Freedom on Sunday — but it's getting later, so enjoy it while you can
May I wish all my readers a happy, albeit belated, Tax Freedom Day. On Sunday 30 May — Whit Sunday — we can stop working for the Chancellor and work for ourselves for the rest of the year. This is always a turning point worthy of celebration, but there is no disguising the fact that freedom comes later and later. Last year this day fell on 28 May, in the previous year it had fallen on 26 May, and since this is a leap year, Gordon Brown has extracted one more day of unpaid labour from us. Freedom would come later still if he had not taken to financing himself by borrowing as well as taxing. But for that (says Gabriel Stein of Lombard Street Research, tax freedom's calculator-in-chief) we would have had to wait for freedom until 11 June — and borrowing does no more than to postpone the day of reckoning and add compound interest to the bill. This Chancellor is having to spend 6 or 7 per cent more of our money every year, simply to buy what he bought in the previous year. Does it cross his mind that we might be able to spend it more carefully? Lord Saatchi has argued that Tax Freedom Day should always be a Bank holiday, and if it had been delayed until Monday, he would have succeeded, if only by accident. His plan is wellintended but misguided. The state cannot expect to know better than we do when we ought take a holiday. In proclaiming one, it is merely being generous with other people's time, just as it likes to be generous with other people's money: ours, in fact.
Lift or shift
John Sutherland of Cadburys hopes that the curse has been lifted. One after another, corporate grandees before him have taken their turn as president of the Confederation of British Industry and watched their companies' fortunes collapse. It happened to Sir Clive Thompson of Rentokil. which seemed to have the secret of perpetual growth but promptly lost it, and only the other day the curse reached out to grab him again and unseat him from Rentokil's chair. Did they all take their eyes off their day jobs, or were they led astray by a succession of McKinsey-trained directorgenerals, who filled them full of conventional wisdom and set the CBI beating the drum for the curo, and for the European exchange rate mechanism before that?
Today's director-general, Digby Jones, would rather beat the drum for wider motorways, so perhaps, as Peter Oborne suggests this week (on page 26), the curse has shifted to the Institute of Directors.
Tell us more
Many are the hazards of a non-executive director's life, from curly smoked salmon sandwiches to writs and ruin, but we can always count on Patricia Hewitt to dream up a new one. Already she has us sitting down to write our Operating Financial Review — just what the shareholders must have been waiting for — and I detect her hand behind a note which reaches me from the human relations empire: 'We are requesting information on ethnic origin and religious beliefs. This will enable us to comply with recent new discrimination legislation.' So will I kindly record my own ethnic origin, choosing from a list of 16 — Chinese, perhaps, which sub-divides into Chinese and Other? And my religion — Buddhist. Christian, Hindu, Sikh, None? What business all this is of anyone else, or how it contributes to making the company prosper, must be open question, but it supports two bureaucracies, corporate and governmental, and helps them to make work for one another. That independent-minded banker Walter Salomon, of German-Jewish birth and a fierce fighter for his causes, when confronted with an official form requiring him to state his race, wrote 'Human'.
A clock strikes
A word of warning this week from the Pensions Policy Institute: don't rely on your house to look after you in your old age. All these well-tailored schemes for extracting your equity and living off it must depend on borrowing more money against the house's agreeably inflated value. Just so long as it lasts. Andrew Smithers has his doubts. In a report for his City consultancy, Smithers and Co., he shows that, over the last half-century, the rise in house prices has been faster than the growth of the British economy — but that when prices got too far ahead of the trend, three decades ago, it all ended in tears. Now, though, house prices are so far ahead that if they were to revert to the trend, they would have to fall by 28 per cent. As a founder-member of the Stopped Clocks Club, I have been waiting for the facts to catch up with my expectations for house prices. Mr Smithers might care to join.
Playing the Games
could do without beach volleyball on the Horse Guards Parade, and what are the Horse Guards supposed to do? Fight on the beaches? Still, this is all part of London's bid to stage the Olympic Games in eight years' time, and so far it is going according to plan: my plan, that is. I argue (as you may recall) that a bid for the Games provides a new excuse for getting useful things done. So the Olympic Committee has noticed that London's underground railways are feeling their age? That gives us eight years to eliminate the black hole in the Aldgate area. We could move Crossrail off the drawing board and off the billboards surrounding Moor House, which in its rebuilt form is supposed to have a station in the basement. We could (a pet project of my railway correspondent, I.K. Gricer) reopen the Post Office's underground railway for transporting athletes who fit the loading gauge. We must not, of course, go to the appalling expense and inconvenience of actually staging the Games, but with any luck some other competitor will beat us to it. What matters, as Baron de Coubertin so nearly said, is not to win but to finish second. Third would do.
Not cut out for it
Wentworth Rose, the financial advisers, have fallen into the hands of the badge engineers and now want to call themselves Origen: an unnerving choice. Origen, surely, was the Father of the Church who was so anxious to avoid any other kind of fatherhood, or even the temptation, that he took corrective action of the most drastic kind. We must all make sacrifices, but I hope that the Financial Services Authority is not going to insist on this one.
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