“Everything goes wrong for a government which is going wrong”
- Richard Crossman
Government Ministers are well trained in the art of media appearances. They need to be as there have just been too many disasters to explain away recently. Legionella in the water system on the Government’s flagship prison vessel for asylum seekers, the Bibby Stockholm, forcing its evacuation a month ago; crumbling concrete in school buildings forcing whole and partial school closures; the escape of a terror suspect from Wandsworth Prison by a route more suited to Ronnie Barker in “Porridge” and failure to award any contracts for wind energy generation in the latest round of bids.
Now when faced with explaining all this failure away, Ministers are well armed in the excuse and blame shifting department. The first tactic is to present yourself as breathless because you are working “at pace”, “night and day” with “relentless focus” to sort matters out. In fact, you are so busy you have hardly got time for media interviews. Tactic two is blame somebody else – this is usually the last Labour government, which left office 13 years ago, some as yet to be identified hapless civil servant and, finally, some unfortunate pleb in the great out there who was sitting on his or her “arse” when they should have been bailing out the Minister.
If none of this appears to be cutting through with Laura Kuenssberg or Trevor Philips, the last option is to quietly lean forward and whisper reassuringly something along the lines of “at times like this I like to remind myself why I am a Conservative (nation holds its breath); it is because I am a small state low tax Conservative”.
Bingo! Home Run! What’s not to like? Surely we are all in favour of low taxes and a reduced state? Although this Minister may be struggling today because our schools are collapsing under the weight of dodgy concrete, he or she really does have my back when it comes to matters important to me.
The word ‘state’ conjures up a vision of control with overpaid, underworked Whitehall bureaucrats working from home when they should be in the office serving time until they retire at 50 on their gold-plated pensions. The evils of the State have been well defined for us in “Brave New World” and “1984”. The word ‘state’ does not conjure up images of doctors, nurses, fire fighters, prison officers, policeman, etc. The very people who helped keep the nation going during the Covid lockdowns. The very people who are a key part of what the State does on behalf of us all. By diminishing the role of the State our Minister is also reducing its size. The hard truth of this is less doctors, nurses, police officers plus people to answer the phone at HMRC, or the DVLA, in addition to extended time to get a passport, a driving licence or a power of attorney authorised.
The problem with our Ministers’ attractive throwaway line is that voters quite like having more police officers, fire fighters, doctors, nurses etc. They may not like the image of a overbearing State that the Minister is trying to weave but they do like Scandinavian levels of public services.
A small State means less public servants which leads to reduced levels of public provision. The Government’s 10-year-long austerity programme was supposed to wean us off dependence on public provision of vital services. I guess the plan was to massage this under tax cuts. Somehow the Magic Money Tree was fed the wrong fertilizer by successive Chancellors as the Conservative dream of Scandinavian levels of public services with US levels of personal tax somehow morphed into Scandinavian levels of personal tax and US levels of public services.
It would not be unfair to describe the UK as now having the highest levels of personal tax since 1945 and poorest level of public services since the 1950s.
It seems to have escaped the Tory strategists’ attention that underinvesting in schools and hospitals today just builds up a bigger bill for tomorrow. It is not an option for voters to go to the private sector. It does not follow that that today’s budget cut is tomorrow’s tax cut.
So let us return to our Minister floundering in front of Laura Kuenssberg. Let us remind the Minister that what voters want is a doctor’s appointment within a day or so and not three weeks, a hospital appointment that is just few weeks away and not several months, to send their children to schools where the ceiling will not fall in, and where class sizes are below 30.
The notion of a ‘small state, low tax’ society is just snake oil. Tories have borrowed it from Republicans in the US; a country which enjoys some of highest levels of deprivation in the developed world with the biggest margin between the poorest and richest.
What voters want may not sound quite so catchy, but it goes something like ‘a State that meets the needs of myself and my family supported by a fair taxation system’.
The immediate post-1945 notion of ‘from each according to his/her means and to each according to his/her needs’ still holds good today.
Voters do not want a large state, or a small state come to that, but a state that works for them. The deceit at the heart of conservatism is that voters can have a state that indeed meets their needs but on the cheap. An effective State that meets the needs of its citlzens does not lie on the same spectrum as low taxes. A fair taxation take does.
There is a silent expectation from voters that the State will step in and help them with costs that cannot be borne on an individual basis. The most recent example is childcare costs. It would have been unheard of 20 years ago for the State to be supporting the child support costs for working families but now it does. This was the State responding to the changing needs of its citizens, not the State growing in control against the will of its citizens.
The notion of a small state low tax society needs to be discarded to the waste bin of useless (dangerous) political catch phrases.
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