An Open Letter to Ed Milliband

Dear Mr Milliband

Old Labour, New Labour, One Nation Labour…What does it all mean exactly?

I am old enough to remember when the political parties put forward their principles, ideals and aims, together with the policies they believed would achieve those aims. The electorate would then have the opportunity to choose the party which most conformed to their own beliefs. And I think that the last party leader to do that was Margaret Thatcher. (She wasn’t my choice, but it worked for her!)

Since then there has been a not too subtle change in approach, so that at best, the parties try to dress up (or dilute) their policies in a way which will appeal to as many different sectors of the voting public as possible; or at worst, try to discover what policies would most appeal, and then shoe those policies in to their own manifestos regardless of principle. (The immigration debate is a case in point.)

For some reason the policy makers believe that the general public don’t sense this; and tragically, these days, they are often right, not because voters are not intelligent, but because we have become bored with the institutional cynicism thus displayed.

What happens in other countries?
It is fascinating to compare our situation with that in other Western countries. For example, take infant mortality. The highest level (per thousand live births) is USA, and the lowest is Sweden. Child poverty: highest in USA (by a long way) and lowest in Denmark. Gender inequality: worst in USA, best in Sweden. Environmental sustainability: worst in USA, best in Nordic countries (and Switzerland). Income share of the top 1%: USA over 18%, Denmark 4%. And the point of all this? Where these figures are represented on a graph, UK come up roughly in the middle of the countries represented. But there is one more graph, which, significantly, shows that in all respects, the best performing countries are those where tax is highest as a percentage of GDP.

In the UK it appears that the two main parties are competing to achieve the lowest taxes per capita, and the result is the present misery and inequality. But the labour party have a very strong advantage in their ‘battle for hearts and minds’. It would not be against party dogma to increase taxes, and it would lose almost none of their core votes. Imagine how popular it would be, for example, if all those earning, say, half a million or more were to pay 90% on anything above that threshold. And how many of those will ever vote Labour?

The current tax regime in this country is one which favours the very rich. Thus the very rich have an enhanced influence on the direction of Government, which in turn has an adverse effect on democracy. It can be shown (in addition to the statistics shown above) that the greater the gap between rich and poor, the less notice Government takes of the opinions of the general population. This is evident at the moment, for example, in the ‘fracking’ debate, the GM food debate, the HS2 debate and many other areas. MPs, and MEPs, seem increasingly reluctant to engage with their constituents (although that is only my own experience rather than a statistical fact, and particular to some Conservatives and UKIP!)

Something to recognise is that people earning a very high income are generally uninterested in their pay packet, except as a measure of their success when compared to their colleagues or competitors. The level of tax is irrelevant to them when applied across the board. After all, they certainly have adequate spending money!

History shows that a regime which taxes high earners heavily does not drive a significant number of them to move away. They are generally motivated by love of their job and a competitive spirit, not a desire for another Ferrari! And when a few footballers or pop stars or even the occasional banker do depart, there are plenty more good people waiting in the wings. But the additional tax revenue can fund improved services, and very importantly, many new council houses (not available for sale to tenants). Employment would rise. Families would afford child-care, and mothers could go back to work. Benefit budgets would reduce. A cycle of increased prosperity could begin. SMEs would begin to prosper, and they are much more important to the average man or woman than the huge transnationals, who are only trying to please international shareholders, not British customers.

An enlightened approach, along the lines adopted by the prosperous and high taxed economies in the Nordic countries, could begin a steady climb to the sort of living standards which we all crave.

Our collective minds have been deadened by the oft-repeated mantra from both main parties that low tax is good for business and the economy – but the facts indicate this to be totally false. Back in the last century, when my father, a confirmed Tory voter, was paying ‘supertax’ at a rate of 19s 6d in the pound, the country was arguably in a worse state than we are now, but the welfare state and the NHS had been put into place after the war and the gap between the rich and the poor was at a completely reasonable level. Democracy was working.

Now look across the Atlantic, at the richest economy in the world, where infant mortality is the highest in the developed world, as is obesity, and the rich/poor divide; and tax revenue as a percentage of GDP is amongst the very lowest. This is not a situation we should wish to emulate.

My point is this, Mr Milliband. Go back to first principles. Stop trying to compete with the Conservatives, whose dogma-driven agenda will undoubtedly continue to fail. Austerity didn’t work in the great depression in the USA, and it was not what saved us after the Second World War. It is doing us untold damage now. Please, let us hear something new and challenging, not just more of the same! As things stand, I wouldn’t vote for any of the three mainstream parties (and UKIP are a joke!) and I am begging you to give us all a credible alternative!


Yours sincerely

A disillusioned voter

Tim Thomson

PS Much of the information I have referred to above has been stolen from a brilliant book by the Canadian journalist Linda McQuaig, with Neil Brooks, called ‘The Trouble With Billionaires’.

Full of Sound and Fury, signifying what exactly?!

The Eurozone is worried! Beppe Grillo has certainly stirred the pot. In the Italian election his ‘movement’ grabbed a quarter of the votes, propelling 160 or so non-politicians into politics. I believe the most pertinent question we should all be asking (and it is relevant to all of us) is why did the voters vote this way? Perhaps after the antics of Berlusconi (including passing laws specifically designed to exempt him from prosecution) and then coping with his rather grey successor who they never voted for, and who subjected them to austerity and mass unemployment, they took the view that to go through all that for the sake of some European intangible ideal was not what they wanted. Perhaps their frustration with the day-to-day political merry-go-round finally got the better of them. Perhaps they want to try something different!

Could this be the glimmer of the beginning of a shift away from the conventional growth-obsessed thinking of ‘the usual suspects’, and towards a carefully controlled steady state economy?

There has been plenty of corruption in Italy’s politics for years – but take a look at the politics of the rest of the world. We in the UK are always so smug about our ‘mother of parliaments’ image, but really we are no better than the others. Although ‘corruption’ is a word generally applied to the dishonest use of money or power in government, I would apply it more widely; to include, for example, politicians who misrepresent their motives and ambitions. We have had the Iraq war, clearly fought on a false premise, ‘cash for questions’, the expenses scandals, Chris Huhne’s ill-judged antics, all of which have caused us to question the integrity of our politicians. And now the accusations against Lord Rennard – concerning which we are still being ‘spun’ a dilution of the facts.

In the USA, the public are continuously misled on a grand scale – their Iraq war (again on false premises), the subjugation of their politics to Big Oil, Big Agriculture, Big Pharma, the NRA and other groupings (including religious ones) who continue to mislead on food safety, energy, sustainability, climate change, environmental issues and the manipulation of their tax dollars to favour those who least need help but who chase power and wealth.

The level of corruption in the African countries, Spain, Greece, South American nations and most others is a phenomenon we are frequently alerted to by the media – and certainly the media themselves are not above scrutiny.

Some more fanciful commentators have drawn a parallel between Grillo’s Five Star movement and the so-called Arab spring, suggesting that Beppe Grillo’s arrival on the political scene heralds the start of a Europe-wide anti-political movement. But in fact this trend became internationally visible a while back with the Occupy movement, although the anti-globalisation protests predated that. Because the Governments in Europe and the USA are in favour of free speech (at least superficially), the Occupy movement has a harder row to till; such movements thrive on opposition.

But consider for a moment the bye-election in Eastleigh, Hampshire, the seat vacated by the disgraced former Minister Huhne. More than a quarter of the vote went to UKIP. Why? I presume some people voted for UKIP for their stand on European membership and immigration. But that is a less convincing suggestion since David Cameron announced his intention to hold a referendum on Europe, which could potentially address both those issues. Very few people, I would suggest, are in sympathy with most of the other UKIP policies, such as their antipathy towards any kind of green agenda, so we must assume that it is another example of ‘a plague on both your houses’. (Interestingly, in a post-election poll in Eastleigh, most of the ex-Tory voters admitted that at a general election they would return to the Tory fold.)

However our UK parliamentary system does not readily lend itself to a ‘Grillo’ situation, especially since the complete mismanagement of the referendum on our voting system. (A good example of a question constructed to achieve the desired result!)

Perhaps our politics need some kind of purge. To many, our political systems in Europe are not fit for purpose any more. There are too many laws and restrictions, a proportion of them increasingly unenforceable and seemingly pointless, and many of them apparently designed to protect us from ourselves! Taxes take an increasing proportion of earnings to pay for top-heavy administrations and projects which most individuals see as irrelevant to their lives.

So what does Mister Average Voter want? Disillusionment with the well trodden political path taken by every party when in power, notwithstanding election promises or political colour, leaves him bewildered, bored and disinterested. Despite the rose-tinted publicity material spread through constituencies at election time, politicians just don’t have the charisma, imagination or will to do anything new. No matter what they say, we know that there will be no substantive change to the way our Country is governed, only, perhaps, a new and more polished way of presenting it.

We could do with a Grillo to break the mould. Beppe Grillo has stated that his movement will not support any political grouping, but will act as an opposition party. To avoid instability and political break-down, the right and the left will be forced to work together. The potential ramifications of failure are huge throughout Europe, and particularly the Eurozone. After all Italy is not Iceland. The Icelandic Government takes credit for turning its back on its own banks (in response to a referendum vote on the matter), and allowing them to fail, despite protestations from Europe. The new prosperity in Iceland shows the virtue of that course of action. If Italy did the same (and exited the Euro) that would really give us all a good shaking. Perhaps that is just what we all need! There would certainly be plenty of misery, but perhaps it would be relatively short lived, and might free us from the chains of our present form of democracy, allowing us as individuals to relearn how to rely more on ourselves and our communities, and less on the State. Then we could start voting for what we want, instead of voting against what we perceive to be the marginally worse option!

A Degree in Soundbite-ism?

The weather is grey, and there is the sound of thunder in the distance; my outside activities are temporarily on hold. I have been watching television and caught a speech by David Cameron, given at the start of the school year at a new Free School.

I remember that great star of the programme Opportunity Knocks, Hughie Green. We all used to sit down as a family to watch him presenting his unknown talent. But the phrase I remember him for the most was this; “…and I mean that most sincerely, folks!” We all knew, of course, that with his adopted transatlantic accent and smooth flow of talk, the one thing he was not was sincere! So when I listen to a political speech in which the most frequently occurring word is ‘frankly’ – I am inclined to be less than completely trusting.

I am not against the concept of free schools – the jury is still out. I do think that teachers should have more autonomy, and I believe that a free education is a right that should be available to all, in the national interest. But when I see the size of the school that my grandchildren go to, and when I see that the less bright pupils are left largely to ‘catch up if they can’, I am convinced that the real solution to our education problems is to double the number of teachers and halve the size of classes. Smaller rural schools should be kept open so that numbers of schools should increase rather than decreasing through mergers and closures. Of course it costs money – it’s what is called ‘an investment for the future’!

But I despair when I hear David Cameron describing as ‘powerful’ Michael Gove’s sound-bite; “You have to learn to read before you can read to learn!”

The over-use of sound-bites is, I believe, directly associated with the present state of the party political system, which appears to me to have outlived its usefulness. I remember a time when a Party would state its beliefs and principles, and voters would decide which set of principles they wanted to support. Now, though, politicians take a straw poll (by one means or another) to discover which policies are the ones which voters like, and then say, ‘That’s what we will promise to do!’ The trouble is that the main parties are therefore all heading in broadly the same direction! So we have ended up with a marginally bluer version of that gifted self-publicist Tony Blair – David Cameron, who used to have a career in PR! I am completely confident that my own MP will slavishly follow the party line while paying brief lip-service to what her constituents say; probably in the hope of a place in Government.

So I am afraid that while I listened to David Cameron being very frank at the Norwich Free School, my eyes were inexorably drawn to the sign in the screen behind him which displayed what must be the ultimate in meaningless sound-bites, ‘The Future Is Here!’