To judge from his byline photograph, the Independent‘s Johann Hari has not yet started shaving and his balls haven’t yet dropped. Like police officers, it’s hard to take entirely seriously columnists who get younger with every passing month. But I like to persevere with him when he’s ripping the piss out of the Tories.
George Osborne has indicated he would like to “move” on inheritance tax, which he says – with compassionate fawn-eyes – is “putting pressure on the middle class”. In reality, only the richest 6 per cent pay inheritance tax. These are people such as Osborne himself, who inherited millions from his family, and virtually everybody else David Cameron knows. His “move” would be simply an Old Tory massive tax cut for the wealthy.
He’s wrong about “Old Tory”: he means “Thatcherite”. It’s a small but important distinction and an error that can be forgiven in one so callowly youthful.
Cameron has been given a ludicrously soft ride, with every piece of spin taken at face value by an awe-swept media… When one of Cameron’s policy researchers declared his opposition to relative poverty and his love for Polly Toynbee, it made front-page news. Hardly anybody bothered to read Cameron’s big poverty speech that followed, which explicitly stated that Cameron would do nothing about incomes soaring into the stratosphere at the top. By definition, then, he will not do anything about relative poverty. He directly contradicted himself, but nobody called him on it.
I’m not sure about that. Let’s be honest: anybody declaring love for Polly Toynbee has to be taken with a pinch of salt.
Where Cameron’s thinking is not filled with holes in this way, it amounts merely to a rebranding of old Tory nostrums. Small-state conservatives have always said cutting taxes will stimulate private charity. Without the Big Daddy of the state there to take charge, we will start to look out for each other, they argue, and poverty will fall. Cameron calls it “rolling forward the frontiers of society”.
Danny Kruger, one of Cameron’s advisers, calls this stress on fraternité (rather than égalité) “Cameron’s big idea”. But it is very old, and it has been tested a thousand times. In the years Margaret Thatcher was in power and sawing into state expenditure, the number of children living in poverty trebled, and – according to the definitive London School of Economics study – their chances of ever making themselves rich collapsed. Fraternité didn’t grow; it haemorrhaged away. Once again, the evidence shows that without explicit redistribution, the poorest become trapped.
Yet the few symbols of redistribution introduced by the present government are explicitly opposed by Cameron. He talks ominously of “moving beyond tax credits” and he is committed to abolishing SureStart, the programme that supports the poorest parents in Britain and helps make sure their kids keep up developmentally with their middle- class cousins. Cameron calls it “a model of state failure”; easy to say when you can afford two full-time nannies, I suppose.
And then the alarm clock went off and I woke up and it was a dream.
I may have made up that last sentence.
