Simon T. Kaye

The UK Green Party is a political success story still in motion. They’ve managed to combat the strictures of our First-Past-The-Post electoral system to the point of getting their leader elected to Parliament. Meanwhile, Jenny Jones has just finished coming third in London’s mayoral elections, their campaign has brought them to third in London Assembly votes, and at the same time the party is making council gains in various spots around the country in the face of a resurgent Labour vote.

The most electorally successful hard-left political party in British political history?

People should know that when they vote for friendly, chatty Jenny Jones or nod along with Brighton’s Green MP Caroline Lucas, they are actually (and, I believe, unwittingly) supporting what is rapidly becoming the most electorally successful hard-left political party in British political history.

The Green Party, usually the repository for the votes of people who simply (and very legitimately) want to bring environmental issues firmly on to the agenda in British politics, espouses a set of economic and social policies that put them far to the left of the most radical governments of the UK’s twentieth century, and indeed to the left of the Labour Party even in the midst of Foot’s leadership.

The main issue seems to be that nobody – least of all the people who find themselves voting for them – ever seems to have read the actual body of Green Party manifesto documents, or clicked more than three hyperlinks on the Green Party website. And the party itself seems to be complicit in the two-facedness of their public presentation. Jenny Jones’ website contains nary a hint of the Green Party’s vast hinterland of policy ideas, for example.

So let’s look at those Green policy plans in detail. You’ll see that these are set out in plain prose, with quotation marks – I thought about putting links in, but their policy website (which I link to at the end of this post) is so thick with examples of this sort that I thought it might be even better for people to dig through themselves, as I did.

• Let’s start with a biggy: The Green Party would introduce a universal ‘Citizen’s Income’: “an unconditional, non-withdrawable income payable to each individual as a right of citizenship. It will not be subject to means-testing, and there will be no requirement to be either working or actively seeking work.” This extraordinary policy would effectively destroy any semblance of a market in jobs, and eliminate any connection between state-provided incomes and a commitment to go to work. The sustainability of such a policy is highly questionable. Elsewhere, the Greens claim that “the introduction of a Citizen’s Income would reduce the cost of labour to industry without pushing people into poverty”. This is very bad economics indeed. A citizen’s income would massively reduce incentives to work, creating a shortfall in the working population and increasing demand among industries; necessarily, this would lead to an increase in salaries, not a decrease.
• As an overarching ambition, the Green Party would seek to “Raise taxation from its current very low level of GDP … [as] the fiscal gap is not caused by too much public spending but by taxation dropping to unacceptably low levels.” Well, yeah, they’d have to! This statement is not accompanied by any indication of just how high the tax burden would rise under a Green government, though an allusion is made to an overall level of 40% of GDP in pre-Thatcher years. In fact, paying for the following policies would require tax levels closer to 60% or 70% of GDP.
• They would Change Capital Gains tax from current levels (18%) to “the recipient’s highest income tax rate” – so, a rate of up to 50%. They also aim to increase inheritance tax.
• The Green party would nearly double the current basic pension to £170 a week. The current pensions system is already unsustainable, with a top-heavy, ageing national demographic proving difficult to support at current levels of productivity. The Greens are talking about doubling the pensions black hole, up from £56 billion to £110 billion each year.
• On housing, the Greens promote several extraordinary policies, including “the right to rent” – that is, where homeowners find themselves in difficulty paying their mortgages, the local council will allow them to “rent their existing home as council housing”. The cost of this policy is practically incalculable, and detail on this policy is thin indeed, but at the very least such a commitment would enshrine as a right an individual’s habitation of a given house, irrespective of their ability to afford it, and necessarily transfer all debts of this sort straight to the state.
• The Green Party wants “a national Minimum Wage of 60% of net national average earnings”, which would be something between £8 and £9 per hour. This is, of course, an interim measure until the introduction of the Citizen’s Income.
• They would legislate to reduce the full-time working week from 43.5 hours to 35 hours. This is mainly promoted as a way to reduce carbon output, but would put the British working week alongside France, and far, far south of the week-lengths of the world’s economically competitive nations.
• The Green Party aims to nationalise the railways and the London Underground, both operators and tracks.
• They would replace land ownership – in the current sense of freeholders’ rights – with a kind of land-use planning system, where the state grants usage rights to individuals on the basis of some assessment. This would also be accompanied by a Land Value Tax, an additional tariff on the worth (in terms of productive value) of owned land.
• All mains distribution of gas and electricity will be nationalised by a Green government. Public ownership of energy providers will be increased.

There’s more to see – these are just some of the most striking examples. I strongly advise current or prospective Green voters to properly review their policy platform at their rather dense policy website, http://policy.greenparty.org.uk/.

And there’s more to say here, beyond simply pointing out the version of communism that the Green Party is subtly peddling; perhaps I’ll put some more thoughts about that up here at some later date.

Now if somebody wants to come back and say “yes, I knew of each of the policies listed above, and I voted Green because of them”, then I will do nothing but celebrate your settled political ideology with you and wish you well. But my suspicion is that some of the above will come at least somewhat as a surprise to the earnest middle-class types who usually find themselves ‘going green’.

To finally summarise my main thought, here, then: green politics could be better served – indeed, deserve to be served better – than this country’s Green Party.

…or, why Bono shouldn’t pay up.

This week, U2 will be headlining at the Glastonbury festival. As expected, rock music purists are debating whether U2 is just too pop; whether this might be another symptom in the festival’s dumbing-down (Snoop Dogg, Beyonce and Jay-Z being among recent headlining artists).

But the musical discussion has been overshadowed by a political one. Art Uncut, a spin-off from the  UK Uncut protest movement which we heard so much about during the tuition fees arguments of late last year, is staging a demonstration against U2. Not because Bono isn’t rock’n'roll enough, but because he – in their view – is dodging his taxes.

I encourage you to read the 3rd June piece about this on the Art Uncut website. Titled “It’s crucial we send a message to Bono that what he is doing is wrong”,  the piece forwards what is now becoming a very familiar argument: that there is a moral obligation to maximise individual tax contributions.

The ‘Bono Pay Up’ Facebook event page now has around 200 registered participants, all of them (presumably) ticket-holders for the expensive Glastonbury event. Perhaps this seems a little meagre, given that around 177,000 people are set to attend the festival. But the overall power of a moral argument against tax-avoidance has gathered massive support elsewhere, mixed well into a generally politics-flavoured cocktail of state spending cuts opposition and distaste for specific coalition reforms. Protests and sit-ins at Fortnum & Mason, Topshop and the like have attracted news headlines and big-name support from the likes of the Guardian‘s Polly Toynbee.

Let’s run through the ‘uncut’ argument.

1. State spending cuts are bad, and will undermine valued services which are best provided by the state.
2. Budget deficits, like the UK’s annual £170 billion debt rate, are also bad. It is right to try and reduce national debt and the spending deficit.
3. Raising taxes is not always good, though preferable to reductions in public spending.
4. How then do we plug the deficit, without reducing spending or raising taxes too much? Simple: we force rich companies and individuals to stop avoiding their taxes.

On the face of it, this is a powerful, practical ‘everyone wins’ argument. Congratulations should be offered to UK Uncut and its spin-off campaigns for bringing their agenda into the public eye through the targeting of a few case-studies. Bono and U2 are just the latest example of this.

So what’s the problem? Let’s dig down into the case against Bono and U2.

1. We are not morally or legally obliged to maximise our tax contributions.

I would even view this as a human right. We have the human right to act rationally wherever such action is legal. Minimising our tax contribution is always rational – particularly, in fact, for the very rich, as they are far less likely to need state support at some later point.

Being a multinational company or rich individual and earning a lot of money shouldn’t change this. Human rights aren’t human rights if they stop applying to you over a certain income threshold. Put it another way: at what point does a state gain the remit to delimit human rationality?

This is not to say that civil society shouldn’t be concerned with encouraging selfless, generous, charitable and social behaviours. But Bono surely ticks a lot of these boxes independently, as we shall see below.

2. Ireland is not a ‘developing country’…

…not in the sense that this term is usually understood, anyway. Art Uncut argues:

… [T]ax issues are crucial to development. Christian Aid estimates that developing countries lose $160bn annually, more than the global aid budget, thanks to unscrupulous multinational companies dodging tax. If we want poor countries to become richer, we need to adopt an ethical approach to taxation. It’s clear that U2 take anything but an ethical approach to taxation.

Even allowing this assertion – that developing countries are often screwed by tax-dodging multinationals – cannot help in the case of U2 and Ireland. Ireland is a highly developed and economically modern country.

3. Why should Bono trust Ireland with his money?

There is a reason, after all, why Ireland is now having to embark on a significant austerity programme. As a state, Ireland has hardly demonstrated fiscal prudence.

Irish spending policies contributed to a landmark unemployment rate and the country’s first recession since the 1980s. When the financial crisis occurred, the cost of bank-bailouts contributed to an already-vast deficit. Eventually, the EU and IMF stepped in, and other countries lent fiscal support to Ireland.

Perhaps Bono wouldn’t agree with the spending priorities of the Irish state. Perhaps he didn’t agree with the largely ineffective 40 billion Euro stimulus package, or the policy of buying out failing banks with their toxic credit. By the time of the 2008 crisis, U2 was already tax-resident in a different country; this was both legal and rational and, as an internationally successful band, not particularly strange either.

4. What if Bono spends his money more wisely and charitably anyway?

As the Art Uncut article states,

Bono presents himself as someone who cares deeply about development.

This is putting it mildly. U2′s philanthropy is near-legendary. The band has spent more than a decade (perhaps ironically) campaigning on third-world debt. Bono co-organised the Live 8 charity concert project. He is a founder of the Product Red charity brand campaign. He has his own charity – the One Foundation. This and other work represents millions of pounds of charitable contributions, on top of robust political activism.

I’m not a particular U2 fan, and there may be many good reasons to arch an eyebrow at some of Bono’s posturing, or question the effectiveness or sensibility of his approach. But to suggest that Bono is money-grubbing seems decidedly churlish.

Indeed, if Bono is choosing to reduce his contribution to one or another state infrastructure, and then pumps what surely amounts to more than the difference into charitable projects, and he chooses to do so legally, who has a moral basis for questioning his actions or attacking his civic sensibilities?

To conclude…

I suppose the broader point is that it would seem peculiarly trusting, even naive, if people imagined that in all cases the state they happen to live in is better placed to dispose of their money with wisdom. Yet to volunteer taxes – to offer, as it were, additional taxes, above those that are legally required – would be exactly the same as minimising personal disposable wealth. It would be an admission of incompetence, perhaps, or a wholesale acceptance of the idea that the state knows best.

Surely, and especially in the aftermath of the last few years, nobody actually still thinks this way?

Speaking of my occasional writing at Prospect Magazine’s online presence (see previous post), I was surprised and gratified to discover one of my articles on their end-of-year online content roundup.

I’m officially no.9 on their top ten list of online-only articles! See!

It’s important to bear a few things in mind here: first of all, while it says that the list is in “no particular order”, my splurge about the end of Lost and its important online following is still probably one place too high.

Secondly, this DOES mean that I made the list and Brian Eno did not. Brian Eno. I am not worthy.

Happy New Year!

I forgot to say that I wrote another piece for First Drafts, Prospect Magazine UK’s blog.

It’s called Shouldn’t students put voting ahead of activism?, which was (I thought) a fairly uncontroversial thing to suggest.

Here’s an extract:

Students’ tendency to self-disenfranchise may contribute to their willingness to express themselves in alternative ways. But to engage in the public sphere in a non-systemic way without participating in the institutionalised structures of democratic change seems terribly incoherent.

Old news now, I know, but any thoughts or reactions would be welcome.

Has Willetts put his foot in it?

We’re all still awaiting Lord Browne’s report into higher education funding. It’s very likely, as many have pointed out, that he will eventually recommend lifting the cap on undergrad tuition fees, which currently stands at a little over £3,000. Whatever level fees end up at, I think we also know fairly certainly that they will be paid retrospectively via a loan system, as introduced under Tony Blair (still, I think, a good way of going about things). What we don’t know:

• Where the new fees cap will be set – £9,000? £12,000? £14,000?
• How many universities (and university departments) will choose to set their fees towards the higher levels
• What process (if any) Browne or the government put together to ensure continued value for money in undergraduate study. This is a problem now, so imagine how people will feel about their 8 contact hours a week when they’re paying upwards of 10 grand for them.
• Whether, at the last, the government (at least the Tory element of it) will choose to endorse the report wholly, or merely take its recommendations into consideration while formulating some other new policy.

My party, the Liberal Democrats, have always leaned the other way, wishing to reduce or cut undergraduate tuition fees altogether. Under the coalition agreement, Lib Dem MPs retain the right to argue against legislation that would raise fees, and to abstain on any votes. This already seems too weak a stance for many of our MPs who have signed pledges to actively oppose such legislation.

Ming Campbell has already said, on national TV, that he would probably be forced to rebel. You can assume that many Lib Dems will do the same, coalition agreement be damned. It’s not outside the realms of possibility, therefore, that any such higher education funding bill could face defeat in the Commons, and specifically threaten the coalition’s cohesion. So the first consideration here is political: how likely is it that the Tories will pursue a higher education policy that could undermine their position in government? On this basis, I’d say we can assume that the eventual tory policy will be at least fairly ‘mild’ in terms of content, and probably far less radical than Browne’s recommendations.

This has always been a point of difference between myself and the policy platform of my party. I don’t mind owning my own education. Actually, I quite like it. Getting higher education was not automatic for me – as it should not be for anyone. It was a choice. I want to own that choice, and the responsibility for it, in every sense. Now we can argue about the level of cost and the point of income where I start paying back, but I think the principle was always pretty sound. People from my generation of students were torn on the movement from fees of around 1 grand to something over 3 grand now, and the so-called ‘top-up fees’ scheme of paying these costs retrospectively.

Globally, 3 grand per year for an undergrad degree is an almost astonishingly good deal. The real-terms quality of this deal is obviously to do with the quality of your course. My own priority is that some kind of framework ensuring value for money must be put into place.

What happens if fees are raised? Perhaps it’s instructive to look at Master’s degrees – MAs, MScs and so on – which are not capped in the same way as Undergrad degrees. I studied at the LSE, which charges all the way up to £13,000 (or more, and even more for foreign students) for a one-year MSc. Most other UK universities charge between £3,000 and £7,000. Nationally, the range of costs is wide, and higher costs are not always attached to actual quality (though they may be attached to prestige).

So the lesson is: with a raising of the cap, not all institutions will instantly raise fees to the highest that they can possibly get (except, obviously, for the LSE, which has never wittingly missed an opportunity to thus gouge). We can assume that technical, professional and scientific courses – law, medicine, etc. – will set the highest fees. And, paid retrospectively with a revised approach to the point at which one’s income is high enough to swallow the costs, a new regime need not be too arduous, nor put too many people off university altogether.

But, based on his appearances today, Willetts is certainly barking up the wrong tree in another way.

Willetts is suggesting that students avoid the costs of living away from home – living expenses –  by attending classes and learning in a local college, but receiving assessment – and eventual certification – from another, more prestigious university.

Does this make any sense? To anyone? Assessment is oriented around the content of specific courses. How can the UCL run an exam for a course taught by Bath Spa? It might work – just about – for maths or technical subjects. But this is at the cost of university as significant life-change, as an immersion into a culture of learning.

If people want to study – study good materials – from home, and pick up a well regarded degree, then we already have a very good system in place. It’s called the Open University.

Someone should tell David Willetts.

My third piece for First Drafts, the blog of Prospect Magazine UK. I’m quite pleased with this one.

I offer a few critical thoughts about how the show was wrapped up. I think most sensible folk agree that it was unsatisfying. But I also argue that the fun was always in the magnitude and cleverness of Lost’s web following.

I’ve got a bit of form talking about Lost on this blog – take a look through the ‘TV’ category if you don’t believe me. I think I’ll miss it.

My Prospect post is here, and here is a little extract:

Perhaps Lost’s creators shelved whatever overarching explanation they had originally concocted when they realised that it could never compare to the intricate, crowd-sourced theories of their viewers.

Oh, and beware the spoilers.

David Laws, the Liberal Democrat Chief Secretary to the Treasury, is justly getting glowing notices in every Parliamentary sketch column in the papers today. I’m thrilled to see someone whom I’ve long suspected is the most talented MP in Westminster picking up some recognition.

Otherwise known as one of the central negotiators and architects of an extremely favourable coalition agreement, David Laws is now cementing his reputation as possibly the only man who can peddle the fiscal pain of the coming years and keep everyone on-board.

Here, theatre poster style, is the praise from the broadsheets:

“A dazzling debut” ****

-Simon Carr, The Independent

“…seeing off the other side with contempt and contumely” ****

-Simon Hoggart, The Guardian

“A star is born” *****

-Ann Treneman, The Times

“The Chief Secretary displayed a calm mastery of his brief: clever without being clever-clever, concise without sounding glib, self-assured without looking arrogant.” *****

- The Daily Telegraph

It’s all recorded as a 45-minute session on the BBC. Alastair Darling opens in an excitable way, which I wasn’t entirely sure was possible for him. Do watch it, I promise you won’t be bored. Here’s the link.