Apparently running the Home Office is no longer the political kiss of death that it once was. ConservativeHome highlights an interesting and worrying trend in the sentiments of the party base – a strong, and growing, preference for Theresa May to be the next Conservative Party leader after David Cameron:
Last month, the Home Secretary squeaked it, displacing Boris Johnson from the top of the poll by 22.7 per cent to 22.6 per cent – in other words, there was one vote in it out of some 800 responses.
This month, she does so again, by 23 per cent to 22 per cent – or, if you prefer, by a margin of three votes. Michael Gove’s rating is down from 17 per cent to 14 per cent; William Hague’s is up from 10 per cent to the same total, 14 per cent.
What’s striking about this month’s result is that the gap between May and Boris is more or less unchanged – but the survey got roughly 200 more replies.
Looking back over the record of previous Home Secretaries, I was recently arguing with a friend about whether the office of Home Secretary tends to naturally attract the authoritarians and those casually dismissive of civil liberties from within their parties, or whether working in the Home Office makes a person that way, and that even an ardent libertarian would come out of the Home Office singing the praises of indefinite detention without charge, bulk data collection and citizenship revocation without criminal conviction. Which came first, the chicken or the egg? In the case of Theresa May, an uninspiring record prior to government has only been tarnished further since 2010.
The only thing more worrying about this preference for Theresa May is that her chief threat is the implausible Boris Johnson. The Mayor of London’s ability to say what he actually thinks, bypassing the usual politician’s filter, is admirable and refreshing in a high profile political figure. But he has a tendency toward the ridiculous, harms London’s competitiveness by his intransigence on the expansion of Heathrow airport, and is weak on free speech issues. His shortcomings exceed his no-nonsense attitude and his love of Latin.
By contrast, the Education Secretary, Michael Gove – perhaps the torchbearer for the more libertarian, small government / maximum personal liberty wing of the Tory party – languishes in third place, tied with William Hague.
Two very different visions for government.
The bright side, as Benedict Brogan points out in his Morning Briefing, is that Theresa May’s popularity with the party base is not matched by equal enthusiasm in the parliamentary party. Since the leadership election rules in the Conservative party give MPs the job of whittling down the field to the final two candidates who stand before the entire party membership, it is possible that May could fall at the first hurdle, perhaps opening the way for someone who does not quite so closely adhere to the authoritarian mould of New Labour.
Talk of the next Conservative leader may be very premature – Cameron could well win a second term in 2015, either to govern as a majority Tory administration (which would be a real test of his principles – no longer would he have the fallback excuse of placating LibDem coalition partners) or in another coalition. And of course the 2015 general election and upcoming European elections this year will change the electoral landscape further still. But it is disconcerting to note that as we stand, after reviewing the performance of all the Conservative ministers in government and comparing their rhetoric to their actions, a substantial part of the Tory base believes that Theresa May represents the best way forward.
It is quotes such as this, from Education Secretary Michael Gove, which remind me why I pounded the pavements in support of my local Conservative parliamentary candidate back in the 2010 general election:
“My ambition for our education system is simple – when you visit a school in England standards are so high all round that you should not be able to tell whether it’s in the state sector or a fee paying independent.
“We know England’s private schools are the best independent schools in the world. Why shouldn’t state schools be the best state schools in the world?
“I want to see state schools where the vast majority of pupils have the grades and skills to apply for university, if they want to, where a pupil being accepted to Oxbridge is not a cause for celebration, but a matter of course.
“Where it is the norm for state pupils to enjoy brilliant extra-curricular activities like sports, orchestras, cadets, choir, drama, debating, the Duke of Edinburgh scheme, and more.”
There have been many disappointments from the Conservative-led government since they came to power and ejected Gordon Brown from office. Only last week in Prime Minister’s Questions, David Cameron could not bring himself to say that taxes should ideally be cut for all citizens across all income levels – instead trying to outflank Ed Miliband and appease his supporters by claiming that the rich and successful were paying more under the Conservatives despite the abolition of the 50% top rate of income tax. But while David Cameron and Theresa May equivocate on civil liberties, and while George Osborne neither delights nor grossly offends at the Treasury, Michael Gove continues to quietly get the job done over at Education.
The Telegraph reports on Gove’s upcoming keynote speech at the London Academy of Excellence:
State schools will test children using private school exams for the first time under plans to make them the “best in the world”, the education secretary will say in a speech on Monday.
Michael Gove will say that schools must set their standards “so high” that they are indistinguishable from the best fee-paying schools like Eton and Harrow.
He will say he wants to end the perception that state education is “bog standard” by emulating independent schools with tougher tests, longer school days, more extra-curricular activities and better discipline.
There are some indisputably good ideas in the meat of the speech – ideas such as setting state school children some of the same exams used to measure ability in private schools, and using international tests to better benchmark performance against schools in other countries. It is similarly hard to argue against the renewed emphasis on extracurricular activities and discipline.
Of course, reciting a shopping list of common sense ideas doesn’t mean that the British educational system will improve overnight, or even that dramatic improvements will come about in the very short term. Neither does it acknowledge the reality that all of these changes will be of zero benefit if parents remain disengaged from their children’s education, either unable or unwilling to nurture and help them, or if poverty and the varied symptoms of socioeconomic disadvantage continue to suppress the educational attainment of poorer children. And too often, the Labour Party have more to say on mitigating these real problems than do the Conservatives.
But there is no reason why we should not hold these high aspirations for our public schools, and use this aspirational language as Michael Gove does. Indeed, there is something refreshing about it, and this is what makes Gove so appealing to many people of a libertarian-Conservative persuasion. Gone is the talk about sharing burdens, paying “fair shares”, postcode lotteries and equality of outcome, and in its place we have talk of benchmarking, experimentation, variation and unbounded possibility. It is quite hard to not get excited, even in the absence of any of the finer detail as to how we get there.
The Telegraph’s editorial mirrors this optimism and sense of a refreshing change:
This is why his agenda for state schools so terrifies the Left. It represents a much-awaited rejection of bog-standard equality in favour of the excellence that typifies the independent ethos.
We shall observe with interest the reaction from the rest of the news media as it comes in. And as always, the devil will be in the details. But with precious little by way of new policy announcements or radical ideas as the coalition government trudges toward lame duck status and general election 2015, at least one government minister is still doing his job.
Well, now we have it conclusively. It has nothing to do with making the rich in our society pay their “fair share”, no matter how loosely you define (or indeed blatantly misuse) the word “fair”. Nothing to do with ensuring that essential public services are funded, either. No, Ed Ball’s announcement of the Labour Party’s intention to reinstate their punitive 50% top marginal rate of income tax has everything to do with punishing people for daring to still be rich, for having the temerity to succeed.
Daniel Hannan MEP, writing in the Telegraph, ponders the cognitive dissonance behind a proposal to raise taxes without realistic hope of increasing revenues, and wonders if Labour are right to stake their electoral hopes on the British people being motivated primarily by envy and a desire for vengeance:
Labour doesn’t actually think the 50p tax rate will make Britain more prosperous. We know this because, for all but the last few weeks of its 13 years in office, it kept the top rate at 40p. Yet it now brazenly calls a 45p rate “writing a cheque to millionaires”. On one level, this is too silly for words: even if everyone earning £150,000 were a millionaire, on no conceivable definition does demanding less money from someone constitute “writing a cheque”. But Ed Balls has presumably calculated, as Iain Martin adroitly observes, that there are enough votes in envy to cobble together a majority under the uneven constituency boundaries.
In another column he also reflects on the results of a YouGov poll showing that an overwhelming majority of Labour supporters believe that a 50p tax band should be brought back even if it was conclusively demonstrated that doing so raised no additional revenues. The telling visual is here:
Hannan goes on in this second piece to explain the motivations that may cause people to vote as they did in the poll, and has the humility to accept that he (and others on the opposing side of the argument, myself included) probably suffer from similar confirmation biases and reverse rationalisation on this and other matters.
But the inescapable fact is that the motivation for supporting a revenue-neutral or revenue-negative tax increase comes largely down to envy, and that ugly part in the minds of some in the Labour Party (fully accepting that the Conservative Party has other ugly parts of its own) that would rather everyone in the country be worse off and more equal than better off and more unequal:
Envy is an ugly and debilitating condition, but it seems to have an evolutionary-biological basis. The dosage varies enormously from individual to individual, but even toddlers often display a sense that, if they can’t have something, no one else should either. If they had the vocabulary, they would doubtless, like the 69 per cent of Labour supporters, explain that emotion “on moral grounds”. Few toddlers, and few Labour voters, openly admit to being actuated by vindictiveness.
Most policy positions are an expression of some ingrained tendency. For example, we have an instinct to care for the vulnerable, and also an instinct to value reciprocity, and our welfare system results from an interplay between the two. Similarly, the current row about deporting foreign criminals has less to do with their numbers or the nature of their crimes than with our instinct – again, a human universal – about hospitality and its abuse. We shouldn’t be surprised when people who suffer from envy elevate it into a political precept and call it “fairness”.
The concept of fairness has been much abused by politicians (generally those on the left of the political spectrum), particularly since the start of the Great Recession. The worthy desire of Labour politicians to ease the crippling, painful effects of poverty on those less fortunate in our society is not in question, but it is disconcerting when they cling to the idea that punitively high, revenue-neutral tax increases will do anything at all to help the poor other than to cheer them up with the knowledge that wealthy people are also feeling the pinch.
And while we are quibbling about wording, Ed Balls needs to be taken to task in the media for characterising George Osborne’s decision to reverse half of Gordon Brown’s 50p tax hike to a slightly more palatable 45% top rate as a “massive tax cut”. If a five-point reduction in tax rates constitutes a massive tax cut, surely the ten-point increase in income tax instituted in the dying days of the Labour government of which he was a part could only be described, using the same dramatic language, as a gargantuan, devastating, apocalyptic tax increase? And yet, come general election season 2015, it is certain that we will not see Ed Miliband or Ed Balls’ faces smiling down at us from billboards promising “massive tax increases”.
But let us return once more to the YouGov poll results. No other mainstream British political party – not even the Liberal Democrats or the supposedly crazy UKIP – has a majority of their supporters who believe in raising taxes for the rich just to teach them the lesson that hard work does not and should not pay. That distinction is reserved for the Labour Party, a party whose leadership and supporters are now – quite cheerfully, openly and stridently – acting in a dangerously irrational way.
Irrational, that is, if we take them at their word that they have the best interests of all the British people at heart.
One real gem of an idea nestling in between the usual stale nonsense.
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Yesterday we were treated to the spectacle of Work & Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith promising to “slash Britain’s benefits bill” by picking around the edges of the problem and denying benefits to immigrants who do not speak fluent English, a transparent piece of Daily-Mail-pandering that sows despair in the hearts of anyone who wants to seriously reform Britain’s welfare system.
This was a triumphant case of grabbing headlines whilst accomplishing nothing courtesy of the Conservative Party, but it turns out that Labour were not to be outdone. Today, it was the turn of Rachel Reeves, the shadow Work & Pensions Secretary, to put on the Tough Love hat and have a crack at the welfare problem.
Almost anticipating the backlash and onslaught of scepticism, The Guardian hide the story well away in the depths of their online news site, reporting:
Labour would force jobseeker’s allowance claimants with inadequate maths or English to go on basic skills courses as a condition of receiving their benefit, Rachel Reeves, the shadow work and pensions secretary, will say on Monday .
It is estimated that one in 10 of Britain’s 250,000 monthly new JSA claimants have inadequate maths or English, two skills critical to finding work. Nearly 20% of those with repeat claims have problems with reading or numeracy. Labour said the pledge could be funded from the existing skills programme.
Much as with the Tory announcement on welfare, there is nothing inherently wrong with this idea. If a significant proportion of repeat benefits claimants have low literacy or numeracy skills that could be holding them back from gainful employment, then it is probably right and proper to take action to address this skills gap. If, as Labour claim, the testing could be funded with existing money then so much the better. But while there is nothing wrong with the proposal itself, there is everything wrong with unveiling it as a major announcement or in any way a serious attempt at policy change.
Dan Hodges, writing in The Telegraph, spares no time in shooting down the proposal and exposing it for what it is:
Reeves’s speech was trailed in this morning’s Independent. “Her mission is to create a ‘fair and affordable social security system’, with ‘sticks and carrots’ to get the unemployed back to work, which will be good for them and for taxpayers,” wrote the newspaper’s political editor Andy Grice.
That’s not Rachel Reeves’s mission. Her mission, handed to her by her leader, is to make the country think she is planning “tough” reform of welfare, whilst at the same time reassuring the Labour movement she is not preparing any significant reform at all.
“It is hard, but it is also fair. You can call it tough love,” said Reeves. No you can’t. Setting someone a maths test isn’t tough, or loving. It’s a maths test. At her school did they say “right Rachel, you’ve got an hour of PE, an hour of Geography and then an hour of tough love”?
He then rightly contrasts the awesome size of Britain’s welfare bill (here he separates out pensions) with the puny scale of the measures that Reeves is proposing:
Is there anyone anywhere who thinks a maths test will come anywhere near addressing the current crisis of welfare, or if you prefer, the crisis being created by the attack on welfare? It is a nonsensical policy. Saying “the big problem with the welfare system is very few claimants have good numeracy skills” is like saying “the biggest problem with the welfare system is very few claimants have Indian elephants as pets”. It’s true, but it’s irrelevant. Teach them better maths. Teach them better English. Teach them to lightly fry chorizo and play Bach. What impact is that seriously going to have on the nation’s £100 billion welfare bill?
Hodges (who, in course of the past year, has become my favourite Labour-in-exile commentator) believes that Labour would do well to stop talking about welfare altogether, for fear of making themselves appear even more incoherent and opportunistic than they do at present. I would be tempted to agree with him, but for the presence of one genuinely good and revolutionary idea in Reeves’ speech, the proposal to award higher level unemployment benefits to long-term or higher rate taxpayers for the first months of their claim, so as to provide a “soft landing” for those newly out of work.
The Guardian reports:
In her biggest speech since taking on the portfolio, Reeves will also confirm she is seeking to strengthen the contributory principle by exploring how long-term taxpayers can receive a higher-rate allowance for the first months that they are unemployed.
This is laudable, and something that I have myself supported for a long time. Such an action would return the concept of unemployment benefits or Jobseeker’s Allowance to being viewed as a kind of insurance rather than an ever-present and unchanging right.
Why should it be that someone who has worked over a period of years, perhaps in a well paying job, and has contributed many thousands of pounds to the treasury should, on losing his or her job, receive exactly the same allowance as a young person living at home who managed to fall out of eleven years of compulsory education without any qualifications? For the newly-unemployed high earner, jobless benefits may be a way of scraping together enough money to keep making rent, mortgage or bill payments while they scramble to find new work. For the unemployed eighteen year old, that same money may be nothing more than beer tokens to be redeemed at the nearest Wetherspoons pub.
Of course this is a generalisation and of course we cannot individually means test the level of benefits awarded to each claimant based on their individual circumstances – nor would it be the appropriate role of government to attempt such a thing. But surely it is not so outrageous to restore a link between the amount of money contributed in taxes over the years by a new claimant and the amount that they are awarded in benefits? Is that not part of “making work pay”, as well as making sure that capable but overstretched workers (probably with limited to no savings) in today’s precarious economy don’t fall off a complete financial cliff if they happen to lose their jobs? If I sound at all bitter when I discuss this, it is because my argument comes from my own bitter experience.
So overall, another day of great frustration on welfare. Labour have joined the Conservatives in seeking to tinker around the edges in pursuit of cosmetic change and tabloid approval, while the crux of the problem remains conspicuously untackled. The only shining light in the whole tired song and dance, the newly-broached idea of giving higher allowances to higher-contributing taxpayers, was proposed by the party I least suspected to ever endorse such a thing (how on earth did Iain Duncan Smith let Ed Miliband steal a march on him like this?) and while it is truly refreshing to see this being advocated by a major political party in the UK, it is almost sure to die a slow death under withering barrages from the far left proclaiming it “unfair” and “discriminatory”, and another step on the road to a “two-tier Britain”. So clearly and vividly do I see the imminent death of the proposal that it is very hard to generate enthusiasm about its announcement.
From a Conservative perspective, it should also be troubling to David Cameron and to Tory supporters to see Iain Duncan Smith join Michael Gove as the second Conservative minister to be completely outmanoeuvred by their Labour counterpart. With Gove it was the Labour proposal to license teachers and enhance their professional standing and standards, and now with Duncan Smith the Tories were nowhere to be seen when Labour suggested tiered unemployment benefits according to contributions.
In the first years of the coalition government we were continually told of the revolutionary new ideas and policies being cooked up by ambitious Tory ministers determined to enact real change and make their mark after eleven stultifying years of New Labour’s centralisation and standardisation efforts. In 2014, innovation and revolutionary ideas are hard to come by anywhere at all in British political life, but where it does exist, it is not emanating from the Conservative Party.
This should worry anyone who does not want to see the spirit of Gordon Brown in the guise of Ed Miliband reoccupy 10 Downing Street next May.
Four years of painstaking research have finally revealed the gaping black hole in Britain’s finances, the reason why the British state has grown so large and expensive yet manages to achieve such mediocre outcomes in so many areas.
No, it wasn’t throwing ever larger sums of money at the same inefficient education and healthcare delivery models. Nothing to do with a rigid retirement age at a time of ever increasing life expectancy. It turns out that the problem was providing multilingual access to benefit claim forms, and translating services to immigrants who lack fluent English. Armed with this knowledge, Iain Duncan Smith, the Work and Pensions secretary, has drafted a clever scheme to fix everything.
The Daily Mail, for whose readers this policy was so transparently and cravenly crafted, summarises it thus:
In a radical bid to slash Britain’s benefits bill, the Prime Minister intends to stop printing welfare paperwork in foreign languages and prevent claimants using taxpayer-funded translators at benefits offices.
The move – which would also hit British residents who cannot speak English – was due to be announced tomorrow, but has been delayed following a row with Nick Clegg.
Tories hope that axeing foreign-language versions of documents explaining how to claim benefits would make it harder for immigrants such as newly arrived Romanians and Bulgarians to cash in on the UK’s benefits system, encourage others already here to learn English – and save money spent on translators.
Anyone who thinks that taking this action will slash Britain’s annual welfare bill needs to go away, look at the figures and then maintain a long period of dignified silence. Social security spending (pensions and benefits) will cost Britain £256 billion in 2014. How much of that vast sum do people really think goes toward printing forms in multiple language and hiring translators? Who, exactly, is the Work and Pensions secretary trying to fool?
Just use Google Translator, that will save some cash.
If you want to do the things that IDS proposes to save some money around the edges then that’s one thing, but to enact them and claim that it will “slash the welfare bill” is misleading and disingenuous. Iain Duncan Smith is a talented minister with otherwise good ideas, and it is discouraging to see him wasting his efforts proposing ideas such as this when he knows full well that they will go nowhere towards solving our fiscal problems.
Of course, there are doubtless some lazy immigrants who are perfectly capable of learning English sufficiently well to be able to function independently, and yet who choose not to do so for one reason or another. Where this refusal is rooted in a stubborn unwillingness to integrate into British society and desire to remain part of an insular and closed community, this is a particular cause for concern, because integrating new immigrants effectively into our country is vital for social, law and order and national security reasons. But threatening to cut benefits from immigrant claimants is highly unlikely to either solve the problem of people persistently failing to learn English or dramatically cut the welfare bill.
If the Tories’ concern about new immigrants struggling to integrate into British society is genuine, then they should propose some positive ideas to help promote inclusion and cohesion, and suggest ways to make it easier for new arrivals to learn their new native language. There should be some carrot (even if the incentive is of the cheapest kind, such as pointing people in the direction of existing English courses at local colleges and institutions) as well as the stick of cutting off access to benefits. If they are not seen to tackle the problem from both ends, many people (myself included) will suspect them of cynical motives.
And cynical they are. This is a proposal designed entirely to grab headlines, but more worryingly than that, it is a proposal designed to win the approval of the Daily Mail. If the Conservative party is really gearing up for 2015 general election mode by pandering to the prejudices of their base rather than reaching out to those whose instincts are to vote Labour or Liberal Democrat (who are likely to roll their eyes at policy announcements such as this) then there is grave cause for concern at their electoral prospects.
All is not yet lost – the Conservative Party has recently shown some signs of attempting to reach out beyond their core supporters. But, as so often, we see these small steps forward immediately neutralised by the two steps back of the let’s-bash-the-immigrants rhetoric. Shedding the label of the “nasty party” is not helped by policy proposals such as this.
The sardonic response from the Liberal Democrats puts it best:
“These are proposals from the Tories which haven’t been agreed in Government,” [the LibDem source] said.
“We’ve already taken significant steps to make sure we all enjoy the right to move and to work, but not a freedom to claim.
“We will look at these proposals, but would prefer the Tories to agree policies in Government rather than chase Ukip’s tail via the Sunday papers.”
The Conservatives would do well to heed this particular pearl of wisdom from their inexperienced junior coalition partners.
Semi-Partisan Politics 