Coming up with headline-grabbing ideas for six long weeks would tax the most inventive of minds. Desperation to find something novel to say can lead to proposals that unravel even before the presses begin to roll.
Election 2024 is demonstrating how easily the quest can backfire. Rishi Sunak’s national service scheme appeared to have been written on the back of an envelope that contained the simple message “self-destruct”.
There will be more gimmicks to come in the election manifestos but novelty is probably not what most voters want from the next government. The Liz Truss experiment was more than enough novelty to last a lifetime, and it left much of the country on its knees, praying for a period of calm.
Sir Keir Starmer is regularly criticised for being managerial and boring but that does not sound so bad after Boris Johnson demonstrated how not to run a country during a pandemic lockdown.
Starmer is not making rash promises that cannot be delivered. He slipped up once, putting a price tag of £28bn on Labour’s green energy plans, and then retracted it when it became clear that the money simply would not be available. His Conservative opponents still try to milk that change as a dire reversal of a promise but admitting that an ambitious spending plan had been too ambitious is simply good sense.
Chancellor Jeremy Hunt is repeatedly wheeled out to tell the country how well it is doing, with inflation down and growth running ahead of France and Germany. The response from workers on average earnings is, understandably, that it does not feel that way. As some are forced to boil their water before drinking it, and being in constant pain because of an endlessly delayed hospital appointment, the chorus from voters is that “Britain isn’t working”.
The country’s problems go back decades, and putting them right will take time and money that will not be easy to find. Labour has severely limited its ability, once in government, to find that cash, promising not to raise any of the major taxes.
It would be cynical to suspect that, once inside No 10 and able to plead that the country’s financial plight is even worse than they had previously believed, Labour would revisit its tax promises – but it would not be entirely surprising. Were it to do so, if it went on to demonstrate that it was capable of using the money carefully and to the benefit of the country, the broken promise might be forgiven.
In the meantime, we are in the Never-Never land of wishful thinking. Both main parties are clinging to the idea that they can unearth a pot of gold by cracking down on tax avoidance, yet the Conservatives have talked about finding this for 14 years with pitifully little success. Labour say that they will put more bloodhounds on the scent but they are not guaranteed success either.
Their task would be made easier if tax were simplified instead of being so complicated that lucrative loopholes abound. The Office of Tax Simplification was established in 2010 with the objective of giving independent advice to the government. Whatever advice it delivered, successive governments continued to complicate the issue. Kwasi Kwarteng, in his brief period as chancellor, closed down the OTS, saying it was being folded into the Treasury, from where it would never be heard from again.
The fundamental problem is that governments don’t like simplifying, they like legislating. At the start of every new parliament, the monarch has to read out a list of the new bills that the new government plans to introduce. This is far from exhaustive.
As the months go by, administrations think of more and more laws that they can announce, giving the impression that they are actually doing something – the last government was addicted to passing largely unnecessary legislation. The Levelling-up and Regeneration Act runs to more than 500 pages and the best way it could have achieved any actual levelling up would have been if a short person had stood on it.
Even in the dying days of the Sunak administration, the urge to push through unnecessary legislation prevailed. Although the potentially useful Renters Reform Bill was abandoned, the Pet Abduction Bill became law. Theft of a dog or cat could now bring a five-year prison sentence and a fine – no matter that theft, even of a pet, is the crime of theft, it was something new to announce.
Enough gimmicks. Let’s have some calm competence.
