POLITICS
Is public opinion ready for offshore socialism?
BRUCE ANDERSON
he Tories think that it is all so unfair. If it had been revealed that one of their ministers had a concealed interest in so much as a potato patch in Guernsey, they would never have heard the end of it. 'Gov- ernment rocked by new sleaze allegations' would have been the tenor of the headlines for several days. But now Mr Robinson's millions are arousing far less interest than Lord Spencer's divorce settlement.
The Tories do not object to Mr Robin- son's being a rich man. They believe that the entrepreneur is worthy of his hire. But they also believe that someone who leaves school at 16 and works his way up to run- ning one of Europe's largest companies is entitled to be paid at something approxi- mating to the international going rate for chief executives. They remember what Labour MPs used to say about Cedric Brown of British Gas; the epithet 'fat cat' which heaped additional hot coals on the Tories' reputation. Yet in the fat-cat league, Mr Brown is much nearer the banished moggy Humphrey than he is to Mr Robinson.
Sensible Tories are not complaining about Geoffrey Robinson using offshore trust funds to protect his fortune from con- fiscatory taxes on capital. Even with the help of Thatcherite tax rates and first-rate accountants, he will have had to pay a lot of tax on his earnings; why should he now pay a further impost on his savings? But there is an obvious solution to his embarrass- ments: the abolition of death duties. In this regard, the Tories themselves have to plead guilty to missing their opportunities. In 1992, John Major wanted Norman Lamont to abolish death duties, and by 1995/6, Mr Major would have been happy for Ken Clarke to do so. But Mr Lamont thought the time unripe, while Mr Clarke was never keen on abolishing taxes. If Mr Robinson were now to urge his Treasury colleagues to display the moral courage which the Tories had lacked, his position would be unassailable. He is unlikely to do so. Indeed, he has now told middle-class savers, in effect, that if they want to protect their hold- ings, they too must move them offshore.
Geoffrey Robinson is an interesting char- acter. For a successful and at times ruthless businessman, he is surprisingly mild- mannered, at least in public, a trait he shares with Michael Green of Carlton. Nor is this the first time that he has made the Tories grind their teeth. Back in 1975 when he was first elected to the House at a by- election, the Tories were finding — as now — that opposition is a depressing business. That Labour could have recruited the 35- year-old chief executive of Jaguar to be their candidate while the Tories could only field the idiosyncratic Jonathan Guinness added to Tory demoralisation. But at that stage, the Tories need not have worried. For two decades, Mr Robinson sank into anonymity. Under Neil Kinnock, he was briefly a front-bencher, but it did not work: the culture gap was too great. It is another mark of Tony Blair's success that he has made the Labour party safe for Geoffrey Robinson, who has also evaded — or should that be avoided? — one of Cherie Blair's prohibitions. She decreed that only youthful figures were to be given a job in the new government, and that anyone much over the age of 55 should be packed off out of sight like an unwanted pussy-cat. Mr Robinson is one of the few exceptions.
But even if the Tories are finding it hard to wrong-foot the government over Mr Robinson, it remains to be seen what effect all this will have among Labour back- benchers, traditional Labour supporters and indeed among the general public. Labour MPs enjoyed the fat-cat campaign, and not only because of its electoral advan- tages. They relished it because it gave them a chance to indulge their redistributive urges. They knew that they were forbidden to say anything about higher tax or spend- ing; that would alarm the middle classes. But they were safe with fat cats; partly because of the abject failure of the Tory party to deploy a potentially strong pro- Brown case, very few middle-class voters felt a common cause with him. One of the reasons for the scale of the Tory defeat was the way in which the politics of envy had crept up the social scale.
That form of politics is part of Labour's appeal to its own heartlands, who always think that it is time for more money to be taken from the rich and given to them. John Smith agreed with that; he used to insist that his fellow Scots were morally superior to the English because they were prepared to pay higher taxes. Robin Cook is still at heart a redistributionist and Gor- don Brown can occasionally sound like one; not Mr Blair, nor Peter Mandelson. Mr Blair may list his membership of Trimdon village working men's club in Who's Who and make occasional genuflections to Christian Socialism, but no aspect of his electoral success has delighted him more than his successful appeal to the rich. The path that enables rich men to join the King- dom of New Labour is a lot more accom- modating than the eye of the needle.
There have always been rich men in Labour governments, most notably Harold Lever, who lived in splendour in Eaton Square in what came to be known as the Palazzo Lever, where he sometimes used to lubricate trade union leaders through awk- ward pay negotiations. In the post-1974 Labour government, he also had the crucial role of assuring the City that there was no need to take Tony Benn seriously, thus inspiring a Financial Times cartoon in which one stockbroker said to another, 'I always buy after a Benn speech and sell after a Lever speech.' On one occasion, when Mr Lever was trying to persuade a reluctant trade unionist that there was no money to meet his members' claim, he pro- voked what seemed like a good retort: `There appears to be plenty of money to fund your lifestyle, Harold.' But Harold Lever was not lost for an answer: 'Yes, but you see — there's only one of me; there are 100,000 of you.'
There will never be many Harold Levers, but there is a difference between this Labour government and all previous ones. In their cases, the Bollinger Bolsheviks seemed marginal to the main thrust of gov- ernment policy. This was not without its hypocrisies, such as the way in which Harold Wilson switched effortlessly from pipe and pint to Havanas and brandy as soon as the cameras were off him. But there was always a sense that a Labour gov- ernment derived its moral authority from a redistributive mission. Even if that became somewhat etiolated under Harold Wilson — never good at moral authority — there was a vociferous Left to remind everyone what the Labour movement was about. But now Mr Blair and his people are openly contemptuous of the whole notion of a Labour movement, nor are they interested in being judged by their moral commitment to the dispossessed. The Prime Minister believes that he can base his moral authority purely on his own personality, and so far, it has worked; his government's problems have not affected his own standing. But is public opinion ready for offshore socialism?
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