Phil Taylor

I can’t quite believe the Westminster village’s response to Thursday’s leaders’ debate and the polls that followed. I missed the first part of the show as a result of being in the last cabinet meeting before the election. I hated the format and felt that the way it was chopped up made it very un-engaging.

Up until now I have been largely happy to ignore the LibDems as an irrelevance. I did not take the time to read their manifesto before all of the excitement of the last few days. Judging by the outcome of the leaders’ debate you can only conclude that Tory leader David Cameron made the same mistake.

I have started myself to look a bit more carefully at what the LibDems are saying. I love the idea of a £10K starting rate for tax and indeed I have suggested it myself in the past, here. The way they want to pay for it though is one third fantasy and one third dangerous.

On page 100 of the manifesto, where they lay out how the £10K starting rate will be paid for, they identify £4,625 million of anti-avoidance measures. Well actually they don’t identify any they just pluck a number out of the air and stick it in a table to make their number add up. Anyone who is in business or has to deal with the tax authorities for any reason knows that this is a fantasy. For 13 years Labour has been relentlessly tightening up the tax system. Remember IR35? I get the taxman chasing me for tax on bits of interest I forgot I received.

The largest measure to pay for the £10K starting rate is an elimination of tax relief for pensions at the higher rate. This has to do £5,455 million, the largest share, of the work. This measure has to raise three times what the much talked about mansion tax has to raise.

This measure is dumb at least three times over:

• this measure hits ordinary people and ensures that they will have a straightened old age. High rate tax payers aren’t just the “rich”. They are you and me when, hopefully, we get on in life and get promoted or do well in business. We might be struggling to pay off debt and get on the housing ladder in our twenties – pension contributions postponed. We might spend our thirties and forties raising children and paying the mortgage – pension contributions postponed again. Just when we get our heads above water and need to start seriously thinking about how we fund our retirements and along come the LibDems to further bash our already damaged pensions system. Anyone over 40 voting for this measure needs to be altruistic – it will really hurt
• this measure will encourage consumption and reduce investment and the savings ratio. I assume that the LibDem figures imply £27.5 billion of pension contributions put in question every year. A large chunk of this is going to leak into consumption rather than savings every year as people decide to spend money now, taxed at 40%, rather than save with a 20% tax and then pay 20% income tax in the future
• finally, are we going to see a debt funding crisis? The biggest purchaser of gilts has to be the UK pensions industry which is suddenly going to see £27.5 billion a year of contributions put at risk!

I am sure that a lot of people are going to be spending more time looking at the LibDem’s manifesto and that there will be more holes to find. More later.

Today’s letter in the Guardian from 50 totally objective teachers who in no way represent any kind of producer interest is only an opening shot in a soon to come blast of anger and agitation from a workforce that fails our country in a huge way. It seems to have been organised by a group called Progressive Education Network (PEN) which is sponsored by Estelle Morris the refreshingly honest Labour education minister who resigned because she thought she was not up to the job. I don’t think it is a stretch to call these people a Labour front. They endorse Labour policy and throw cheap insults at the Tories such as “boutique experiments”, “naive educational tourism” and “flatpack free schools”. They say:

The educational landscape presently evolving is already a powerful force for change. It is led by a group of professionals who collaborate for the good of children, who have a shared vision for the whole system and think beyond the boundaries of their own schools. So please, no return to year zero.

No mention of one in four pupils leaving primary school unable to read or write properly and about two-fifths of 16-year-olds failing to get five good GCSEs, including maths and English even under a system of significantly dumbed-down exams.

I guess the teaching lobby needs PEN as a vehicle for sounding reasonable as their unions are so extreme and militant. They hate SATS of course which hold them to account and are planning to boycott the 2010 tests as soon as the election is safely out of the way. They hate the Tory free schools proposals too as they might just challenge their monopoly of mediocrity.

The Tories have a clear vision for education and an excellent spokesman in Michael Gove to promote that vision. One of the reasons our country is not more successful is that the Tories failed to get a grip of education in the eighties. They must not fail this time. Michael Gove will have a busy summer.

We all know the key moments in our political history. Labour’s biggest moment came in 1945 with the khaki election election which ushered in the NHS but also came with Hartley Shawcross’s stunning quote “we are the masters now”. Very Animal Farm. In 1979 with Britain at its knees Margaret Thatcher came to power kicking out yet another failed Labour government and 18 years later Tony Blair swept to power as a generation became tired of the Tories. Would the election of David Cameron on May 6th be another such turning point?

On the strength of the two manifestos, Labour’s published yesterday and the Tories’ published today, I think yes. Is the state going to solve all of our problems? No. There will always be new problems and the state is simply not nimble enough to stop doing the old stuff. Too often what you get with the state is bigger, worser. It is only us that can solve our problems and that is a messy, tiresome business and many would rather leave it to someone else but we cannot outsource all of our problems to the state. Cameron’s brave and sunny invitation for us to take part deserves to be accepted.

Today Gordon Brown launched the Labour manifesto at the soon to open Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham. Cabinet Office guidelines specifically preclude using government facilities, including NHS ones, for party political purposes, see here.

I remember local Labour MP, Gisela Stuart, being interviewed around the time of the 2005 general election and saying that it was easy to campaign for Labour as they were building Birmingham’s first new hospital since the war. She really does not know what a dumb statement this is and repeats it prominently on her website:

Edgbaston houses the brand new University Hospital, Birmingham’s first new hospital in 70 years. When it opens in 2010, this hospital will provide state of the art medical care to hundreds of people throughout the West Midlands.

Think about it. Under the NHS, which celebrated its 60th anniversary in 2008, the second largest city in the UK has never had a new hospital.

I can only imagine that Gordon Brown himself came up with the strap line for the Labour election campaign: “A future fair for all”. What a load of mangled nonsense? What is wrong with: “A fair future for all”. Don’t we traditionally put adjectives in front of nouns in English? Gordon Brown has the strangest linguisitic habits and I can only imagine that he came up with this slogan and resisted all attempts to iron it out.

If you enjoy being patronised then click on Labour’s little video below. I know they are promising to lower the voting age to 16 but do we need to be infantilised like this?

I will flip through the Labour mainfesto later but the Conservatives has already identified 102 broken promises from the 2005 manifesto here. In 2005 they promised:

We will not raise the basic or top rates of income tax in the next Parliament (p.16)

Since then Gordon Brown abolished the 10% rate, Alistair Darling has added new 45% and 50% tax rates and forzen allowances. They are making the same claim again today. Once bitten, twice shy I think.

In the sweet FFFA the skyline will be dominated by mobile phone masts.

Apparently in Labour’s sweet FFFA it is so dangerous on the streets that policemen don’t just go around in pairs, they steam the streets in packs of eight on bicycles.