Читать книгу The Future of Politics - Charles Kennedy - Страница 9

New Labour is reluctant to mention the word taxation, except, of course, to claim that it is coming down, but if we accept that every citizen of our nation has a right to first-class education, to comprehensive health care and a welfare safety net, then we also have to accept that we all have a responsibility to make those priorities possible. They cannot be achieved without radical changes in the way our taxes are applied and collected. To pretend otherwise is simply to con the voters.

I am not arguing for a simplistic ‘high taxes, high public spending’ model. I believe that the main increase should be in terms of efficiency. Increased efficiency in the way taxes are imposed, gathered and, most importantly, spent. Four guiding principles should govern all socially responsible policies on taxation.

The first is adequacy: taking exactly and only what is needed, from precisely those who can give. Penalizing the successful only deprives the nation of entrepreneurial talent. Bleeding the rich dry as a policy has more to do with old-fashioned antipathy – what Winston Churchill called ‘cool-blooded class hatred’ – than the search for social equality. At the same time, government cannot be starved of the money it needs to pay for good schools and teachers, quality health care, adequate pensions and people in need. That is why I urged the present government to spend its 1999–2000 budget surplus on the public sector, instead of sweetening the least needy sections of society with tax cuts and patching up the shortfall with the surplus cash.

That is also why I greeted Gordon Brown’s 2000 Budget with scepticism: £1 billion goes into education, but £2.6 billion is devoted to a further cut in the basic rate of income tax – a clear indication of Labour’s priorities. The Budget will do nothing to provide nursery education for all three year olds, and little to reduce class sizes in our secondary schools, or to address the backlog of repairs. Nor will it do anything towards abolishing or reducing tuition fees for higher education, or addressing the massive gap between the needs of business and the training on offer.

Physics tells us that matter can never be destroyed – it simply converts into other forms. Similarly, in politics you can never cut taxes unless somebody else pays. In the case of New Labour policy, much of the tax burden has shifted away from income tax and on to council tax, which has risen by a third in four years. Much of the pain will also be felt by the young and the old, as education loses out, and as do the pensioners, who received the staggeringly generous sum of an extra 75p a week. The only provision of extra money for pensioners was in a small increase (£50 – less than £1 per week) on the one-off winter fuel payment, when it is clear that what is required is an increase on weekly income across the board. That would be far more empowering than handouts on fuel. Perhaps the only consolation we could take from the Budget was that things would have been far worse under the Tories, but still, current Labour taxation policy does not satisfy the criteria for adequacy.

The second principle for responsible taxation is honesty. Politicians need to be straight with people about the choices involved. It is simply not acceptable to say, as William Hague’s Conservative Party has done, that you can have tax cuts and more spending on schools and hospitals. That is an implausible position to take, and one clear indication of why the Conservative Party has become so irrelevant. In the run-up to elections, politicians must tell the public precisely how much their programme of public sector spending will cost, and how it will be paid for. Wherever they wish to introduce new taxes or set different levels they must explain exactly why the changes are occurring, and where the new money is going.

Liberal Democrats have produced a fully costed manifesto at both of the last two general elections. We have shown how much our plans would cost, and how we would pay for them. Some people have responded to this by saying, ‘You can afford to be honest about it because you’re the third party.’ But being the third party does not mean we can get away with being out of touch with the mood of the nation! Our decision to be honest about taxes is based on an awareness that this is what the nation wants.

When we first proposed that we would, if necessary, raise taxation by 1p in the pound to pay for investment in education, commentators believed it would be unpopular. It was the subject of much passionate debate within the party before the 1992 General Election. People like Robert Maclennan, Simon Hughes, Matthew Taylor and myself were strongly in favour. I supported it because it was such a clear-cut, honest platform upon which to fight an election, and it was a definite departure from 1983 and 1987, when no-one, least of all ourselves, really understood what issues we were fighting on. Most importantly, it sent out the message that we were a party prepared to be honest about the money we needed in order to change things. Now, polls regularly indicate that as many as seven out of every ten voters are in favour of paying an extra penny on the pound for education or health.

Hypothecation is a term redolent of something technical and extremely complex. In reality it is just the opposite. It is the principle that people are able to see exactly where their money is going. If more money is needed for schools and hospitals, then hypothecation means that government will explain the costs to people, and where the money will be raised. People do not resent giving money in such a situation. I want every citizen to receive a statement with their tax return, which sets out in simple terms where their money has gone. It should also say what the main targets were for the public services, and how far they are being achieved.

The third principle is fairness. Taxes must be applied and collected in a fair way. It is grossly unfair that, at the moment, someone who earns £8,000 pays the same rate of income tax as someone earning £25,000. We should demand the greatest contribution from those with the greatest ability to pay. I strongly favour asking those who earn over £100,000 a year to pay more, through the introduction of a 50 per cent rate for anything earned over that figure. That would enable us to help the worst off in Britain, by taking around half a million people out of paying income tax altogether.

The fourth is sustainability. Taxes must favour job creation and the environment. Rather than being seen as the government’s penalty upon the wage earner, taxes must be presented as the means by which we achieve a fairer and healthier society. Cutting tax for the low paid would be a major step in helping to create jobs and encourage people into work. Tax should also be used to discourage pollution by taxing the use of fossil fuel energy sources and the use of harmful chemicals in industry. The money raised can be used to reduce tax in other areas, so that people are not hit twice. I want to see logic prevail in the way taxes are used. For instance, putting money from petrol taxes straight into asthma research or money from tobacco straight into cancer research. At present, some industries are able to undermine people’s health – whether by the sale of cigarettes, alcohol, junk food, or by pollution. Taxing them is one way of redressing the balance, so that they start to pay some of the costs they are presently imposing upon us.

There has to be a shift in the way the money gathered from taxation is spent. We would set our long-term policies with the aim of building a fairer society: reforming and investing in education; giving more of the nation’s wealth to the NHS; increasing job opportunities for the long-term unemployed and others disadvantaged in the workforce; making more affordable housing available; and working for a healthy environment. With a Social Justice Audit in place, the government would have to state its aims for social spending and report each year on how well these were being met. That way, we could see whether policies were in fact expanding opportunities and promoting a more equal Britain. There was a time when manifestos were a new concept: that government should say in advance to the electorate what it intended to do was a strange idea. In the modern world, surely it should not be too much to require the government to explain whether it is achieving its promises. It is the logical progression of the manifesto.

We could also achieve better results through different types of spending. In education, we have to focus new spending on early years education to give children the best possible tuition in core skills of reading and writing. In the area of health, much greater attention needs to be paid to preventive medicine, and it needs to be realized that environmental factors make an enormous impact on health. That could mean GPs being able to prescribe home insulation as a preemptive treatment, instead of waiting until somebody is ill with pneumonia before treating them.

Britain clearly needs a more efficient and accountable tax system to fund a programme of social repair, but more money is seldom the only answer, and sometimes pouring resources into a bottomless pit can exacerbate the problems it was supposed to solve. The state has a duty to act as a safety net, but it has an equally pressing duty not to become a permanent crutch, lest people lose the will to walk themselves. We need to be agile in our thinking when it comes to bridging the deep social divides at the heart of Britain and, rather than simply providing funds on tap, we have to encourage individuals and communities to help themselves.