Everyone seems very bored with the coalition, but if you look at the pre-Budget discussions, might it not be working quite well? It is surely a good thing that most senior Liberals now admit that the 50 per cent top rate of income tax is not necessarily a great idea, and that most senior Conservatives now begin to recognise that the vast amount of wealth tied up in property should not be able to avoid tax as much as it does. The Lib Dems have to confront the reality that high taxes encourage avoidance, drive away talent and, eventually, reduce revenue. The Tories have to focus on the fact that income taxes are shockingly high for the poor and that houses and land are not made to work for their owners’ living as they should. These dawning perceptions could be the basis of a constructive dialogue. Traditionally, the Budget has been treated as a box of tricks which no one but the magician (the Chancellor of the Exchequer) may inspect. Governments, therefore, have been like companies run by their finance directors: they have failed to work out what they really want to do. Slowly, the structure of the coalition is changing this for the better.
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But there may well be a base reason for the way the ‘mansion tax’ is shooting into prominence. The only place in the country where the tax would really threaten a lot of people is London. There are two months to go before the mayoral election. If George Osborne announces a mansion tax in his Budget, we shall know for certain that he and David Cameron do not want Boris Johnson re-elected.
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Meanwhile, the government wants to impose a new and oppressive tax on the poor — a minimum price for alcohol. It is always in the name of health that the working class are attacked. But what struck me most about the story was how the decision was taken. According to the Sunday Times, ‘The decision to go ahead was made at a meeting chaired by Jeremy Heywood, the cabinet secretary, and attended by [Andrew] Lansley, Theresa May, the home secretary, and Vince Cable, the business secretary … it was not put to Cabinet.’ This is yet another example of the unacknowledged change in our constitution by which civil servants are put in charge (see also Crown appointments, honours forfeiture, IPSA, the Information Commissioner etc) of their elected political masters. ‘During the meeting,’ the report went on, ‘Heywood is said to have overruled Lansley’s objections.’ By what right?
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One cannot understand the life of Norman St John Stevas unless one realises that he was, in part, Greek. He had a romantic longing for social acceptance. Why else would Norman have suppressed his Christian name Panayea, adopted a fruity English voice and taken the extreme (and unique?) measure of becoming an officer not only of the Cambridge but also of the Oxford Union? On one occasion as a very young man, Norman told my parents, he had lunch with Gwilym Lloyd George, son of David and — at that time — Minister for Food. The first course was mushrooms, to which Norman was allergic, but he felt too deferential to refuse. As a result, as they left the restaurant and stood waiting for a taxi, he was sick all over the minister’s shoes. It is easy — indeed, unavoidable, if one reads Lord St John’s wonderful obituary in the Telegraph — to laugh, but pity the country where immigrants or the children of immigrants have no desire to ape its culture. Are there any Stevases now growing up? Shall we look upon his like again?
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Francis Maude says the Conservatives will always be the ‘nasty party’ until they support gay marriage and identify with ethnic minorities. Doesn’t the former make the latter impossible?
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In Afghanistan, mobs got in a rage and killed Americans last month when it turned out that American forces had destroyed copies of the Koran by mistake. President Obama apologised in person. In Benghazi recently, a group of Libyan Islamists set to work, deliberately and apparently unhindered, to desecrate the Commonwealth war graves — British, Australian, Canadian, Polish, even Sudanese — there. If you watch the film on YouTube, you see them laughing as they kick tombstones over and smash them. The camera focuses gloatingly on the Star of David on a Jewish serviceman’s stone. You can hear people shouting ‘Jew! Jew!’ in Arabic. Then men get a ladder and attack the large memorial cross with hammers — ‘Break the cross of the dogs!’ the crowd cries. One is glad, of course, that British mobs are not trashing North African restaurants or mosques in retaliation, but it is disheartening that official reaction has been so muted. These horrible attacks are part of a pattern across the Muslim world in which any public symbols of anything un-Islamic — a church, a synagogue, a monument — are insulted. The dead are abused and the living intimidated. Ministerial responses here are of the ‘We understand why people of the wartime generation feel upset’ variety, rather than expressing any real shock themselves. The Commonwealth War Graves Commission, from its inception, insisted on an equality of respect in death — for officers and men, for Christian, Jew, Muslim and Hindu. It maintains its graves all over the world where Commonwealth servicemen fell. When these graves are attacked, a particularly fine and, in a way, universal set of values is spat upon.
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Radio Twee latest. Sarah Mohr-Pietsch after playing a bit of Dvorak’s 9th symphony: ‘music which for Dvorak symbolised America … and for many of us symbolises a lost bucolic world of cobbled streets. Of course, that Hovis ad in which it was used wasn’t actually filmed in Yorkshire at all.’ Are cobbled streets bucolic? Why would anyone think the Hovis ad was filmed in Yorkshire, since the speaker has a vaguely West Country accent? While we are on the subject of bread, Nigel Farndale contributes this, from Penny Gore this week: ‘Brahms was on a roll’.
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