People often tell opinion polls that ‘The Conservatives are the party of the rich’, and this worries party managers, because the rich are, almost by definition, few, and the voters are many. But would it actually be better, electorally, if people thought ‘The Conservatives are the party of the poor’, or even, which is often thought to be the best, ‘The Conservatives are the party of people like me’? Isn’t it a significant part of the Tories’ appeal that they carry the subliminal suggestion that, if you vote for them, you might get richer?
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For this reason, among others, the Conservatives need to be careful about excoriating tax avoidance. Of course people will agree when you say how disgraceful it is that the super-rich can get round taxes, but one should bear in mind that the rest of us resent such avoidance not because we are in favour of paying high taxes but because we wish we could get round them too. At what point does tax avoidance become immoral or, as the Chancellor of the Exchequer recently put it, ‘aggressive’? It is not easy to say, and it would be both illiberal and unconservative to let the Treasury define it as it went along, let alone — as now happens in some cases — retrospectively. Wherever tax rules permit any form of choice, the rational thing is to avoid the tax. If, for instance, a married couple consists of one top-rate taxpayer and one basic-rate one, it is sensible to hold any shares mainly in the name of the latter. Much-loved ISAs are tax avoidance schemes and not worth holding on other terms. One of the main reasons for the high price of houses is that there is no capital gains tax on the sale of principal residences, and so people pour money into them. We might not put it to ourselves thus, but tax avoidance is dear to millions.
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George Osborne now says he ‘shocked’ by how little tax many multi-millionaires pay. I find this hard to believe of Mr Osborne, who is not the shockable type. It is unwise to introduce such rhetoric: it will only make people angrier when, as is all but inevitable, avoidance continues all the same. I am, however, genuinely shocked by his suggestion that senior politicians should publish their tax returns. If tax returns are correct, why are they anyone else’s business? Publication will just be yet another way of discouraging sane people from going into politics.
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Trenton Oldfield, the ‘anti-elitist’ arrested on Saturday, is not the first revolutionary to cause trouble over the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race. In 1925, Leon Trotzky [sic] was convicted of the Boat Race-related offence of ‘a wanton and serious assault upon the police’ and sent to prison for 30 days. His case is related in ‘Without the Option’ by P.G. Wodehouse. Bertie Wooster bumped into his friend Oliver Randolph Sipperley (‘Sippy’) on Boat Race night when he (Bertie) ‘had been doing myself rather juicily’. Poor Sippy was depressed by the imminent prospect of three weeks staying with ‘some positively scaly friends of Aunt Vera’. ‘What you want, old man,’ said Bertie, ‘is a policeman’s helmet’. ‘But there’s a policeman inside it,’ objected Sippy. ‘What does that matter?’ Bertie replied, and Sippy was persuaded. At Bosher Street magistrates’ court, to avoid identification in the newspapers, Sippy gave his name as Leon Trotzky. Pronouncing sentence, the magistrate allowed that ‘following the annual aquatic contest between the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge a certain licence is traditionally granted by the authorities, but aggravated acts of ruffianly hooliganism like that of the prisoner Trotzky cannot be overlooked or palliated.’ Quite, and the prisoner Trotzky, however ruffianly, did not disrupt the race itself, as Oldfield is accused of doing.
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On the 20th anniversary of John Major’s 1992 election victory, debate resumes about his record as prime minister. That victory and its aftermath illustrate the ambiguity. He led the Tories to win the largest number of votes ever cast for any party in this country (14,093,007). But he also led them, in 1997, to a defeat in which they won only 9,600,943 votes, their worst percentage in the era of universal suffrage. He raised the Tory vote by 330,000 (from 1987), but then dropped it by nearly four and a half million. Why the big initial success, and why the huge ultimate failure?
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The Today programme on Thursday 5 April led with a convoluted piece of news. The Care Quality Commission, it reported, were complaining that the Health Secretary’s request that they should urgently inspect 300 abortion clinics had cost them an extra £1 million and made them miss their targets for other inspections. On came the shadow health secretary Andy Burnham to accuse Andrew Lansley of ‘chasing headlines’ and trying to change the subject because his NHS reforms were unpopular. This was a classic example of BBC bias, not so much because of any party animus, but because of the assumption behind the story. This was that investigations of abortion clinics could never matter much. (The original problem, which the BBC did not properly explain, was that some abortion clinics had been revealed by the Daily Telegraph to be illegally offering abortions on grounds of sex.) Suppose that Mr Lansley had ordered an instant inquiry because of alleged child abuse or racism: would the BBC have gone after him? Would the CQC have dared complain? Would the £1 million extra spent and annual targets missed have been touted in a lead story as serious concerns? Like all the most effective bias, this one was, I would guess, absolutely unthinking. There simply wasn’t anyone in the Today programme who thought that the investigation of illegal abortion could be worth getting out of bed for.
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‘Why can’t we talk about self-pleasure?’ was the Sunday Times Style section’s cover headline for Easter Day. But we can, and do: metaphorically, at least, the consumer supplements of the media talk about little else.
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