It feels like the Labour party is doing its best to park its tanks on the TaxPayers’ Alliance lawn today. First Ed Balls calls for a tax cut, albeit a temporary one funded from borrowing. Then the Times reports that Ed Miliband is planning on attacking wasteful public spending. Don’t worry about it, we won’t resist the occupation, everyone is welcome. And like a good host handing around the lemonade, I’d like to offer a little advice on how they might make this agenda effective, and make it fit with their broader aims and objectives.
To make it convincing, they’ll need to surprise people. If examples of waste sound too trivial or convenient then no one will be convinced. Or if calls for tax cuts are just another way of plugging the Keynesian line instead of a way to let taxpayers keep more money in their pockets, then the political results will be meagre. The party will need to surprise people a little to get their attention.
That doesn’t mean they need to sacrifice their principles though. When £250,000 is spent on a shower for Nicolas Sarkozy at a three day EU summit in Paris – a luxury shower with air conditioning and surround sound – then torn out unused because he decides to wash at his normal place in the Élysée Palace ten minutes away, that is equally offensive whether you think the money should be left in people’s pockets or spent on public services.
The best schemes to attack are the ones designed to satisfy some already fat special interest, at the expense of ordinary people. Too many Tories love that kind of thing because it gets a round of applause at the right CBI conferences. Look into some of the spending in the Local Enterprise Partnerships for example, a replacement for the Regional Development Agencies that most participants are only involved in as a vehicle to grab Government grants. Heseltine and his committee are going to hand money down like some Aztec emperor bestowing gold on grateful subjects, while other priorities are bleeding sacrifices. The way to help businesses isn’t to take their money and then give it back to a favoured few.
The biggest opportunity which the Labour Party is missing at the moment is the Government’s plans for a new high speed rail line. HS2 is hugely expensive, over £1,000 a family in total, so no one could doubt the fiscal significance of such an announcement. It won’t deliver anything till 2026, and means foregoing opportunities to improve capacity in the shorter term, so services to places like Milton Keynes get more and more congested in the meantime. Even when it is finished many big towns like Coventry will get a worse service. There are more affordable alternatives that can be delivered more quickly and do more to ease congestion.
This is a scheme which will benefit a fortunate minority of passengers. Nearly half of all long distance rail journeys in Britain are made by people from households in the top income quintile. There is no reason to think HS2 will be much different. The business case has assumed a third of passengers are businessmen earning an average of £70,000. Why are the Government taxing the poor to pay for a rich man’s train?
Shadow Transport Secretary Maria Eagle is cleverly keeping her options open on this one. She told the Guardian “we rightly start with a blank sheet of paper – that sheet doesn’t have a high-speed train line running through it”. The last Government only started to work on the scheme under Andrew Adonis – the most ultra of Blairites. The Green Party are opposing it because of the lacklustre environmental case and the effective subsidy to the rich, their London Mayoral candidate Jenny Jones attacked it at a recent event we held bringing together the scheme’s opponents.
There are other areas where the government are splashing taxpayers’ cash with abandon. You can support International Development, but still question writing cheques to a Rwandan Government the Metropolitan Police thinks might be sending hit squads to London. You can support action to cut greenhouse gas emissions, but wonder if we should really be putting £3 billion into a Green Investment Bank which won’t be accountable to Ministers, Parliament or the public. Is more investment banking what the planet needs?
And that’s before we get talking about taxes. The hideously complex tax code is as much of a burden on the poor as it is on the rich. Improving it will help create a system where everyone pays their fair share and time and money aren’t wasted navigating the loopholes.
Failing that, just point and snigger when the police paint a car to look like a pumpkin on Halloween night, or when Cornwall Council plans to send 12 councillors on fact-finding trips to lap dancing clubs.
Matthew Sinclair is director of the TaxPayers’ Alliance.
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