14 Nov 2017

I have been on the town recently. Two weeks ago I went to see Reasons to be Cheerful, a brilliant play based around the music of Ian Dury. It is performed by the Graeae theatre company that featured in the 2012 Paralympics opening ceremony. I saw it when it was produced the first time in 2010 and eagerly returned for more. Ian Dury was to say the least an anti-establishment figure and by today’s standards not politically correct. I’m not sure whether he would have appreciated the fact that a new song was tacked on to the end of the show. “If it can’t be right then it must be wrong” has rather puerile lyrics that I don’t think Ian himself would have written (“Keep the funding flowing from a loving cup”). As the song was played and sung, pictures of various politicians with devil horns sprouting from their heads were flashed onto a screen: Mrs Thatch, natch, David Cameron and, oh look, Tony Blair. But I will let someone else summarise: “This new anti austerity song from Graeae and the Blockheads captures the current mood of the country. Its lyrics bring people together in a moment of shared experience to challenge the status quo.” Jeremy Corbyn, Leader of the Labour Party. There I was watching a play set in 1979 and suddenly the “mood of the country” in 2017 was sprung on me. How did that happen, I wondered. Last week I revisited 1979 for the second time by paying a 2079 price to see Squeeze at the Royal Albert Hall. And it happened again. In between Cool for Cats, Up the Junction and Labelled with Love, the band naturally played songs from their new album. These included Rough Ride which laments the lack of affordable housing in London and A&E which really challenges the status quo by calling for more funding for the NHS. Perhaps I should get out more but I was struck by the way in which the anti austerity message was offered on both occasions with such confidence, as if it were not a politically contentious message but almost a fact. Perhaps I live in a London bubble but...

28 Apr 2017

THE PARADOX OF SPENDTHRIFT AUSTERITY It may be stretching a point to say that any of the political parties in the forthcoming “snap” election will make interesting financial arguments but it does seem that the days of competitive spending pledges might be behind us. That would be a relief and at least we could say that the continuing nine year fallout from the financial crash was not for nothing. I will generalise by saying that opposition parties have a strategic problem. They would like to criticise the Conservatives for allowing government debt to rise from 76% to 90% of GDP during a number of years labelled as a period of “austerity” but they are also against austerity in principle and disinclined to criticise the Tories for pursuing it with insufficient discipline.    Yet it seems that calling for even more government borrowing is not regarded as an option for a party with serious ambitions to be elected. So the debate, if that is not too dignified a word, is turning towards where the burden of taxation should lie and whether the status quo is “unfair” (a word that we all remember well from the school playground). LET’S TALK ABOUT TAX We can all agree that tax evasion, which is illegal, is a bad thing. Unfortunately tax avoidance, which is not illegal, is frequently lumped together with evasion and cited as part of the evidence that some wealthy people or companies are not doing their share. It is certainly the case that some tax avoidance is morally dubious and some tax advisers come close to crossing legal lines. But much tax avoidance is the result of behaviour that has been encouraged by the government of the day. I avoided income tax by paying money into my pension. I was deliberately incentivised to do this. Children are encouraged to avoid tax by putting their savings into a Junior ISA. The fact is that you are unlikely to meet anyone who wants to pay more tax but it would be equally unusual to find a person who doesn’t think that someone else should. Just as the Labour party cannot afford to be a blunt advocate of public...