Socialist engineering
Simon Heffer on the arrogance and cruelty of Gordon Brown as he goes about his self-appointed task of destroying the English middle classes We have yet to be given a thorough refutation of the Granita agreement, the pact made in an Italian restaurant 11 years ago between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Its terms, we were told, were that the refreshingly normal Mr Blair would be allowed to run for leader of the Labour party, in return for which the decidedly odd Mr Brown would be Chancellor of the Exchequer. As part of the deal, Mr Blair would control foreign affairs — and so could be blamed for perceived cock-ups like the Iraq strategy — and Mr Brown would, as Chancellor, oversee the domestic agenda. Mr Brown has capitalised on this carte blanche, each of his Budget speeches becoming more and more like a State of the Union address. And therefore, to those of us with logical minds, it will be absolutely clear that if things are wrong with this country (and there seems little doubt in the minds of voters that they are), then Mr Brown must be to blame.
Yet Mr Brown has redefined the power of Teflon. His colleagues, his political opponents and the media all seem scared of him. His conduct of office is apparently so brilliant that vandals may throw stones, but not hope even to wound. The NHS is wasting billions and still not treating people. Billions are being pumped into education and yet the only way the government can meet its targets in schools is to abandon them. Business complains that it is being regulated out of any chance of being able to take on its overseas competitors. Vast sums are wasted on projects of social engineering. All this is at the Chancellor’s instigation: yet he has, so far, got away with all the damage he has been doing.
Like our wonderful public services, the very principle of Mr Brown is beyond criticism. His socialist, anti-middle class, antiEnglish agenda is inflicted upon its victims remorselessly and they raise hardly a note against him. He was at it again last week in his Budget. Hardworking people were punished by being allowed only measly rises in their tax allowances. High-earning companies, of the sort this country needs if it is to survive, were punished by a cavilling new initiative on stamping out tax avoidance that will, de facto, become another tax on enterprise. Meanwhile, unmotivated and uneducable young people were to be bribed £75 a week to stay at school. Welcome to Gordon Brown’s wonderful, twisted world of ‘fairness’ and ‘social justice’.
Mr Brown enjoys an untouchable status in the Labour movement of a sort probably not seen since the glory days of Aneurin Bevan in the late 1940s. Despite having sustained some spectacular self-inflicted wounds, Bevan was not finally shot down until he found himself on the wrong end of a coruscating, lacerating speech by Iain Macleod in the Commons in 1952. We still await a Macleod to point out not merely the sheer wrongness of Gordon Brown, but also his dishonesty, his self-servitude, his manipulativeness, his substitution of rhetoric for truth (such as when he described his wonderfully divisive 2000 Budget as ‘a Budget that unites the whole country, a Budget for the people’) and the cost that his self-indulgence and ideology will cause our country to have to bear.
It is probably because the media are so busy hating Mr Blair that Mr Brown has got away with his charlatanry for so long. Admittedly, Mr Blair was taking questions from the media last week when he was eviscerated over the lies he was telling about the Tories’ spending plans. But Mr Brown often says such things without the slightest attempt being made to disembowel him. He simply grins next to the Prime Minister when Mr Blair is in trouble on the subject. One cannot help wondering, at such moments, whether the Chancellor (who is notoriously self-regarding and thin-skinned) would have the guts Mr Blair has shown recently in dealing with endless personal attacks; or whether the instability of character that shines through in so much of what he does would, instead, take the upper hand.
Let us be clear about what Mr Brown has done to Britain, and what more he intends to do. Those words ‘fairness’ and ‘social justice’ are to be found in many of his speeches. ‘Fairness’ was a key theme of his 1999 Budget. What it broadly seems to mean, in the Brown lexicon, is taking from those who have worked hard and giving to those who have shown no inclination to work at all. Mr Brown used that same Budget speech in 1999, as he has used various others, to describe the public services as an inviolable cornerstone of our society. The kind-hearted among you might imagine that he holds them in such regard in the hope that health care, education and welfare services might be provided to improve the quality of life of our people. But that is not the whole story. Mr Brown needs a power base in the Labour party not merely to become leader but to stay in that job. For him, that power base is the trade unions. He loves the public services largely because they provide jobs for Labour voters. As an old-fashioned socialist, he well understands the need to build up a client base for his own personal support, and for the support of the party. He has expanded this client base hugely in the last eight years, with 850,000 jobs (many of them socially useless) created in the public sector. He wastes money by pouring it into unreformed public services, and refuses to countenance their reform, because any meaningful change would result in the extinction of the jobs of hundreds of thousands of trade unionists.
And this naked gerrymandering has been paid for by the very people Mr Brown despises most: the English middle classes, especially those living in the southeast. By making only derisory adjustments to the inheritance tax thresholds, he has ensured that the estates of people in London and the Home Counties who bought their council houses in the 1980s are now paying death duties, along with millions of others. His raising of the starting point for stamp duty in this Budget will have helped people in Labour’s heartlands, but have done nothing for the average, impoverished first-time buyer in the south-east. Nonetheless, it does mean that otherwise unemployable people staggering out of one of Alastair Campbell’s ‘bog standard’ comprehensives will be subsidised into a pointless job on the back of such expropriation, an extension of the bung Mr Brown is paying them to stay at school. If the girls among them choose to become single parents — something Mr Brown has positively encouraged, with his abolition of the married couples’ tax allowance — they can receive further encouragement for their activities in the shape of a £20 a week bribe to look for work. Then, of course, there will be a state trust fund set up on the birth of their child worth £500 to the poorest among them.
The socialist, social-engineering project in which Mr Brown is engaged comes at an enormous price to business and individuals. He began this process in 1997, with an annual £5 billion raid on pension funds that has, with the stock-market collapse it helped trigger, caused a crisis in pensions for which Mr Brown is greatly responsible yet shows no inclination to sort out. Since 1997, thanks to his failure to increase thresholds properly, 50 per cent more people are now paying the top 40 per cent rate of tax. On the average salary of just over £25,000, the person earning it is paying a basic rate of tax equivalent to 33 per cent, taking into account National Insurance contributions. Council tax has risen each year way above the rate of inflation, providing yet another of the government’s stealth taxes — one that, again, has fallen most on areas of the country that do not support the Labour party. Tax Freedom Day — the amount of time an individual has to work before he stops paying the government and starts paying himself — is calculated by the Adam Smith Institute to fall this year on 31 May, three days later than last year.
The cost to business is even higher. The British Chambers of Commerce estimate the cumulative cost of Mr Brown’s addiction to red tape at a cool £39 billion. The recently announced doubling of paid maternity leave adds another nail to business’s coffin. Mr Brown brags about Britain’s low corporation tax rates, but British businesses are taxed more highly than those in competitor nations. Many, especially in the service industries that the government now increasingly relies on to create employment, find that the minimum wage has forced them to reduce their payrolls.
Mr Brown, though, talks blithely of low inflation, low interest rates, high growth and high employment. So he can’t be such a bad chap, can he? Yet an economist who is a great personal admirer of his, Irwin Stelzer, went for Mr Brown in a postBudget article last Sunday in the Sunday Times. Mr Stelzer pointed out that Mr Brown has increased the proportion of national wealth taken by the government from 37.1 per cent in 1997 to a projected 40.5 per cent next year. This is about 10 per cent higher than in America. Here, the net gain in new jobs last year was entirely accounted for by Mr Brown expanding his client-base. In America 2.2 million of the 2.4 million new jobs were in the private sector.
Yet our Chancellor is incorrigible. Even before he has finished throwing away Britain’s hard-earned money on the undeserving poor, he is promising a shedload of it to Africa too, so that nice men like Mr Mugabe can spend more on guns, Mercedes-Benzes and their mistresses’ shopping trips to Paris. Promising to shut down 29 quangos, he is still keeping open a further 500. The taxpayer pays Mr Alan Milburn to be a full-time election manager for the Labour party, and likewise pays Mr John Prescott, an uncouth and inarticulate ignoramus with no discernible qualification for high office, to travel around the world and stay in fabulous hotels. Perhaps because of this, Mr Brown is pledging to borrow a staggering £168 billion in the next five years. And all the time he does this our workforce becomes less and less skilled, our productivity falls behind that of our competitors, and the urge to enterprise is driven abroad: all contrary to Mr Brown’s rhetoric, which he makes the terrible mistake of believing.
Recently, one of the Tories’ more impressive candidates, Danny Kruger, was forced out of his candidacy in Sedgefield because he spoke of the need for ‘creative destruction’ of the public services. The Tory party — in this case dancing to the tune of Miss Polly Toynbee, for God’s sake — has to stop cringing like this. Mr Kruger was dead right. The Tories are handicapped from attacking Mr Brown because their policies are remarkably like his — promising to increase spending from Labour’s already unsustainable level by 4 per cent a year rather than Labour’s 5 per cent. These are the economics of the madhouse. Mr David Cameron gave another example of how overpromoted he is by talking recently of the need to move on from Thatcherism. Actually, Thatcherism is precisely the medicine that the disease caused by Brownism requires. In recent weeks, Michael Howard has closed the gap on his opponents by reverting to his fundamental instincts. He now needs to revert further still, and start aggressively to make the unanswerable case against Gordon Brown.
Simon Heffer is a columnist for the Daily Mail.
Previous page
