The public expects to have it all – low taxes and good services – and politicians are busy furthering this delusion. Will Labour tell the truth in Brighton?
This party conference season is like no other, said the BBC’s political editor, Nick Robinson, the other night. Instead of competing with promises of goodies to come, politicians are trying to show who can be toughest, pledging the most wide-ranging cuts.
Don’t believe it. Voters are not suddenly ready to don hair shirts, accepting wartime-style austerity. Nor are politicians ready to give them the unvarnished truth. The prize goes to the party that can convince voters it will bring back the good times quickest and do so without inflicting significant pain.
In 1997, New Labour promised ‘compassion-lite’: more help for the unfortunate without loss to anybody else. Now, the Conservatives promise ‘austerity-lite’: less public spending – and, therefore, lower taxes or at least no tax rises – without deterioration in services such as education and health.
New Labour insisted the miracle could be performed by economic growth, the Conservatives by ‘greater efficiency’. The problem comes when you get down to specifics. Ed Balls, the children’s secretary, has offered £2bn in cuts to schools. This won’t result in larger classes, he assures us, but in fewer ‘senior staff’. Even they won’t suffer much since their jobs will disappear, mainly through ‘natural wastage’.
Heads and deputies, he proposes, could work across school ‘federations’ – which, to some of us, sound like a return of the split-site comprehensives of 20 or 30 years ago, which were roundly denounced. Yet, politically, Balls has chosen wisely. A poll by Ipsos Mori for the Royal Society of Arts, carried out earlier this month, shows larger classes would be hugely unpopular. Nor are most voters willing to accept fewer police officers, charges for visiting GPs or fees for hospital stays.
As for increases in income tax, VAT, fuel duty or council tax, forget it. If politicians want to balance the budget and bring down national debt, according to the poll, they will have to make savings through fewer education programmes in prisons (which, in total, cost less than £200m or about 0.1% of the ‘black hole’ in the Treasury’s accounts) and refusing NHS treatment to smokers.
Alternatively, they could try raising more money from business tax, inheritance tax and fines. All these measures get wide support because, as most voters see it, they affect other people.
Only 24% think spending cuts are necessary at all, although 75% think more ‘efficiency’ would be a good idea. Voters who want to have every cake in the shop and to eat the lot should by now be familiar to politicians. Surveys regularly find wide support for the proposition that benefits for the poor should increase even at the cost of higher taxes. Yet ask which of the main taxes – income tax, VAT, petrol duty, for example – are too low, and voters will reply by margins of nine to one that, on the contrary, they are all too high.
The British are not alone in their unwillingness to enter a mature debate about how to repair the public finances. In ultra-democratic California, voters have repeatedly supported new public spending programmes while also voting down tax increases to the point where the most prosperous state in the US has run out of money.
In both the UK and the US, politicians have encouraged voters to believe in a childish never-never land. For a decade, new Labour talked about ‘hard choices’ but never made them, allowing even the very rich to wriggle out of paying more tax. The entire tax system is a botched-up mess that undertaxes carbon emissions, overtaxes work, penalises stable families (true, even though the Conservatives say it), encourages avoidance, burdens the poor more than the rich, persists with an absurdly regressive property tax, and almost completely fails to tax wealth, particularly land.
At the first sign of public opposition to even the most modest advance – a feasibility study of road pricing, say – ministers retreat in panic. Now Labour has nothing left to lose. If its leaders were to set out the truth in Brighton and publish detailed proposals for fairer taxes and necessary spending cuts, it really would be a party conference like no other.
It probably wouldn’t win them the election, but at least they might go down to defeat with honour.
Peter Wilby is a former editor of the New Statesman
