Ideas@TheCentre
UK election report - The questions no one dares to answer
Peter Saunders |
23 April 2010
The Tories showed they are serious by publishing their manifesto in hard cover. Somebody said it looks like the Gideon’s Bible you find in hotel bedrooms. Its title is: Invitation to Join the Government of Britain.
They are offering tax breaks for married couples – a controversial proposal – but their big idea is extending public participation (an idea that used to be popular with the left in the 1970s, and which the Conservatives call their ‘Big Society’ program). They promise ‘an army of independent community organisers to help people establish and run neighbourhood groups.’ People will be able to take over and run their own parks, libraries and post offices if they are threatened with closure. We will be allowed to set up independent schools, financed by Swedish-style vouchers.
Most voters are bemused by all this. They don’t want to run a post office. They just want it to offer them a good service. But some members of the chattering classes (Toby Young in The Spectator is one) are planning to take advantage of the schools proposal. One suspects they are not planning to set up new schools in the grim council estates and welfare dependency black spots where they are really needed, but it’s a start, and David Cameron deserves credit for saying he’ll allow for-profit businesses to run schools (expect Labour to make some class war capital out of this before long).
The Liberal Democrats’ big idea is raising the tax-free threshold to take low earners out of tax (another idea close to the heart of the CIS). Unfortunately, it’s very expensive, and the Lib Dems are not (despite their name) a liberal party. So they will pay for it by increasing taxes on contributions to private pensions. Gordon Brown has already wrecked the UK private pensions industry, and now the Lib Dems propose another bash at it.
The Lib Dems are soaring in the polls at the moment – not because of their manifesto promises but because their leader, Nick Clegg, performed well in the first of the televised leaders’ debates. Everyone loves an underdog, and nobody likes establishment politicians at the moment (especially as they all seem tainted by last year’s expenses scandal). Clegg projected himself as an outsider taking on the Westminster insiders, and one poll on Monday put his party in front of the Conservatives with Labour lagging in third place. That 22% of voters said they were switching their vote after one, highly-staged TV debate shows how volatile the electorate is.
As for Labour, it’s hard to come up with new ideas after 13 years in power because your opponents can always ask: ‘Why haven’t you done it already then?’ So they are sticking to the idea of ‘fairness’ (which is Brown-speak for giving taxpayers’ money to as many people as possible). Labour’s manifesto cover depicts a family standing on a hill watching the sun rise. It looks like a piece of socialist realist art from Stalin’s Russia. Hand-in-hand with Gordon, we are invited to march on to the sunlit uplands.
And the busted economy? None of the parties says what it will do. Will they increase VAT (Britain’s GST)? Raise the basic rate of income tax? Cut public sector jobs? Nobody knows. All we are getting is vague statements about ‘protecting front line services’ and ‘cutting waste.’ Whoever wins, this country is in for a huge shock when it wakes up on 7 May and discovers this wasn’t just another edition of X Factor. Professor Saunders is a Senior Fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies. This article is part of his weekly piece on the UK election.
