Just about the only Conservative who doesn’t want to spend shedloads of money is Philip Hammond. Having spent years telling us all how important it is to be responsible and then irresponsibly inflicting all the pain on the poor and those who use public services like schools or hospitals he isn’t keen on seeing all his hard work squandered away.
So I thought I might help out the Tories by suggesting some ways of controlling their profligacy and acting with genuine fiscal responsibility. Here goes:
- Call off Brexit and stop wasting money on preparations for something that will cause economic damage.
- Stop spending money on clumsy nuclear power projects like Hinkley Point and while you are at it make electricity cheaper by scrapping the commitment to buy Hinkley’s energy at twice the current market price for twenty years
- Cut out all the spending on the Trident nuclear weapon. Another vanity project and one that is utterly irrelevant to modern defence capabilities
- Cancel the £ billion plus a year expenditure on the “Help” to Buy scheme which simply puts up the cost of homes at the expense of the tax payer and rewards the building developers who have made such generous donations in the past to the Conservative Party. Donations which those developers made, of course, out of utter selflessness and love of country. They had no expectation of financial reward, removal of planning protection or ripping up of effective building regulations.
- Stop wasting money on contracting out NHS services, probation services, prison services, social services, transport services, and any other services you can find. Especially now the evidence has mounted that the private sector is simply incapable of delivering public services better than the government can do itself. And after evidence has mounted about how hard it is to price such contracts and define what is to be delivered. So that the state either pays too much or gets the contract handed back to it in a chaotic way when the private sector can’t deliver it and make money.
- Collect taxes owed but dodged by companies and individuals shifting income abroad. Do this by employing properly paid revenue staff, enacting the right for a jury to impose the tax bill on any company paying what they judge to be an unreasonably low bill on its turnover and taxing land and property in this country regardless of what offshore tax haven it is owned in. Copy the US law requiring any UK citizen to prove that they have paid at least as much tax in their foreign tax haven as they would have paid in the UK and then collecting the shortfall. Jail tax dodgers.
- Tax gambling effectively to increase revenue and cut government expenditure on trying to repair the damaged lives of people who have lost far more than they can ever afford.
- Tax financial transactions to reduce speculative short-term gambling by bankers. Then you might not have to step in to try and rescue those bankers from their own reckless behaviour whilst asking the rest of us to tighten out belts.
- Remove subsidies for large landowners. (Yes I do know this is an EU rule – I am allowed to support membership of the EU and still campaign against giving millions of pounds of taxpayers money to the very richest people in the land. No I don’t want to cut subsidies for small and medium scale farmers and those working marginal land).
- Properly subsidise homes to install high quality insulation and to generate at least as much power as they use so that we can cut people’s energy bills, make ourselves more energy secure and massively reduce our impact on the climate crisis.
- Invest in education. In particular deal with the massive crisis in our further education colleges which have not had a penny increase in their per student funding rates for 9 years yet need to play a major part in retraining and modernising our economy.
- Provide local councils and housing associations with the deposit money they need to borrow and build or renovate homes that people actually need
- Launch a major regional investment programme to transform and modernise our ailing former industrial cities
- Start sorting out our enormous care crisis by agreeing a long term cross party strategy. Oh, and by recognising that you can’t look after an aging population without having more young people so also by easing up on immigration.
- Transform the deliberately clumsy universal credit system so that people in need aren’t forced to sit listening to unanswered phone enquiries and then punished for not having the correct information.
- Look after the veterans of wars who have come back to this country to be made redundant in order to pay for Trident and suffer high rates of mental illness and frequently end up in jail.
- Invest in effective public transport via a coherent bus and rail network that connects regional economies quickly and effectively. Require every supermarket, gas station and public car park to install electric vehicle charging points
- Ban zero hours contracts and police the minimum wage system effectively
We are about to have a government led by a person who has promised faithfully to do a whole series of really stupid things and to break the bank paying for them. The Conservatives are about to transform themselves from the party that has preached the necessity of tightening our belts for 10 years into a party which is happy to fritter away any amount of money provided it wins a few votes.
In the States Donald Trump has provided over the worst decline in the public finances in living memory beating even the records set by Ronald Reagan for fiscal irresponsibility. Now both the potential next Prime Ministers have promised to be equally feckless.
That’s the thing about the Tories. They’ve been infiltrated by extreme political fanatics and they are now so obsessed with repeating to themselves the same out of touch fantasy ideas that they can’t be trusted to manage the country’s economy or public finances in any remotely responsible way.
If you want grown up responsible politics from a party that is facing up to the challenges of the future you’ll now find more realism any day in the Green Party than in the former party of business. The Conservatives are now – in the immortal words of its most probable new leader – the party of “Fuck Business”.