14 May 2015
Aftermath
by John Watson
One of the sadder sights of Thursday night was that of the constitutional pundits leaving the offices of the various broadcasters and newspapers. The cold light of dawn, which revealed that the Conservatives would achieve an absolute majority, meant the end of what had looked like a nice little earner for them. There would be no analysis of possible coalitions now, no questions about what action the Queen should take, no analogies from the days of Lloyd George. Instead all that expertise has had to be put back in its box on the shelf where it will moulder until the day when the British public comes up with an indecisive conclusion. What a loss to the broadcasters and newspapers who were hoping to produce successive supplements dealing with constitutional wrangles.
A feebler media would accept its disappointment and fill the extra pages with news about football matches or how many women are competing for the attention of the latest winner of Big Brother. It’s not quite as exciting as a contest for No 10, of course, but it would fill column inches just the same. Fortunately the British media are made of sterner stuff and have quickly moved from the problems which would arise if the election was inconclusive to the problems which arise because it was not. It is worth sitting back for a moment and thinking about one or two of these.
Let’s start with Scotland. There can be little doubt that Nichola Sturgeon’s comments that the Scots Nationalists would guide the policies of any coalition they might form with Labour pushed the voters south of the border towards the Conservatives. Of course she must have known that it would have that effect when she made them. Does that mean that she had a cunning plan to reinstall David Cameron and further flame the fires of Scottish separatism? No, of course it doesn’t. The truth is that she thought it the right thing to say to attract support in Scotland and the results for her party there were far more important to her than any collateral damage she might inflict on Mr Miliband. Actually the fact that the government will not be dependent on SNP support will make the agreement of a constitutional settlement with Scotland much cleaner. Everyone knows that the negotiation will be a tough one but that is better than having the Nationalist team negotiate with a government which it can bring down at any time.
Well then, what about the EU? There is no doubt that it needs reform (did you spot the proposal to appoint twenty-eight new judges to the European Court of Justice even though it only needs twelve because one has to come from each member state?) and both the main political parties said they would press for this. With Cameron in power that pressure will be backed by the fact that the British public are to vote on the result. If Labour had won we would have been negotiating with no supporting sanction. Ask yourself which type of negotiation is the more likely to produce a result. If you can’t answer the question yourself, ask Vladimir Putin.
There are areas, though, where the Conservative victory is disappointing. It is a worry that they have not been able to explain where their welfare cuts will fall. Suggestions that money will come from “curbing tax avoidance” may be optimistic. Then there are proposals in the Labour and Liberal Democrat manifestos which make good sense. Sometimes they are new and sometimes they are designed to put right errors which the coalition has made in the last five years. There is nothing surprising about that. Solomon himself could not govern for five years without making mistakes. Now is the opportunity for Mr Cameron to look at some of the ideas put forward by his opponents. An evening spent on a sofa with the other parties’ manifestos in front of him would be an evening well spent. Here are few of the areas to which his attention might be drawn.
The first is the level of university fees. Whether you support them as a matter of principle or not, they are plainly too high. It cannot be right that a student leaves university with £27,000 of debt. £18,000 would be more manageable. They could also be a reduction in the interest rate paid on the student loans and a system for writing off those loans if income has not risen to a specified level within, say, ten years.
Then there is the “bedroom tax” under which housing benefit is reduced where the recipient has more bedrooms than the regulations permit. It is never right to impose financial penalties on someone who cannot afford them – the Tory objections to the mansion tax identified exactly this point – and it is hard to see that the government should raise money in this way. Certainly there is a need to move those who are over accommodated at public expense but, even in this age of austerity, it could surely be done by paying them something to downsize rather than penalising them if they do not do so.
Quite late in the campaign, Labour raised the tax regime for people who are domiciled abroad and who, subject in the case of long-term residents to the payment of a fixed annual charge, can escape tax on overseas income provided they do not bring it into the UK. As it stands the scheme is anachronistic and unfair. Why should your domicile depend upon the domicile of your father when you were born? If we have people here who are not paying tax on their overseas income, how does it help the UK to insist on them keeping their money abroad? On the other hand no one really knows to what extent the ability of rich foreigners to come here without paying tax on their foreign income supports the success of the British economy. This is something which requires careful thought and as an initial step the government might commission a report from the well respected Institute of Fiscal Studies to analyse what benefits Britain obtains from the regime and whether the regime should be abolished or improved.
With an overall majority under his belt Mr Cameron should be in a confident mood. Now is the time to take stock of the position and, if it involves changing tack on some of the things he’s done in the past, doing that too. No one will think the worse of him for it.
