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The meltdown of Gordon Brown’s Labour government continues. I was struck by this passage of resigning Cabinet minister James Purnell’s letter to the Prime Minister. It is very revealing in what it says not about the differences between these men, but their similarities:
“We both love the Labour Party. Party. I have worked for it for 20 years and you for far longer. ‘‘We know we owe it everything and it owes us nothing. I owe it to our party to say what I believe no matter how hard that may be. I now believe your continued leadership makes a Conservative victory more not less likely.
That would be disastrous for our country. This moment calls for stronger regulation, an active state, better public services, an open democracy. It calls for a Government that measures itself by how it treats the poorest in society.
Quite how one can “love” a party responsible for so much mayhem is an interesting question. There is something distinctly creepy about a man who says that he owes “everything” to a political party founded upon socialist principles. Everything? Does this man have no conception of a life beyond party politics? Does he not understand the concept of civil society, of a world outside government?
And although one can possibly agree on the need for better public services and open democracy, there is something revealing in his call for “stronger regulation” and an “active state”. We have, as this blog likes to point out with reference to the financial crisis, for example, had a bucket-load of regulation and state activism, and these have arguably helped create many of our problems, not solved them. I am also not aware that Mr Purnell, or his peers, would be any better than Brown in their stance on issues such as civil liberties and the database state, for instance. They might simply try to make it a bit more palatable.
So although one might be glad that this man has helped plunge a dagger into Mr Brown, it is not entirely clear to me that this fellow would represent a significant improvement. He wants the NuLab regulatory, interfering state to continue. I see no awareness of the disaster caused by runaway public spending. In other words, he’s not much of an improvement. A spell in the private sector, away from the party machine he claims to “love”, would be the best thing that could happen to Mr Purnell, if he wants to develop a wiser worldview.
Meanwhile, the BBC is asking the question about Gordon Brown: “Why has the man once regarded as one of Britain’s finest Chancellors [finance minister] in such trouble?”
Hilarious. This is a man who, as Chancellor, took hold of a relatively strong set of public finances, and over a course of 10 years, ran the UK into the red even before the credit crunch hit. Far from having been a “brilliant” finance minister, he has – apart from his keeping Britain out of the euro, arguably – been a disaster.
Update: the political situation in the UK is now having direct effects on financial markets.
Update: more resignations. It could all be over for Brown by the end of the weekend. Goodness knows what other countries must make of this.
Two fun comments on this brief report of the resignation of Hazel Blears.
From “Simon George”:
There is a term in electrical engineering. It refers to a kind of power failure that instead of occurring instantly, can take a long time to occur. It plays havoc with equipment and is usually much more damaging that a normal blackout
It’s called a ‘brownout’.
And this little snippet from a spoof speech by HB, penned for her by “The Penguin” (10:56 am, worth reading in full):
“My politics has always been rooted in the belief that ordinary people are capable of extraordinary expense claims, …”
I’m also dipping in and out of Prime Minister’s Questions, on the telly. It all illustrates what I more and more feel about how The Universe works, which is: that there are two kinds of questions. There are those that the questionee can ignore. And there are those that he finds he really must answer, because if he doesn’t answer them convincingly, something he is desperate to prevent will happen. Outside of Parliament, all kinds of questions are being asked of Gordon Brown, and not answered, and this now looks like costing him his job. But PMQs is a monument to the first kind of question. Brown is, it would appear, browning out, although I have learned the hard way not to state when the process will be completed. But you wouldn’t know it from watching PMQs.
I have said it before. I am trying to remember if I lacked the nerve to use the full obscenity last time, or whether an editor removed it.
Once again, though, I cheer the demise of a loathsome Home Secretary, but acknowledge that it will make little difference.
There was a time that I thought that Michael Howard was an unusually and unpleasantly illiberal Home Secretary. In truth, that was a fair estimate of the man, but I did not know what was to come.
At this rate, predictions that there will be a General Election in the UK by the end of this year look pretty credible. It may be that we will get a poll by the autumn, particularly if the meltdown of the government directly affects things like the UK’s debt credit rating. Another day, another bunch of Labour politicians head off.
“In many ways, Cameron faces a task far harder than that which confronted Margaret Thatcher. She was elected three years after the IMF bailout, and so the public finances were being restored to health. She was chosen as leader specifically to bring radical change, and had four years to assemble a team and prepare for the ordeal. Mr Cameron originally assembled a team for the political equivalent of a game of croquet; the same people now find themselves dropped on a rugby pitch.”
Fraser Nelson.
As I was saying before, the real poison of the MPs allowances system is not that they get ‘free money’. It is that it insulates them personally from the bulllying of officialdom that they would have the power, had they the motivation, to curtail. The Guardian reports:
A Labour source said: “The fees office green book which sets out the rules and advice on behalf of the parliamentary authorities states specifically that professional advice, for example from accountants or solicitors, is an allowable expense.
“In order that MPs comply fully with all the relevant requirements relating to tax, and to ensure they are properly meeting all their tax liabilities, many rightly seek professional assistance and advice where this relates specifically to their role as members of parliament.”
But,
Under tax rules, most workers are not allowed to claim the cost of paying an accountant to help them to fill in a tax return as a legitimate business expense.
HMRC is deliberately discouraging ordinary people from getting professional help with a complicated and secretive tax system by disallowing personal accountancy as an expense.* That is calculated to keep a naive segment of the taxpaying public on the margin in subjection and overpaying. In my experience an accountant is not expensive. The psychological pain he protects you from is at least as important as the financial benefit of getting it right.
The sums they claim for it are trivial, but that MPs are encouraged to get that analgesia (100% free to them), whereas the ordinary voter is discouraged from it (paying out of their own pocket, with at best 40% counting against the tax they pay, if they fall into the category where accountancy is allowed as an expense, which they won’t find out unless they employ an accountant in the first place), is another corrupting influence.
…..
* My idea of ‘tax justice’, unlike that of the various organisations that campaign for people to pay as much tax as possible and for more arbitrary power for the authorities, is one in which the system is transparent, there aren’t different sets of rules for different people, and the rules themselves are fair and set out in law.
…..
BTW, on the subject of tax, readers might enjoy this letter in The Times.
I love the headline on this piece in the Spectator by Matthew Lynn. I don’t think he is talking about our own Brian Micklethwait, but he could be.
Mr Lynn is talking about the risk, now rising, that the UK will have its sovereign debt ratings cut, a fact that means the UK government has to pay higher interest rates to investors wishing to hold UK gilts. I suspect the US could be headed for a similar fate.
Hopey-change!
William Hill, the betting firm, is offering 5/2 odds that Gordon Brown leaves the office of Prime Minister this year. I guess if you want to finesse it, it would be worth knowing what are the odds that he has gone by the end of the party conference season in the autumn (ie, by the end of September in Labour’s case).
Dozens of MPs, such as from Labour and Conservative, could be de-selected by their own local party members over expense abuses that have come to light; it is likely that the issue will be one of the very top questions that a voter will have of a candidate who is up for re-election, whenever the polls are held. As far as I know, my local Pimlico MP, Mark Field, is a good guy in this expenses issue, but I’ll have to check. Here’s some data on him at the “They Work for You” website, an invaluable resource. Mr Field, is, by the way, sound as they come in opposing ID cards.
As a side-issue, I hope, as Guido says, that Douglas Carswell gets re-elected for his East Anglian seat with a good majority. He’s been one of the undoubted good guys of this whole sorry process, not something you will usually read at Samizdata. Here is Mr Carswell’s blog.
And thanks Samizdata readers! It turns out that there has been a fair amount of foreign coverage of this saga. The reports generally do not address what is the 800 lb gorilla in the drawing room: the fact that Parliament is as ineffectual as it is in large part due to the transfer of great powers to the EU. And the expenses of European MPs in Strasbourg will no doubt make for fascinating reading.
It is often a useful question to ask: who benefits from this? Senior Libertarian Alliance honcho Sean Gabb, who not surprisingly is grimly satisfied at seeing the discomfiture of this partly corrupt, oppressive and pointless bunch of political boobies, asks whether his one-time adversary, a certain Boris Johnson, might be a prime long-term beneficiary from the current expenses crisis. Mr Johnson, a former editor of the Spectator, a Daily Telegraph journalist and former member for the safe Tory seat of Henley-on-Thames, is now Mayor of London. Being outside the House of Commons, Mr Gabb argues, confers upon the colourful Mr Johnson the chance to pose as a man untainted. Quite possibly so.
But maybe Mr Gabb is in danger of being caught up in his own cynicism, understandable thought that may be (full disclosure: I am an old friend of Sean Gabb whom I have known for more than 20 years). Mr Johnson, does, of course, have other potential skeletons rattling in his cupboard, as do many of us mere mortals who do not happen to be moral saints. But right now, all that I want is a politician with the sense to roll back the state to the extent that Sean Gabb and I share. In other words, roll it back a long, long way. That surely has to remain the prime focus of our energies, long after stories about expense fiddling have faded from view.
The Speaker of the House of Commons, Michael Martin, is due to speak about his position at 3:30 pm today (about an hour from when I am now writing this). There is a high chance he will resign in disgrace, rather than risk the even greater ignomy of being forced out by a vote of no-confidence from MPs. It appears that even fellow Scot Gordon Brown will not explicitly back him. The scandals over the outrageous arrest of Tory MP Damian Green, and now the relentless series of stories of MPs abusing expenses for things like mortgages on second homes, has damaged confidence in Parliament so badly that fringe parties such as UKIP and the British National Party – a party of hard-left economic views, let it be noted – may do relatively well in the upcoming June European Union elections.
This whole saga demonstrates the truth of the thesis that politicians increasingly have come to regard their own interests as set apart from the country as a whole. It adds to the notion, put forward by Sean Gabb, of an “Enemy Class” that is quite consciously at odds with the more conservative (small – c) values of the country. Of course, there has always been an element of this – it is naive to imagine that Parliament ever quite met some Greek ideal – but it is now in a particularly bad way.
Let’s hope Mr Martin sees sense and takes the proverbial bottle of whisky and the loaded revolver into his study. He will be the first Speaker to be ejected from his role in more than 300 years. Not a record to be proud of.
As an aside, it surprises me still how little this whole saga is registering in the foreign media. Anyone got any examples of US, French, German etc coverage of this? It might be nice if even Instapundit mentioned it.
Norman – now Lord – Tebbit, famously the scourge of trade union militants and who also survived a murder attempt by the IRA in the mid-1980s (an ex-RAF fighter pilot by the way), is urging voters not to vote for the main political parties in the European elections. Instead, the implication is that folk should vote for UKIP. Well, that is Guido’s take on the matter.
Suddenly, the Tory Party does not look in quite such bouncy shape this morning. I guess when you have MPs trousering taxpayers’ money on a fairly impressive scale, it dents the brand somewhat. Like I said yesterday, though, the central problem of UK political life is not fiddling expenses. No, the problem is a continuing failure to push for a major rollback of the state, including removal of this nation from the clutches of an European federal state. Compared with how much money is wasted on quangos, or ID cards, or the rest of it, an MP’s claim for swimming pool maintenance is small beer.
As a book it has its flaws – it does not pay enough heed to the role of Web 2.0 media – but in the light of recent events about politicians’ use of taxpayers’ money, Peter Oborne’s study of UK politics reads better than ever.
A question worth asking, in the light of all this, is whether a less corrupt political class would be better, or worse, at reining in public spending? In the 18th Century, for instance, the UK parliamentary system was deeply corrupt; there was a vast network of jobs and sinecures doled out to enforce political loyalty. And yet despite the drawbacks, the UK managed to forge an Industrial Revolution, build a large and effective navy and help to defeat Bonaparte and all those supposedly more efficient Frenchmen. The central point that needs to be remembered is that the corruption and venality of the UK political class of today coincides with a point in our history when about 80 per cent of the laws and regulations affecting we great unwashed are not written in Westminster, but in the EU; and further, that the state exerts a vastly greater degree of control over our lives now than was the case in the era of Pitt, Burke and Fox. So this stuff is both a sign of the unseriousness of our political class on the one hand, and also a sign of how much more the state and its functionaries matter, on the other. Cleaning up politics will not address the central problem that the state plays far too big a role in our lives in the first place. Take away the jam, and the flies will not be such a pest.
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