £200,000 having to pay the full price of their children’s education at the best state schools. Fees should be the same for the wealthy as those charged at independent day schools.

This “parent premium” for households earning more than £200,000 a year would generate surplus funds, a quarter of which would be retained by the school, with the rest redistributed among other state schools.

We can lump this nonsensical idea together with all of the other vengeful “clobber the rich” schemes broached by those on the left to create a fairly accurate picture of their ideal Britain. In their Ideal Britain, anyone earning much over £150,000 a year would be subject to a 50% marginal tax rate on their income. And when they reached £200,000 a year, a household wanting to send their children to a “popular state school” would have to pay a school fee in line with the fees charged by private day schools, because why the hell not?

Meaningless graphic for a nonsensical policy.
Meaningless graphic for a nonsensical policy.

Implementing this policy would likely cause a fair bit of bemusement and anger among the evil rich fat cats being targeted, as they rightly assume that the hefty taxes that they pay entitle them to equal access to the state services that they help to fund. If, when a household has paid well over half of their income to the government once income tax, national insurance, other direct taxes and VAT are taken into account, I don’t think it is very unreasonable to assume that they have contributed enough and maybe give them a break. But not according to the Social Market Foundation. Having gone through the fiscal wringer once already, SMF sees them ripe for further punitive action, charging them for access to the good state schools that they are already paying to fund.

What next? Means testing access to NHS services? Charging for chemotherapy or kidney transplants? Where does this end?

In fact, the SMF proposal would create the bizarre and perverse financial incentive for parents to send their child to a “less good” or less popular state school so as to avoid spending up to £30,000 a year in fees. Their children might suffer as a result, but perhaps those who advocate for ideas such as this would see that as a good thing. By dragging down the progeny of the rich and successful, we create the more equal, mediocre society that they long for.

This is regressive social engineering of the worst kind, dragging down the successful and clobbering them for more money, funds which would be used for the nebulous purpose of “helping the less fortunate”. As always, the methods of taking from the rich and successful are very enthusiastically and clearly articulated, but the process by which those seized funds would be translated directly into helping the less fortunate is much more vague.

The long and short of it is this. I may greatly disagree with the current heavy tax burden, and the huge, creaking behemoth state that it funds, but I also recognise that it is the concept of everyone paying in and everyone being eligible to partake of the results that helps to create social cohesion and makes us a country rather than a bunch of economic agents who happen to live on the same island. Charging richer parents to send their children to schools that they have already paid taxes to provide – indeed, closing off access to any public services from the wealthy people who provide the lions share of the funding for them – only serves to further entrench the us vs. them atmosphere already roiling our country, but this time would give the rich some ammunition to justifiably argue their corner.

Spending on education increased from £40.6 billion in 1999 to £88.6 billion in 2014, and is estimated to rise further to £90.9 billion in 2016. If British educational standards are indeed stagnating or worsening, chronic underinvestment does not make a convincing scapegoat. Making rich people pay market rates to avail themselves of the public services that they have already funded through their taxes would no doubt fulfill many of the darker, more insidious desires of some on the left. But one thing that it would certainly not do is fix our educational problems.

Treading Water On NSA Surveillance, Ctd.

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

Evidently given prior notice of the dissatisfaction that was certain to fall on his head should he fail to announce any substantive changes to the bulk telephony data collection programme that flourished under his administration, President Obama triangulated and managed  to set out a plan that included the illusion of substantive changes. It may prove enough to fool the trusting and the credulous, but there are precious few of those sorts of people left to be fobbed off.

He listens. He gets it.
He listens. He gets it.

The New York Times gives a good overview:

President Obama, declaring that advances in technology had made it harder “to both defend our nation and uphold our civil liberties,” announced carefully calculated changes to surveillance policies on Friday, saying he would restrict the ability of intelligence agencies to gain access to telephone data, and would ultimately move that data out of the hands of the government.

But Mr. Obama left in place significant elements of the broad surveillance net assembled by the National Security Agency, and left the implementation of many of his changes up to Congress and the intelligence agencies themselves.

The one announcement not earlier anticipated by the New York Times was the fact that the president may be slightly more amenable to the idea of telecommunications companies or as-yet unspecified third parties holding the unconstitutionally-gotten telephony metadata, rather than the NSA itself. The Times reports:

On the question of which entity will hold the storehouse of phone metadata, the president said Mr. Holder would make recommendations in 60 days. Privacy advocates have called for telecommunications providers to keep the data, though many of the companies are resisting it.

And resist they should. Due to the sensitive and highly politically charged nature of the data being held, why would a private firm wish to open itself to potential liability from lawsuits by hosting the data? Furthermore, unsavoury and unconstitutional though it may be for the government to be collating this data, it is probably more secure in the hands of the paranoid and capable people at the NSA than it would be in some corporate data centre.

But all of this is beside the point – it is not the question of where the data is hosted that upsets civil libertarians. If someone robbed banks for a living, the main concern of the public would not be where the robber is hiding the stolen cash before laundering it, it would be the fact that he is robbing banks in the first place. Similarly, the point of contention here is not whether the US government or private telecommunications companies holds vast troves of data about the telephone calls made by US and foreign citizens – it is the fact that the government seeks to monitor and check this information without a warrant to do so in the first place.

It is hard to listen to anything that Obama says on the issue of national security and privacy without remembering that he wouldn’t be saying anything at all had his clandestine spying apparatus not been revealed to the world by Edward Snowden, and that the debate that he now seeks to claim credit for starting would, if he had his way, be held only between competing interests in government, well out of the view or input of the public.

Glenn Greenwald is of the same viewpoint, seeing right through the sham:

The crux of this tactic is that US political leaders pretend to validate and even channel public anger by acknowledging that there are “serious questions that have been raised”. They vow changes to fix the system and ensure these problems never happen again. And they then set out, with their actions, to do exactly the opposite: to make the system prettier and more politically palatable with empty, cosmetic “reforms” so as to placate public anger while leaving the system fundamentally unchanged, even more immune than before to serious challenge.

And how cosmetic these proposed “reforms” really are. Caught in the act of carrying out unconstitutional searches and intrusions into the private communications of US citizens, the president’s response is not to admit any fault, but to utter meaningless platitudes about the importance of “America’s values” while changing nothing of any substance at all:

And now we have the spectacle of President Obama reciting paeans to the values of individual privacy and the pressing need for NSA safeguards. “Individual freedom is the wellspring of human progress,” he gushed with an impressively straight face. “One thing I’m certain of, this debate will make us stronger,” he pronounced, while still seeking to imprison for decades the whistleblower who enabled that debate. The bottom line, he said, is this: “I believe we need a new approach.”

I have just finished reading the excellent essay by George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language”. As well as helping me to realise just how pretentious and cumbersome my own writing can sometimes be on this blog (for which I can only apologise and pledge to try harder), it furnished me with this gem, this eternal truth:

If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself. Political language – and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists – is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

And this one:

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible … Thus political language has to consist largely of euphamism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers … Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.

President Obama, justifying the intrustive actions of the NSA and seeking to cast his proposed cosmetic reforms in a favourable light, and himself as a champion of individual liberty, said this:

“In an extraordinarily difficult job — one in which actions are second-guessed, success is unreported, and failure can be catastrophic — the men and women of the intelligence community, including the NSA, consistently follow protocols designed to protect the privacy of ordinary people,” he declared. “What sustains those who work at NSA and our other intelligence agencies through all these pressures is the knowledge that their professionalism and dedication play a central role in the defense of our nation.”

And this:

And yet, in our rush to respond to very real and novel threats, the risks of government overreach – the possibility that we lose some of our core liberties in pursuit of security – became more pronounced. We saw, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, our government engaged in enhanced interrogation techniques that contradicted our values. As a Senator, I was critical of several practices, such as warrantless wiretaps. And all too often new authorities were instituted without adequate public debate.

Through a combination of action by the courts, increased congressional oversight, and adjustments by the previous Administration, some of the worst excesses that emerged after 9/11 were curbed by the time I took office. But a variety of factors have continued to complicate America’s efforts to both defend our nation and uphold our civil liberties.

The “worst excesses” to which Obama refers? Torture. Extraordinary rendition. Illegal search and invasion of privacy. But “techniques that contradicted our values” sounds so much better, so much more clinical and so much less descriptive of what happened.

This isn’t good, is it?

We Need A Federal United Kingdom, Not Just More Powers To Scotland

Samuel Hooper7 Comments

 

I have felt like something of a voice in the wilderness at times on this blog, advocating for equal devolution of powers from Westminster to the four home nations of the United Kingdom, to the extent that have almost questioned my sanity that something so self-evidently sensible and obvious to me should be so opaque and avant-garde an idea to almost everyone writing a newspaper column or appearing as a TV news talking head.

And so I am seizing on the words of Allister Heath with all the enthusiasm at my disposal. Apparently I am not alone after all. Addressing the question of Scottish independence and the upcoming referendum, Heath writes:

But that doesn’t mean that the status quo is right either. The UK’s constitution has been an irrational and unsustainable shambles since the Scotland Act of 1998; this can only be resolved satisfactorily if the process that started with Scottish devolution is now taken to its logical conclusion.

Following what we must hope will be a resounding “no” vote, we need to adopt a new, fully federal model for the UK inspired by the US, Canadian, Swiss and other similar systems that share power properly between the centre and autonomous provinces or states. England needs to have its own parliament, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland must be given greater rights and responsibilities, and all component nations of the UK need to start living within their means, raising as much tax as they spend.

This is heartening for two reasons – firstly because it validates my own thinking, but with the persuasive articulacy of someone who writes weekly columns in a national newspaper. It is absolutely right to assert that the devolution process begun in 1998 put our country into a state of limbo, but I would go further and argue that the UK’s constitution has been a shambles for many decades and indeed centuries prior to that. This tends to be the case in older countries that have eschewed revolution or invasion in recent times, but while conservatism would tend to urge an “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” attitude, our constitutional underpinning and the way that our country functions is of such fundamental importance that I cast the “traditionally conservative” attitude aside in favour of the reforms advocated by Heath.

Secondly, Heath’s joining the argument for a federal solution is heartening because he addresses the financial aspect in a mature and sensible way. Making the four home nations responsible for their own taxation would allow for that all-too-rare thing, variety, to take root in the UK. The four countries could experiment with setting tax rates in line with local preferences to achieve local ends, and the redistributionist pipe dreams of some of the nationalist parties (SNP, I’m looking at you) once and for all. Heath expands on this thinking, conferring upon the home nations the financial autonomy enjoyed by the states of the US plus a little bit more:

Crucially, the UK’s four component-nations should not merely have the right to spend money but also the responsibility to raise it; they would have their own tax systems, running in parallel with a much reduced UK-wide HMRC. The four nations ought to be able to cut and hike taxes, and would be under great pressure to balance their budgets. They should have the right to issue their own debt, which would not have sovereign status and would not be guaranteed by the UK.

Absolutely right. Of course there will always be a place for HMRC, because certain tax policy (such as import/export duty) must remain common to all. But giving the home nations the right to set their own tax rates on the “big ones” like income tax and corporation tax is absolutely the right thing to do. This could even present the ideal opportunity to do away once and for all with the laughable notion that National Insurance is somehow separate from income tax – let the people see what their real effective tax rate is when NI is factored in to a single tax rate and see what they think of their overall tax burden then.

The UK has suffered from a dearth of political competition for too long. At times I have really struggled to differentiate between the views of the coalition government and the Labour opposition in terms of attitude to the proper size and scope of the state. Sure, the Conservatives may talk the small government talk, but in no way have they boldly walked the walk. Four powerful national assemblies under the auspices of the Westminster parliament would allow for some real diversity in our islands, diversity of ideas and yes, diversity of outcomes.

The end result of all of this would be political settlements more closely attuned to the moods of the local electorates, and therefore more democratic in the true sense of the word. Heath fast-forwards the clock and imagines the likely power dynamics in a newly-federal UK:

In a federal UK, England would probably be run by a pro-market Tory government (or, intriguingly, a Tory-Ukip coalition) with the UK as a whole controlled by Labour, at least in the short term. We could see radical tax cuts in England and elsewhere as leaders vie to grab business. Northern Ireland, in particular, is ripe for drastic supply-side reforms to rejuvenate its economy. This new dynamic would better reflect electoral preferences and would allow rival political ideologies to be tested simultaneously in different parts of the country.

In short, this call for a federal United Kingdom is the complete antithesis to Gordon Brown’s cack-handed intervention in the Scottish independence debate (which I dissected here), in which he proposed a raft of discriminatory (to the rest of the UK) special perks and privileges to be carved out for Scotland as a bribe to their electorate in advance of the referendum. That foolish proposal has all the hallmarks of Brown – short term political manoeuvering to achieve a tactical outcome at the great expense of a broader strategic goal (the strategic goal being the more efficient and democratic governance of the UK as a whole).

The side of democracy, transparency and common-sense needs more articulate advocates, and today we can add Allister Heath to the ranks. Where he picks up, may many more soon follow.

On Paternalism and Porn Filters

Samuel Hooper2 Comments

Liberal Democrat president Tim Farron has not been my favourite person since the Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition government was formed in 2010. The grumpy noises emanating from the Liberal Democrat party hierarchy have all too often been agitations for more specifically left-wing policies rather than the promotion of liberal ones, and I have no truck with that. But yesterday, Mr. Farron won my agreement and earned my support.

The Daily Mail reports:

Liberal Democrats have triggered fury by vowing to overturn David Cameron’s plans for internet porn filters.

Child safety experts and MPs called the move ‘irresponsible’ and warned it would undermine attempts to protect children from hardcore pornography.

Lib Dem party president Tim Farron said the Government should enshrine the ‘digital rights of the citizen’ and halt requirement for ‘filters, lists or controls on legal material’.

Tim Farron correctly labels the government policy as “misconceived, ineffective and illiberal”. It is certainly misconceived – a majority Conservative government with a mandate to roll back the onerous size of the state has no place enacting laws that further chip away at the notion of personal responsibility. It has also been proved to be ineffective – a simple browser extension has already been released which simply bypasses the filter. And the illiberality of the policy speaks for itself.

Insidious yet inept.
Insidious yet inept.

The Independent quotes Farron in further detail, perfectly summing up the argument for the correct way to protect children from adult material in a liberal country:

“If the Prime Minister really wanted to protect children from inappropriate material, he’d ensure they had access to good sexual health and relationship education and give parents the help and support they need to talk to their children about this issue,” he said.

Absolutely. But the daddy-knows-best wing of the Tory party sadly sees things somewhat differently:

Party sources described the new Lib Dem approach as “disappointing”.

“Tim Farron clearly does not want to prioritise the safety of our children online or support our efforts to prevent anyone accidentally accessing illegal material,” they said.

Anyone could have seen this weak, manipulative counter-punch coming from a mile away. Anyone who believes in personal responsibility and empowering and trusting parents to act in the best interests of their children must, according to this worldview, be maniacally obsessed with pornography whilst simultaneously holding the safety of children in complete and utter contempt.

What complete and utter nonsense.

Quite.
Quite.

I invested my precious time and effort pounding the streets of my hometown campaigning for the Conservative Party in the last general election campaign in 2010, but it is policies such as this which make me roll my eyes and question whether it is worth my time and effort to do so again in 2015. The MP I campaigned with, Robert Halfon, has proven himself to be an excellent constituency MP for Harlow since that time, but the coalition government in which his party is the senior member has delivered letdown after letdown on issues of civil liberties and returning responsibility to the individual.

After thirteen years of Labour government I was desperately looking forward to a rollback of the paternalistic, controlling, pseudo-benevolent state that had grown inexorably during that time. Of course I anticipated some inevitable compromises resulting from the fact that the Conservatives had to take on the Liberal Democrats as junior partners in coalition, but I never expected to find myself cheerleading the Liberal Democrat stance over the Tory one on fundamental issues of privacy and civil liberties. And yet that is exactly where I find myself.

Of course children should be protected from harmful content on the television, the internet and other media. But that responsibility rightly rests with the parents, not the broadcasters, ISPs or the state. Every time the government steps in to protect us from any potential harms out there in the world, we are simply stifled by yet another layer of cotton wool, and given the implicit message that it’s okay to glide through life with no regard for the potential consequences of our actions. Many of us may do this at times anyway, and I certainly include myself in that criticism – but my point is that government should not be actively making the shirking of personal responsibility easier by taking on duties of care that used to sit with educated, compassionate and autonomous private citizens.

I would suggest that parents should not be leaving their children unattended to be raised by television and the internet. If parents choose to ignore all common sense and do so, and their child stumbles upon any inappropriate or distressing material as a result, rather than bleating in outrage to the government a personal reexamination of parenting abilities is required.

David Cameron might think that his government’s time is best spent peeping over our shoulders and tutting at the things we choose to watch online under the justification of “keeping our children safe”, but I can assure him that nearly four years of mystifying underperformance in No. 10 Downing Street quite clearly say otherwise.

Gordon Brown To The Rescue

Samuel Hooper12 Comments
He's back.
He’s back.

 

Just as the momentum behind the Scottish independence campaign well and truly faltered and we all started to rest easier in our expectation that the Kingdom will remain United after the people of Scotland hold their referendum later this year, Gordon Brown felt the need to re-emerge from the shadows and weigh into the debate.

I’m sure that in his mind, a person of his “stature” breaking their self-imposed political silence to speak in favour of Scotland’s continued participation in the Union would only ever be a good thing, a final coup de grâce drawing a line under the debate. Unfortunately, Brown could not resist digressing from his original point and sharing his thoughts on the purpose and ideal future structure of our United Kingdom, and in so doing he managed, in his own inimitable way, to muddy the waters and raise more questions than he resolved.

The Telegraph reports:

The Scottish Parliament should be made more powerful, Gordon Brown will say on Saturday as he urges people not to break up the Union.

In his most significant policy intervention since leaving Downing Street, the former prime minister will call for major constitutional changes which he believes could keep Scotland in the Union.

The confusion begins right away. According to the most recent polling, two thirds of Scottish people want Scotland to remain a part of the UK as we currently stand under the terms of the referendum questions. When the unionist side is already making such a convincing case and steadily holding a majority of public opinion, why come out proposing “major constitutional changes” as a deal-sweetener? Not only does it reek of panic and desperation, it is a cast-iron certainty that the constitutional changes being proposed will be of a narrow, specific and non-universal nature, designed to bribe voters but carrying with them the unintended consequence of making the architecture of the UK’s political governance even more complex and inequitable than it is today. But more on that later.

Brown rightly criticises some of the wishful thinking underpinning the SNP’s economic forecasts and predictions for a hypothetical independent Scotland:

He will say: “First, they calculate oil and gas revenues as at least £6.8  billion in 2016-2017 when all formal and independent forecasts suggest the correct figure is likely to be around £3.5 billion, leaving a £3.3 billion shortfall. To make this up requires a rise in income tax of 10p.

“Second, they have failed to calculate the cost of European Union membership without the British rebate, which Scotland would not benefit from. In consequence, Scotland’s net membership costs could be as high as £500  million that the SNP have not budgeted for.

However, it is in The Guardian’s reporting where Brown’s higher aspirations for the future of the UK are fully revealed:

Brown said Scotland would be strengthened by his proposed constitutional changes while remaining within the union. The Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath MP wants the Scottish parliament to be made irreversible, with “maximum devolution of powers in training, transport, health, the Crown Estates Commission and the running of elections”.

This is all well and good. As an instinctive conservative with a strong libertarian and small government streak, I strongly support devolving power to the lowest and most sensible level possible. To my mind, having Scotland make its own policy in terms of education, transport (to the degree which it can reasonably differ from the rest of the UK), healthcare and other matters is perfectly sensible. Some will doubtless bleat about the iniquities of the overly-discussed “postcode lottery”, but to me such an approach is the only right thing to do.

The problem is that Gordon Brown proposes this devolution of power only for Scotland, and only as a means of persuading reluctant Scots to swing their support behind continued membership of the UK. One gets the strong feeling that in an ideal world, Gordon Brown would like nothing more to centralise each and every one of these areas of policy and governance, and run them all from Whitehall, and that it is only through urgent necessity and the pursuit of an even more important objective (maintaining the Union) that he is willing to permit these giveaways.

But what of the other nations of the United Kingdom? Why should Scotland be free to attune her education and transport policy more closely to the needs of her citizens, but not Wales, Northern Ireland or England?

I cannot repeat often enough my firm belief that this piecemeal devolving of powers on an on-demand basis whenever one of the home nations becomes a bit restless or we have a referendum to win is damaging to the integrity of the UK, and ensures that as a country we limp on, united still (just about) but burdened ever more heavily by arcane and inexplicable rules determining which decisions get made at what level in each constituent part of the country.

I call once again for a proper constitutional convention in the UK, to decide once and for all the powers and functions that we the people should rightly and properly give to Westminster, and those which should be devolved to the four individual home nations to be exercised equally by each.

Such a convention would also allow us to determine what should be the “shared purpose of our union”, which apparently if left unaddressed, will be defined by Gordon Brown along the specious and redistributionist lines of “social justice”. The Guardian makes explicit Brown’s view of our common purpose:

He has proposed UK legislation to state the shared purpose of the union, “namely the pooling and sharing of resources for social justice”.

I’m all for having a debate about the purpose of the country, but I would much rather frame it around providing liberty and freedom for the United Kingdom’s citizens than Gordon Brown’s vision of us coming together to to pool and share our national resources. Human beings are inclined to do this anyway of their own accord, and don’t need prompting from government to get them started. And now, for some reason, I cannot purge from my mind the image of Gordon Brown sitting at a desk in front of a huge warehouse, assigning barrels of North Sea oil to each man, woman and child in the UK – every barrel filled equally to the last drop, of course.

It is kind of Gordon Brown to re-emerge from semi-retirement and deign to give a speech on the future of our country. But his long-awaited contribution is not, unfortunately, of great use to anyone. The last thing that the United Kingdom needs is more piecemeal constitutional reform while the bigger picture goes unaddressed. And I am certainly not about to sign up to a national mission statement based on all of us coming together to enact his distinctly New Labour vision of a “just” society.

Until next time, Gordon.