Whatever your political convictions may be, PLEASE make the effort to get out and vote today. People have given their lives in defence of our democratic right to choose our representation; the least we can do is take time to read up on the candidates/issues and make the trip down to the polling station.
Remember: those who can’t be bothered to get out and vote forfeit their right to complain about all things political until the next election.
For those who want to read a final Semi-Partisan analysis of the European election landscape before voting, click here.
The commentariat class continue to scratch their heads in puzzlement as to how UKIP’s support is not melting away in the face of wall-to-wall attacks from the media and the political establishment, and this blog continues to patiently explain why this is the case.
Well, for those who obstinately refuse to learn, here is yet another reason – Labour and the Conservative Party have given a clear demonstration of their ideological muddle by both hiring former Obama campaign officials to help with their respective 2015 general election messaging efforts.
Ed Miliband hailed the appointment as “excellent news” and predicted the strategist would be a “huge asset to our campaign as we work to show the British people how we can change our country for the better”.
Mr Axelrod said he had been struck by the power of the Labour leader’s ideas and the “strength of his vision”.
He drew a comparison between Mr Miliband’s economic policies and the arguments articulated by Mr Obama in 2008, saying both have at their core “the experience of everyday people”.
The Conservatives have also recruited another former adviser to Barack Obama, his ex-campaign manager Jim Messina, to work on their 2015 election team.
As with Mr Axelrod, Mr Messina is not leading the campaign on the ground but remains in the US, reporting to the Conservatives’ senior management team.
It is common knowledge that the Britain sits well to the left of the United States on the political spectrum, so in one sense it is not surprising that an American Democrat such as Axelrod might still find common cause with Britain’s centre-right party (he wouldn’t be caught consorting with a Republican in a million years).
But in another sense, it is a terrible indictment of the British political system that both main political parties – our two ‘polar opposites’, the alpha and the omega of our choices come election day – are either so intellectually bankrupt or coldly calculating that they can both recruit from same same American political talent pool and still present themselves to the British public as though they are different as chalk and cheese.
Intellectually bankrupt or coldly calculating. In truth, there is a fair measure of both at work in the Labour and Conservative parties. Both have followed the example of ‘triangulation’ pioneered so successfully by Bill Clinton, in order to win over the undecided middle while hanging on to just enough of their restive core voters to make it over the finish line.
Tony Blair’s New Labour certainly took the triangulation strategy and moulded it into a political work of art. But make no mistake, the Conservatives are at it, too. Even when accounting for the fact that they have governed only in coalition since 2010, the fact that they have allowed harmful defence cuts and continued encroachments on civil liberties while largely tolerating Labour’s legacy of tax hikes and fiscal drag shows that they, too, see more value in playing to the woolly undecided voters in the middle than making a convincing ideological case for their core principles.
Which brings us back to Nigel Farage and UKIP.
Say whatever else you like about them, but here is a party that has a set of core beliefs and is unafraid to articulate them plainly and simply. (If you are reading this and thinking “but surely all UKIP stand for is leaving the EU, with a portion of racism on the side” then you have been indoctrinated well by the media who have slavishly served the interests of the main political parties – but UKIP do actually have a broadly libertarian policy platform that can be easily researched).
Leaving aside the coming European elections on Thursday 22 May, UKIP’s increasing (and surprisingly solid) popularity is not just a function of the British people having nowhere else to meaningfully express their euroscepticism or their dislike of politicians in general (the protest vote). It is driven also by the fact that conviction politics is all but dead in Britain, leaving many thoughtful and politically aware people with no one who speaks their language, but a host of politicians willing to patronise and double-cross them to gain votes, before discarding them once they are delivered into power.
Tony Benn and Margaret Thatcher are no longer with us, and British politics is suffering the absence of them and their kind. The few conviction politicians left in the House of Commons tend to be curmudgeonly old men and women (think Glenda Jackson or John Redwood) whose prime days are behind them and who will never be brought back in from the margins. And this leaves the political future to be shaped by the oily likes of Ed Miliband in the labour party (with young guns such as Chuka Umunna or Gloria de Piero to look forward to when he is inevitably deposed), and Cameron-Osborne for the Tories.
So forget about the European Union and the Newark by-election. Forget about the mudslinging and accusations of racism from one side and intimidation from the other. In many ways, it’s all just noise, the kind of nonsense we are left to argue about when there is so little left to distinguish the three main political parties from each other when it comes to real life policy.
When Labour and the Conservatives are so indistinguishable that they both instinctively look to buy Barack Obama’s 2008 message of “hope and change” from across the Atlantic, is it any wonder that the only party with an authentic, home-grown message is reaping the rewards in the polls?
Picture: Student drawing from an elementary school in Texas
According to the prime minister of the United Kingdom, it is both professionally and ethically acceptable for a Member of Parliament to use taxpayer money to house their parents and contribute toward the purchase of a property which is later sold having appreciated in value, the profits accruing to the lucky politician.
Furthermore, when questioned by the parliamentary expenses authority and by the media it is appropriate for an MP – in this case Maria Miller, the Culture Secretary – to obstuct, bully and harass those investigating the questionable expenses claims at every turn. There is nothing more to see here, the issue is closed and we should all stop fussing and just move on.
[Culture Secretary Maria Miller] had to repay £5,800 in mortgage interest payments and also apologise for failing to cooperate with the parliamentary inquiry into her expenses. The Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, Kathryn Hudson, had recommended that she pay back £44,000, an amount reduced by the MP-dominated Commons Committee on Standards.
But having housed her parents at the taxpayers’ expense, and made a capital gain in the process, Mrs Miller could be presented by the Tories’ opponents ahead of May’s European elections as the personification of alleged Westminster sleaze which so infuriates voters.
If any one image will come to symbolise this latest expenses scandal in British politics, it will be this – the picture of a haughty, self-entitled, unrepentant Maria Miller making her perfunctory, insincere and lightning-fast pseudo-apology to Parliament after having successfully reduced the amount which she was ordered to repay from the original £45,000 to an astonishingly low £4,500:
Here, Maria Miller is flanked by a number of faces not commonly seen sitting on the back benches by virtue of their position – Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt and Chief Whip Sir George Young. This is no accident. They were ordered to sit with Miller to show the leadership’s determination to stand by the scandal-plagued politician no matter the public outcry.
The picture (from The Times) is essentially a freeze-frame image of Parliament once again conspiring to do right for themselves and act in the interests of the Old Boys (or, in this case, Girls) Club and against the interests of every single voter in the United Kingdom.
Iain Martin correctly surmises that the biggest beneficiary of this tawdry, self-inflicted crisis will be Nigel Farage and the UK Independence Party:
In such circumstances, the survival of the Culture Secretary is a dream for Ukip, as those Tory MPs observed. Having exploited the expenses system and made a sum most voters can only dream about, Miller then had her punishment watered down by a committee of MPs stuffed with the representatives of the mainstream parties. Farage can present Miller as a totem of all that he claims is wrong with the ruling elite.
Martin goes on to suggest that any benefit felt by UKIP would be the result of “scary populist politics”, which rather make one wonder whose side he is on – that of corrupt politicians or that of the people. But tactically speaking, he is quite right – the Maria Miller scandal can only redound to UKIP’s advantage because all of the other major British political parties are represented at Westminster and are consequently tainted by association.
Polly Toynbee, writing in The Guardian and no ideological soulmate of this blog, agrees that Cameron’s refusal to sack Miller – a case of misapplied loyalty at the worst possible time – will come back to haunt MPs from each and every political party and re-open the wounds from a parliamentary expenses scandal that had scarely been given time to heal since the original revelations:
The harm done to politics by the expenses scandal is felt by every MP in the blowback on the doorstep. Even the cleanest get the blame. Miller’s behaviour confirms the worst people think of politicians. How a £1.2m London property housing her husband, children and parents could be called a “second home” defeats most reasonable people. All those “second” bedrooms strike a wicked contrast with the bedroom tax. If her MP colleagues cutting a £45,000 payback to £5,800 was astounding, her 32-second stroppy teenager non-apology took the biscuit. Cameron should have sacked her that day, not for his government’s sake but to salvage a crumb of respect for the politician’s trade.
This really sums up the problem, a rather glaring one left conspicuously untackled since the expenses scandal blew up under the premiership of Gordon Brown – namely, the fact that the spirit of the rules governing expenses continue to be repeatedly violated and mocked, even if they are followed to the literal letter.
In the public mind, expenses exist to cover the necessary costs of performing a job, costs that can or should not be reasonably borne out of the employee’s own pocket. People tend to be reasonable and do not object to the idea of MPs being compensated for expenses incurred while conducting parliamentary or constituency business, just as they would never begrudge a business person legitimately claiming travel and accommodation costs when sent to visit a faraway client.
This blog advocates the introduction of a monitored charge card as the sole method of allowing MPs to pay for purchases to be expensed. Such a system – successfully deployed by many companies with vastly more employees than Westminster’s 650 serving MPs – would provide instant transparency and ease of auditing. In the twenty-first century, there is really no excuse for anything less.
Whenever talk of cracking down on expenses reaches a certain point, the counter-claim is often made that for our politics to work we must continue to attract the “brightest and best” talent to Westminster, and that frozen parliamentary salaries and stricter expenses policies will act as a grave disincentive. This is a self-serving and overblown threat, reliant on the assumption that the best statesmen and policymakers are motivated by cold hard cash. And while the 2015 general election will be the first to take place now that the new rules on expenses have bedded down, there seems little cause to worry that the next intake of MPs will be vastly different in composition to the bland automaton freshmen from 2010.
It is a popular conceit among MPs to believe that they are precious and irreplaceable altruists, but in reality there are many capable people willing and able to serve their country in parliament without also expecting the taxpayer to pick up the tab for their mortgage or second home as some kind of sick golden handshake deal-sweetener. Maria Miller belongs to a political generation that stubbornly refuses to acknowledge this new reality.
The longer that Miller’s petulant non-apology and the image of stony-faced Tory ministers supporting and flanking her on the backbenches remains forefront in the general consciousness, the more damage is done to what remains of public trust and engagement in the British political process.
It may be too late to claim any moral high ground for doing the right thing, but David Cameron needs to end the damage and guide the spirit of Maria Miller’s dying, unmourned political career towards the light.
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.
David Skelton, director of the campaign group Renewal, has penned a provocative article for The Telegraph in which he dares to suggest that the 40% rate of income tax should be scrapped because it punishes the hard-working middle class rather than skimming off superfluous income almost unnoticed from the ultra-rich.
This is a bold move given that most of the political focus is currently on helping the lowest-income earners by increasing the tax-free allowance again and again. And while the current approach certainly has merits, it is undeniable that the middle class has received far less support.
It may have been quite right to begin means-testing child benefit – this blog certainly thinks so, as the first step toward ending universal benefits which simply should not exist. But actions such as this, while correcting discrepancies, anomalies and moral wrongs in the tax code, were not accompanied by countervailing efforts to lower the overall tax burden. This is where Skelton’s proposal shows its value.
Skelton writes:
It is also important for the Government to help middle income earners who have played such a big role in making sacrifices during the recession and in reducing the budget deficit. George Osborne should take a major step to unwind the undesirable drift towards an ever higher proportion of the working population paying higher rate tax. In doing so he could relieve the pressure on the squeezed middle, so many of whom have borne the burden of paying for Labour’s profligacy.
His proposal would see more than two million people taken out of the higher rate tax band:
A number of Tory MPs have argued that the Chancellor should look to raise the higher rate threshold to £44,000. Our proposal at Renewal would go much further, taking many more people out of paying the 40p rate while simplifying the tax system. We believe he should scrap the 40p rate and start the 45p rate at a much higher level of income.
Potentially, this could take more than two million people out of higher rate tax, giving a significant tax cut to the squeezed middle.
The retention of the punitively high 45% top rate of income tax is the only unwelcome part of the proposal, but was clearly included to keep the break-even point at what was considered a politically palatable level. But aside from this regrettable acceptance of Gordon Brown’ final act of economic vandalism before being kicked out of office, Skelton’s proposal is very strong.
It is long past time to address the fact that the 40% tax band now includes a very different sort of person to the type envisaged when the rate was set by chancellor Nigel Lawson. As Skelton rightly notes:
More and more people on middle incomes have been dragged into paying the 40 per cent rate of tax over the past decade. That includes teachers, nurses, bricklayers, police officers and Tube drivers. These are not people who should be in the higher rate tax bracket but are because the threshold at which it is paid has been repeatedly frozen.
The number of people paying 40p tax has risen steadily from just over 1.7 million in 1993/4 to 4.4 million in the current tax year. That is a staggering one in six of taxpayers, up from one in 20 when Nigel Lawson was Chancellor.
Quite right. A person on around £40,000 a year in the early 1980s was far more affluent than someone on that same salary today. But cowardly government after cowardly government have deliberately chosen not to increase the tax rate threshold in line with inflation, bringing this whole new cast of characters into a tax realm originally intended for those who were genuinely, comparatively rich.
The chances of this proposal becoming concrete policy remain slim, however. As James Kirkup notes in the Telegraph, the increasingly boisterous and assertive Liberal Democrats are intent on defending the laser-like focus on raising the minimum tax threshold above all other ideas:
Increasing the basic threshold has been driven by the Liberal Democrats and the party’s Danny Alexander, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, defended the focus on lower-paid workers.
He said he “understood the argument” around 40 per cent tax, but insisted that lower-paid workers had to come first. “I think it’s right that we have a policy that is focused particularly at that part of the population.”
More worryingly still, the Conservative leadership also appears slow to embrace the idea – perhaps because it is a good piece of economic policy that originated somewhere other than Number 11 Downing Street. The Daily Mail reports:
In a major speech on the economy, the Prime Minister promised that further savings from public spending would be used to fund tax cuts.
But Mr Cameron, who confirmed the Government would accept a rise in the minimum wage to £6.50 an hour, appeared to indicate that any future tax cuts would be targeted at the low-paid.
He made no reference to raising the starting point for paying 40p tax, which is emerging as a key Budget demand among Conservative MPs.
Whether the Conservatives have any fire left in their belly to enact a genuinely useful tax cut in the face of this opposition and distraction remains to be seen, and go some way toward showing whether there really is any conservatism left in this coalition government at all.
If they do find the courage, it will be a major victory for middle class earners and for common sense.
Semi-Partisan Politics 