National Insurance - too taxing?

Much was made last week of the Labour party's decision to stick with its policy of raising NI from April 2011, while at the same time the Conservatives vowed to reverse the policy should they win power. The Tories won the support of over 60 business leaders for their decision, and Sir Stuart Rose, the Chairman of Marks and Spencer, was one of those leaders.

On the news last week, Rose spoke eloquently in defence of the Conservative policy, repeating the mantra that an increased NI demand would be a tax on jobs at just the wrong time during the economic recovery. When pressed to suggest what taxes would have to rise to help reduce the deficit, he admitted that VAT would probably have to go up, and seemed relatively sanguine about that possibility.

Presumably then, it is unfortunate but acceptable for employees and shoppers to pay additional tax, but not employers? That doesn't sound fair.

For VAT is (literally and obviously) a tax on shopping. Surely the higher VAT is, the less we will buy. Either way round then, if NI goes up or VAT goes up or they both do, the economic money-go-round might be threatened. (I'm not convinced of this anyway: NI went up by a penny a few years ago without workers being dumped onto the streets, so why would that necessarily happen this time?)

It sounds as though Rose was just trying to dodge the financial contribution to the UK recovery that corporate citizens such as his company should surely be making. I'm not sure convinced these businessmen are being particularly public-spirited just when we need them to be, but am I surprised?

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.