Taxing Economy

Blimey, it's been a while.

Someone said on the news tonight that due to the economic slowdown in the high streets, government VAT revenues are well down, contributing to the massive debt that the UK faces now and over the next few years.

Is now the time to abolish VAT then?

Sounds a bit counterintuitive I guess, but if the money were charged to income tax instead of what we spend our money on in the shops, the government would ensure a more constant (and probably higher) income. And while people would have a little less to spend, prices would be lower and things would feel more affordable, perhaps giving purchasing a shot in the arm that it desperately needs.

You could even go really left wing and charge the difference just to the super rich, but I guess for many that might be a bridge too far, except Lib Dems.

I'm probably being naive, and I'm no economist (before you say it!), but can anyone see why this wouldn't work?

Election jitters

Am I worried about the outcome of the UK General Election? Hell yeah! The pundits and the Press Corps have no idea what is going on in the marginals. The predictions are of a Labour victory with anything between a 10 and 100-seat majority. But if predictions are that precise then surely other outcomes, such as a hung Parliament or worse, cannot be ruled out.

Odious and creepy though I find the man, I am compelled to accept that Michael Howard has fought the most steady and consistent campaign, driving the same messages home time and again, and dictating, to a large extent, what made the headlines every day. In these circumstances one would expect the polls to favour his party more. That they don't suggests that for all his consistency, Howard's message is just not being approved of by enough people. But is this as true in the marginals as it evidently is nationally? Nobody has any idea and we won't know until tomorrow morning.

The continuing saga about Iraq has undeniably hurt Blair and through him the Labour Party. All last week it hijacked the agenda and drowned out the good news stories regarding Child Tax Credits, Sure Start, the New Deal, the strong economy, more hospitals, more schools, more doctors, nurses, teachers and police that I'm sure Blair and Brown would have preferred to highlight. However, this week attention turned away from the war, at least to some extent, and Howard concentrated instead on his timetable for government and the changes he'd make. At the last hurdle he began, finally, to use more positive language and displayed a confident air. By contrast, Blair, despite all his government's tremendous achievements, appeared fearful and out of control, reduced to playing the fear card to warn us of the consequences of Tory victory. That there are no lies here is self-evident to me, but I wish the PM could have ignored or at least downplayed the Tory threat. Instead he should have told us more about the plans for the third term or at least reminded us about what was great in the second, when, this week, he finally had the opportunity to do so.

I wonder how much of the PM's fretful performance will have put off undecided voters. Clearly the strategy was to alarm the Labour stay-at-homes into turning out and voting after all. Blair has shown plenty of political nous in the past though; perhaps I should suspend judgement and wait to see if his tactics this time have pulled the iron out of the fire again.

Money Mounting

Our tsunami relief: indoor cricket day has now raised over £3000! Check out our website!

Conflict of Interest

Over the last two days, the war in Iraq has pushed to centre stage in the election campaign. That it hadn't been there for much longer has been a source of some wonder for political commentators, given how much exposure it received during the last Parliament. It seems though that the British are more concerned about health, education, the economy and even immigration, clearly.

We are invited by the Liberal Democrats to vote against Blair because he took the country to war on what they believe was an illegal premise. This has been their line ever since the conflict began, but it is a misguided one in my view, for reasons I'll expand on shortly. The Conservatives on the other hand have flip-flopped on this matter. Behind the government 100% when war was imminent, they have since seen an opportunity to attack Labour by utilising the uncertainty regarding the PM's use of intelligence estimates and his overstating the case. This is highly disingenuous stuff: everyone knows that Howard would have been "shoulder to shoulder" with the US, just as Blair was, had he been PM. Their position on Iraq is the least credible of the three main parties.

The Prime Minister was caught between a rock and a hard place as soon as he tried to justify the upcoming conflict by means Saddam's supposed flouting of existing UN resolutions. It's arguable that Saddam was still in breach of course, but it must now be accepted that had weapons inspector Hans Blix been given more time to do his work on the ground in Iraq, he would have shown the non-existence of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and that Saddam had much less of a case to answer (in this regard anyway). Blair had no choice but to go down the route of attempting to establish legality however, because of the current UN Charter. For copper-bottomed legality to be established, an explicit resolution for war had to be obtained, and it never was.

This was sufficient for the LibDems to stand against the government on this matter. Never mind that Saddam would survive and would continue to abuse the rights of Iraqi citizens. The observance of international law outweighed that, in their view. Not in mine though. If the observance of international law protects men like Saddam, then that law's an ass. If the PM had challenged the legal status-quo on moral grounds, the clamour for a change in the UN Charter could have been loud, at least from these shores.

The PM should have been bolder and justified conflict, before it happened, in moral terms, and also in terms of the British national interest. Saddam had had WMD and undoubtedly had the capacity to create more, certainly in terms of know-how and very probably in hardware. He continued to pose a threat to international peace in the region, at least latently. He had already invaded Kuwait and Iran. He was a mass murderer, and used chemical weapons against Iraqi peoples supposedly in his care. On all these grounds, it was surely entirely reasonable to attack and topple this man. Actions such as these, to destroy totalitarian regimes and the evil dictators that run them, are precisely the sorts of operation the UN should be looking to carry out routinely. The fact that the UN Charter currently prevents its doing so weakens that body. Invalid governments which have no respect for the human rights of their own citizens should be deleted. The world is better off without the Taliban and without Saddam. From the point of view of the British national interest, it is the icing on the cake that the menace to our existent trading agreements in the region was also removed.

I believe that Blair would have won a greater part of the British people over to his cause if he had justified war on these grounds. That he felt himself unable to do so before the bombs fell has cost him big time. This is what I don't get about his opponents' current attacks on his integrity - what exactly did the PM gain from taking the line he did? He has made himself look like President Bush's stooge, he has brought himself, his image and his political legacy under personal attack and, as we are about to see I suspect, it will cost his party seats in the House of Commons. Why did he do it then? There can be only one answer surely: it was because he believed it was the right thing to do.

Who's complaining?

The new series of Doctor Who is moving from strength to strength. After a dodgy first episode, the scariness levels have improved to the point where Alex is running from the room at the first sight of an alien or monster, and Coryn is loving it. Apparently it is too scary for some though: it was reported last week that 50 letters were received by the BBC concerning the "ghost" story set in 1860s Cardiff. Cobblers! It was 45 minutes of thrill time to be enjoyed by the whole family, and it's the same every week. I watched a lot of Doctor Who as a kid (yeah, yeah so it explains a lot) but I reckon this series is bigger and better. Quality stuff in an era of same old, same old drama. It's a shame Eccleston's going, but if the scriptwriting remains this good, David Tennant will have few problems as the 10th Doc.

Counterproductive humility

For someone as politically astute as Alan Milburn, his apology yesterday for the death of DC Stephen Oake seems remarkably ill-timed and ill-thought-out. It is right to express regret or even apologise for the fact that at the time our immigration system was so leaky that the terrorist Bourgass entered the UK unchecked. On that level Milburn should be praised. However it is not the Government's fault that this man subsequently drew a knife and murdered Oake: that was Bourgass's own choice and rightly he is in jail in consequence. On balance, any apology that could be mistaken (by the public) or abused (by the Conservatives) to confer culpability for that crime to the Government would have been best left unmade.

There is little doubt that at the time Bourgass entered the UK, border controls were insufficient to stop him or others like him. What is being lost in the current debate is that there is equally little doubt that Bourgass would not get into the country were he to try to do so today. As Polly Toynbee comments:

... asylum applications have dropped by two-thirds since 2002. The backlog of claims, bequeathed by Howard (as Home Secretary) at 50,000, is now 10,000 and new cases are
fast-tracked. Airline liaison officers on the Asian subcontinent and in Africa turned back 30,000 last year. The system that lost track of Bourgass is much changed: all asylum seekers are fingerprinted and will soon be electronically tagged. By the end of this year, more failed asylum seekers will be removed than new ones applying. Charles Clarke's less punitive approach is securing agreements with previously recalcitrant countries to take back their failed asylum seekers.

Toynbee is getting increasingly angry about the deliberate conflation of the debate on immigration policy with terrorism. I agree with her totally. The Conservatives are appealing to the basest instincts of the white British population, as I have alluded to before on these pages, and this is, at best, irresponsible politics and at worst, cynical and evil tactics. I believe the truth lies closer to the latter than the former.

Michael Howard has been very fortunate politically that this terrorist was an illegal immigrant, allowing him to reinforce his odious splicing of immigration with terrorism, and that Milburn then apologised, allowing him to assert that the Government recognises that his claims of an immigration policy shambles are true.

The Conservatives are ahead in the polls in this one area. The message (being absorbed by the public anyway) is "we have wealth; they want to steal it" so "let's keep 'em out". Don't the Tories realise that by promoting this "them and us" culture, they foster hatred? Are they really so desperate for power that they will accept the degradation of a beneficial multicultural society into mutual distrust and possibly even violence in return for it? It seems so, and it is the major reason why the Conservatives, at least under Howard, must be utterly destroyed at the polls on May 5. Are we British and are we going to stand against the promotion of bigotry as we always have done? Or are we going to turn into the sort of people we defeated on the battlefield sixty years ago? That's the choice, ladies and gentlemen.

Incredible Responses

At work today I received a few more cheques to put into our Tsunami Relief effort pot. I am literally stunned by how well our day went on March 17. About 60 men and women from across London and Surrey came together at Lightwater Leisure Centre that day to play indoor cricket in support of adoptsrilanka.com. This is a charity that is taking money directly to schools and villages along the devastated Sri Lankan coastline where it is most needed. Our group has now raised over £1500, with a total in excess of £3000 pledged. Gift Aid and corporate donations have still to be factored in, so this figure could rise still more. I want to pay tribute publically to everyone involved for the effort they made; indeed, are still making. Considering the initial ambition was just to reach four figures we have done incredibly well - something for us to be really proud of. Check it out: there is a Tsunami Relief: Indoor Cricket Day website if you want to know more.

The Conservative Party launched its manifesto today for the upcoming British General Election on May 5. In keeping with the style of the Tory campaign so far it is punchy with lots of attention grabbing headlines, although light on costings at this stage. Tax policy to pay for all these ideas will be revealed in the next few days by all accounts. So this'll be outside the manifesto then, and any failure to keep to it won't be a failure to adhere to a manifesto commitment. Clever, huh?

They're tough on law and order. 20,000 more prison places, expanding the potential prison population in the UK by 25%. Just what's needed, enlarged training colleges to swell our criminal community by a quarter. That's OK, we'll get 5000 more policemen every year: well, we'll need them! In a similar vein, there's the plan to improve school discipline by excluding the unruly and herding them into Turnaround Schools. More training colleges for criminality! I mean, a child in a school full of yobs and bullies is really going to get his head down and work for those qualifications, isn't he? Hell yeah.

Want to send your child to private school? No problem, if the cost is the same as state education, a Conservative government will foot the bill for you. Isn't that taking taxpayers' money out of state education and ploughing it into independent schooling though? Of course it is, but don't worry, it won't last long. As demand rises, so will the prices. Then, private schooling will always be more expensive that the state equivalent (isn't it anyway?) and the policy will lapse. So here the Tories appear to offer us something (wrong in principle anyway) when, in fact, they don't. A gimmick!

We see a similar, but probably more successful, financial transfer planned for hospitals. If patients want to go private, a Conservative government will help them do so by giving them the cost of the state care they're foregoing towards the cost of private treatment. Once again, money leaves the state sector and ends up in the hands of private health providers. Pity the poor souls who can't afford to bridge this gap and are left behind to be treated in a system that has been depleted of funds in this way.

It is a grotesque insult to NHS staff to insinuate that they have such poor professional pride that they can't keep their establishments clean. Of course, it's not their fault, the Tories say, it's Blair's target culture. Remove the targets, and doctors and nurses will be able to spend time caring again. But just what targets were these doctors and nurses actually aiming for while putting their patient population at risk of MRSA infection? Even if this were happening and was successful, there'd be some targets manifestly not met. It makes no logical sense and is another story blown out of all proportion to help build the atmosphere of fear needed for the right wing to gain ground.

Fear brings me to immigration and asylum. I've no problem with this subject being talked about as part of a sensible political discourse and I'm not about to accuse the Conservatives of being racist by raising the issue. However it does seem to have stirred up some disturbing and previously hidden hatreds amongst the white British population. Once again, the atmosphere of fear is being enhanced. How often on the TV news have you heard some random bloke in the street say "I'm not a racist but...." and then come out with something almost fascist in its xenophobic intensity? It's happening more and more, and it is the raising of immigration as an issue which has unleashed this disgusting undercurrent in our society and lent it a respectability it should never and will never deserve.

Some have called for the Labour Party to get righteously angry about this, and shout out that it is wrong and should stop. It's hard to argue with the validity of that view, but relative silence of the Left on this matter to date might, in the end, be the best approach. It's immoral, but it's a side-issue when the future of the economy, our health and our education is at stake.

So, all in all, no, I don't think I'll be voting Conservative on May 5.

Sorted the wing-mirror by the way - good as new.