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The Liberal Democratic party has voted, in its annual conference, to continue with its long standing policy of introducing a local income tax in Britain as a source of money for local councils.
The media has treated this as some sort of new thing (which shows how much they know about policy matters), but I am more interested in the classic missing-the-point the whole idea shows.
The point is not whether a local income tax is a better or worse thing than the present ‘Council Tax’ (although an obvious problem is that in some areas most voters are below the income threshold for income tax – so under a local income tax councils might become even more out of control than they are now), the point is council spending.
I am old enough to remember the hatred the old system of ‘rates” (property tax) generated, especially after the ‘revaluation’ of properties in Scotland.
For all the talk of details of local government finance, what most people really objected to was the level of the rates – and the increase in this tax burden was generated by the increase in local government spending.
The Conservative government of the day got rid of the rates and introduced the ‘Community Charge’ (the so called Poll Tax). However, opposition to the tax burden continued and indeed got worse. Again for all the talk about the structure of the tax (“it is wrong for the poor to pay as much as the rich” – although the poor did not pay as much as the rich), what most people really objected to was the level of the new tax.
I rather doubt that many people would have rioted if, say, the level of the tax had been ten pounds per person.
Local government spending went up, but people blamed the tax burden on the new tax (rather than on the increase in council spending).
Today people say (quite correctly) that the Council Tax is a terrible burden. However, (absurdly) many people are still missing the point that the tax is a terrible burden because of local government spending and introducing a new tax will not help reduce this spending.
In Britain most people talk about this or that form of local government taxation and they also talk about whether or not central government grants to local councils are fair (the Conservative party is convinced that the Labour government favours Labour councils at the expense of Conservative ones).
But, as far as I can make out, nobody talks about the level of local government spending – and it is the spending that is the root of the problem.
‘Petrol Price Rise Announced’ blares the BBC Headline:
Fuel duty will rise by 1.28p a litre from 1 October, the Treasury has confirmed.
The increase, which will add five pence a gallon to petrol and diesel prices, is in line with inflation, it said.
So it isn’t a ‘price rise’ at all. It’s a tax increase
I think the public has a right to be told in less ambivalent terms.
Patrick Crozier has a modest plan for the rejuvenation of London…
With the mayoral election less than a year away I feel it time that I declared my hand. OK, so this is not entirely serious. Any candidacy would need funds, an organisation, assembly candidates and all those involved would have to realise that it wouldn’t have a prayer and that the only purpose of the exercise would be to secure publicity. But if we did have all those things this would be my manifesto. That’s the great thing about manifestos: they’re cheap.
Some Observations and Some Basic Principles
London is a great city – after all, it’s home to most of Samizdata’s writers. Millions of people would seem to agree with them coming here from all over the world to find a better life for themselves. But London seems to be getting worse when it could be getting a lot better. In particular it suffers from three major problems: crime, transport and property prices. My aim, if elected, would be to: reduce crime by 90%, reduce property prices by 50% and to make getting around the city a simple and predictable (if not necessarily cheap) business.
I believe that civilisation is at its best when people are free. It is freedom which promotes prosperity, innovation and responsibility. And yet for 100 years we have been chipping away at freedom, progressively heaping taxation and regulation upon a once free people with results that are all too plain to see. If London is to be better then first it must be free.
Housing
Property is too expensive. With a three-bedroom house costing six or seven times the average wage, millions are postponing and even abandoning the idea of having children. This is hardly a sustainable state of affairs. Prices are high because demand is high and supply is low. The answer is to increase the supply.
If elected I would abolish all planning laws and all building regulations. Immediately, people would start to build. Up mainly. And why not? We shouldn’t be scared of living in flats. Many people around the world enjoy good quality high-rise living where raising a family is as easy and as pleasant as living in a semi-detached. All that we have to do is to allow it to happen. I believe that by scrapping the regulations we will see the development of all sorts of new ideas in architecture as well as a massive increase in capacity. We might well see the development of self-build (people designing their own houses) as is seen in places like France and Spain.
Would we lose all our nice old buildings? Some, for sure, but do we really need all of them, especially as there is a chance we might get some nice, new ones in exchange? → Continue reading: Crozier for Mayor
The Conservative Party has been blessed with a ringing endorsement from none other than Polly Toynbee:
A remarkable document has emerged from the Conservative frontbench. Search it from cover to cover and few would guess its provenance. Its deceptively dull title hides a radical departure: Old Europe? Demographic change and pension reform, by David Willetts, the shadow secretary for work and pensions, transforms Conservative family policy.
Not even his economics smells of Conservatism. The pensions problem does not, Willetts declares, need more saving by today’s workers. “Europe needs more consumption, more spending and more borrowing. Keynes warned in the 30s that ageing societies with high levels of savings and not many investment opportunities face a deflationary nightmare.”
So, is this just a devlishly cunning bit of cognitive jiu-jitsu to throw their opponents? I don’t believe they are anywhere near clever enough for that.
I think the end is nigh.
The senior political commentator and Guardian newspaper columnist Hugo Young died at home last night, aged 64, after a long illness.
I used to worship Mr Young’s Mount Olympus of a column, many years ago, turning to it even before the daily Steve Bell cartoon, and have retained a soft spot for him to this day. I suppose that may have been because one dark evening Mr Young had to endure the lefty ravings of some drunken young student from Sheffield University, at some Guardian/NUS bash or other, as this young acolyte tried to suck out some of the greatness from the Great Man of the Left. But being from Sheffield himself, Mr Young tolerated this intoxicated idiot for quite some time, before breaking away to escape into the night.
That conversation taught me two things. One was to try to listen, and the other was to try to think. Hugo Young may have been one of our main political opponents, but he was also one of our best political opponents because he thought about what it was he wanted to say, before he then said it. He was also one of the few men on the Guardian unafraid of calling any situation how he saw it. For example, he recently said of David Blunkett:
At the apex of anti-liberalism, bragging his contempt, sits the most dangerous home secretary this country has ever known.
Well said, sir. The Left is seriously weakened by Hugo Young’s departure from this mortal coil, and shall not see his like again.
And although this post may seem strange, I felt compelled to write it. For although Hugo Young was a Titan standing in our way, from initial stirrings raised in that long ago conversation I must thank him for helping me to escape from the clutches of this self-same Left, and especially from men like David Blunkett. Hugo Young truly was a Great Man. May his soul Rest in Peace.
In my statist youth I was a firm believer in compulsory voting. “We should be like Australia,” I used to say, “and make people vote.” Of course, I would never subscribe to such a draconian policy these days, having indoctrinated myself with the works of Popper, Rand, and Murray N. Rothbard. But until swayed by the wise words of Mr Carr, I used to think it unfortunate that so many British people had become addicted to this growing habit of electoral abstention.
Some British politicians even cry the odd crocodile tear about it, on late-night political programmes. Not that it stops Tony Blair from strutting across the political landscape, like Godzilla, despite wielding only a quarter of the votes of the British electorate, from the 2001 General Election. What people in the ruling class like Mr Blair truly fear, of course, is the growing de-legitimisation of the British state, including all of its political parties, which this increase in non-voting represents. However, despite these fears, non-voting is generally becoming a rational and respectable thing to do.
At least that’s according to one of my favourite Telegraph writers, Tom Utley.
I realise that I am preaching the most dreadful heresy. I know that we are all supposed to pull pious faces and say that the vote is our most precious possession, that men and women have died for it and that to abstain in an election is a grave dereliction of a civic duty. But that has always struck me as a silly argument. If we do not honestly care which of the assorted bores, cranks and exhibitionists on a ballot paper should win an election, then why should we pretend that we do?
Now where I increasingly differ from Mr Utley, after repeatedly failing to hear Oliver Letwin’s outright condemnation of David Blunkett’s plans for a national ID card, is in his proposed solution to the crisis:
People don’t think voting matters, and it is the politicians’ job to persuade them that it does…Elections must be made to matter again. What I am really saying, I suppose, is Vote Tory.
Aside from this hesitant political plug, it’s an interesting article, especially as it’s the first time, as an admittedly irregular reader of the Telegraph, that I’ve seen the rationality of non-voting discussed with any kind of seriousness within its hallowed pages. It seems Mr Carr’s message is getting through.
In occasional moments of reflection, I sometimes wonder why the British government is wasting £5 million pounds of taxpayers’ money on the Hutton Inquiry, when we already know the result: the day the report is published, Geoff Hoon will resign.
But this begs another question. Who will Tony Blair replace the hopeless Defence Secretary with, when Hoon takes the Hutton bullet on behalf of the Dear Leader? With Tony rapidly running out of friends in Cabinet, who could the Teacher of the Nation possibly turn to in such a moment of crisis, especially when the locker is bare of mellifluous wormtongues, despite Tony having hundreds of overpaid New Labour backbenchers to choose from, most of whom spend their long dull mornings wandering around Westminster trying to secure free lunches?
Yes, you’ve already guessed it. No, you couldn’t possibly believe it. Yes, my friends, hold onto your bed-knobs and your broomsticks. For the next Secretary of State for Defence will be, yes, step forward please, the former Secretary of State for Transport, a man who made it through the rain, yes, ladies and gentlemen, it’s the new and improved Stephen Byers!
Please. No tittering at the back there!
After having served more than an entire year on the backbenches, for having serially lied to the British people, rumours abound that Peter “Mandy” Mandelson has decided Stephen “Liar, Liar, my Pants are on Fire” Byers, must be returned to the ruling caste, as the new Defence Secretary, to bolster pretty-boy Tony’s rapidly disintegrating regime. If you can’t follow this link, here’s what today’s Daily Mirror said:
STEPHEN Byers is about to return to the Cabinet as replacement for doomed Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon. Byers, 50, who quit as Transport Secretary 16 months ago in a storm over spin, will bolster support for Tony Blair at a time when Chancellor Gordon Brown’s backers are increasing in strength around the No10 table. Mr Hoon is widely expected to go after the Hutton inquiry over Dr David Kelly. Mr Byers has been exiled “long enough”, said a senior source.
Which leads one to think several things may have happened. First of all, Tony Blair has finally gone totally gaga mad. Unlikely, though possible. Second, the new unspun Tony has given up the ghost, and will go the same day Hoon does, handing over the multiplying problems of New Labour to Gordon Brown to fail with. Again, unlikely. Blair has nowhere yet to go, as he’s failed to get us into the €uro, and a daily fix of executive power is a drug few give up voluntarily. Third, Tony has created such a court of Yes-men, that he can no longer objectively discern reality from the sinuous platitudes of his courtiers. My bet is on this third option. It’s that Bay of Pigs scenario again, with Stephen Byers, in this case, being the pig.
Whatever the case, even the kite-flying suggestion that Stephen Byers is a solution to the problem of Geoff Hoon points to a government in mortal crisis, like the proverbial spider about to disappear down the spinning whirlpool of proverbial bathroom history. But with no trusted political opposition in the UK, and falling voting levels in all substantive elections, what happens when such a despised government does collapse? I don’t know, but start writing those libertarian manifestos right now. Our day may be closer than we think. Though I won’t be giving up the day-job, just yet.
Alas, the drinks really are starting to run out now, in the UK’s socialist Wonderland. As the world price of crude has started dropping, because the UK and US Coalition Allies have finally got the Iraqi oil pumps flowing again, instead of passing any resultant economic benefit onto the British people, the UK Chancellor Gordon Brown is about to pass this benefit onto himself by raising UK petrol prices by up to five pence per gallon. A splendid back-door tax effort, I think you’ll agree.
But one would’ve thought he’d learned his lesson during the UK Fuel Crisis, three years ago. However, our Gordon is wiser than we mere mortals. He thinks he can slip this tax rise in when the pump prices are dropping, thereby fooling we gullible British people into not noticing the difference ‘twixt cup and lip. But what happens, Gordon, when some unforeseen event pushes pump prices back up again? Will you reduce your tax-take? Or cut your spending? Or will you steel yourself for the UK Fuel Crisis Mark II?
I really don’t think you have a clue. Because, idiotarian though you are, you’re a highly intelligent man. And you know if you allowed this price cut to be passed onto the British private sector, instead of keeping it to pay for all your new lesbian nicotine-awareness counsellors, it would stimulate economic growth and increase your long-term tax-take. But you don’t care about the long-term tax-take, do you Gordon? When the British economy is heading over a waterfall, as you recently told the Cabinet, let’s just get that oar in the water and start paddling as hard and as fast as we can. The long-term future will just have to take care of itself.
And it will, Gordon. It will. Let’s just hope that you and your kind aren’t in it.
There are times (rare, it must be said) when I feel a pang of sympathy for our politicians.
Well, no, perhaps ‘sympathy’ is too strong a word. Let’s just say that I do occasionally recognise the thorniness of the predicaments in which they find themselves. Such as this one:
“We have quite a lot of evidence that illustrates that the council tax is very near the limit of acceptability in a number of areas,” said Mr Raynsford. “The increases in the last two or three years have really taxed the patience of a lot of people. They have been very substantial increases and we have to look at options for change including the possibility of finding other sources of revenue.”
Mr Raynsford’s remarks are evidence of Government concern that soaring council tax could severely damage Labour’s popularity in the run-up to the next general election.
The increases have led to threats of civil disobedience by pensioners in Devon who say they cannot afford the rises on their fixed incomes and are refusing to pay.
So what’s the problem? Just lower the taxes, right? Ah, well if only it was as easy as that. See the politicians realise that onerous taxes are making them unpopular but the only way to reduce that burden is to slash public spending and that will make them equally (if not more) unpopular. What’s a government minister to do?
Truly this is almost a picture perfect snapshot of a schitzoid nation. The common folk are always grumbling menacingly about the taxes they are forced to pay but at the same time they are not prepared to entertain even a suggestion of a reduction in the size of government (national or local) nor any diminution in the level of state largesse which they demand with an unquenchable vigour.
Oft-times this infected body politic breaks out in pustules that send the political classes scurrying around to find a less tender part of the body onto which to shift the burden. I suppose that method of treatment has a limited shelf-life.
It is slightly worrying that even after the Thatcher years there still seems to be no clear understanding that state activism comes at a high price. The British people appear to want low taxes and big government without appreciating that they cannot possibly have both. Until such time that sufficient numbers of them have settled on which one they want, these techtonic plates of expectation are going to continue grinding against each other, leading to frequent tremors and occasional quakes.
[Note to non-UK readers: ‘Council taxes’ are property-based taxes collected and spent at local level.]
Despite the most draconian anti-gun laws in the known universe, the British police are having to resort to enlisting the help of musicians in an attempt to curb gun crime:
The senior detective investigating the murder of Toni-Ann Byfield, the seven-year-old girl shot in the back, yesterday told Britain’s black music artists to warn their fans to stay away from guns.
At a summit with senior music industry figures, including Mercury Music Prize winner Dizzee Rascal and members of So Solid Crew, Detective Chief Superintendent John Coles, head of Operation Trident which investigates black-on-black gun crime, said it would help stop the shootings if rap musicians, DJs and producers spoke out against Britain’s escalating gun culture.
What’s all this nonsense about ‘escalating gun culture’? How can that be? Isn’t that something Americans are forced to endure but we Brits are mercifully free of?
Priceless.
Our friend Sean Gabb is no stranger to radio or TV broadcasting. Indeed, so commonplace are his incisive contributions to both that Sean himself appears to regard them as somewhat mundane.
But yesterday was different. Yesterday, Sean travelled the studios of BBC Radio Oxford to take part in a phone-in debate on law and order. One of the other studio guests was none other than Tony Martin. As Sean himself says:
This is a case that has at times filled me and many other people with incandescent rage. It is the perfect summary of all that is wrong with modern England. Now, I was invited to meet the man at the centre of the case. Let alone driving – I might have walked the entire circuit of the M25 to be with him. So off I went.
If it is possible to be incandescent with envy then I am.
As is his custom, Sean has written about his afternoon with Tony Martin:
There is in any society an implied contract between state and citizen. We give up part of our right to self defence – only part, I emphasise – and all our right to act as judge in our own causes. We resign these matters to the state and obey its laws. In exchange, it maintains order more efficiently and more justly than we could ourselves. In modern England, the state has not broken this contract. If it had simply given up on maintaining order, that would be bad enough – but we could then at least shift for ourselves. No, the state in this country has varied the terms of the contract. It will not protect us, but it will not let us protect ourselves. If we ignore this command, we can expect to be punished at least as severely as the criminals who attack us. That is what the Tony Martin case is all about. This is not just a matter for the country. The towns have it just as bad, if not worse. If you are a victim of crime anywhere in this country, you are in it alone and undefended. Call for the Police, call for a home delivery pizza – see which arrives first.
Sean has a gift for commentary which few can emulate. This article, as with so many of his other writings, has all the solemn dignity and moving power of a hymn. His melancholy conclusions alone deserve the widest possible audience if only as a chronicle of these troubled times. Seldom has the phrase ‘read it and weep’ been quite so literal.
[Update: I think ‘whoops’ is the appropriate phrase. I drafted this and posted it up without realising that Brian was doing exactly the same thing only marginally sooner. But even duplication can be quite instructive as both Brian and I live up to our respective reputations of him being optimistic and me being pessimistic in response to precisely the same article.]
There are many definitions of the Rule of Law, and I’m no lawyer, which may or may not be a good thing, but if freedom before the Rule of Law is to mean anything, surely it means only answering to well-defined pre-established law, rather than to the arbitrary and discretionary edicts of governments, particularly retrospective legislation where you get punished for something you did before it was made ‘illegal’.
Now I’m no card-carrying member of the Jeffrey Archer fan club, but when a government arbitrarily singles out just one man, even one as notorious as Lord Archer, and then ramrods through a piece of retrospective legislation deliberately designed to harm and humiliate just this one single individual, then if the Rule of Law was already on the critical injuries list, comatose in a life support unit, I think now is time to simply turn the ventilators off. What’s the point of keeping them on? The Rule of Law, in the UK, is dead.
Nurses, quickly please, the screens.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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