Opening Our Reach

The dispute with BT and Openreach has been resolved. Strikes work. Over in the officially public sector, although obviously you cannot imagine the State allowing BT or Openreach to go under, subsidies are greater than would be necessary to avoid the strikes altogether. Essentially, that is a slush fund. How much of it winds up in the coffers of the political parties? Yes, all of them.

The public sector could be given an inflation-matching pay increase if capital gains tax were equalised with income tax, but the only thing even less likely than that would be the abolition of the exemption of main residences from CGT. I have never understood it, but I am neither an academic nor a newspaper columnist. I am a political activist and a parliamentary candidate, and I have to pick my fights.

As for VAT on school fees, that is the Labour Party's perennial internal crowdpleaser, the unfulfilled promise of which will always be too useful for when activists started to ask what their party was actually for. It is never going to happen. But for the sake of argument, as with so many things, the claims made for and against it are equally contemptible.

Fees have gone up every year forever, but pupil numbers have remained constant. No one who could find £20,000 would struggle to find £24,000, never mind the suggestion that people who could find £30,000 would struggle to find £36,000. No one is struggling already to find that sort of money; you either have it, or you do not.

If a Labour Government were to tax private schools into oblivion in Britain, not that it ever would, then they would set up abroad as if nothing had happened. In any case, it was Michael Gove who in 2017 proposed putting VAT on school fees, and that year's Conservative manifesto threatened in black and white to do so unless at least the major public schools sponsored academies.

There is a class war being waged in British politics, and it is the same one as it always is, the one of "tough decisions" that are always essentially the same ones, both in themselves and no matter who is in office. This most right-wing Government since the War faces the Loony Right on three fronts. The SNP is toying with charging to use the NHS, as the Conservatives are with charging £50 to see the doctor. The Liberal Democrats' departure from government led to a moderation of austerity, and since then there has been nothing like either the invasion of Libya, or Vince Cable's privatisation of the Royal Mail.

As for the Labour Party, it promised even more austerity in 2010 than the Coalition ended up delivering, and it did not oppose the austerity programme in 2015. Most Labour MPs and all Labour Party staffers remained fanatically pro-austerity even after the Government had changed direction, and that has never ceased to be the case, firmly continuous with every Labour Budget from December 1976 onwards.

Having opportunistically pretended to have opposed the only mini-Budget measure that had not been in Liz Truss's pitch to the Conservative membership, the abolition of the 45p rate of income tax, Labour is stuck with its support for all of the others. If you still think that Trussonomics was a good idea, then vote Labour. It has accepted the existence of a "fiscal black hole" of £55 billion, which is a figure made up out of thin air in order to justify predetermined policies.

Therefore, Labour accepts both of Jeremy Hunt's fiscal rules, that underlying debt must be falling as a proportion of GDP at the end of a five-year rolling period, and that public sector borrowing over the same period must be below three per cent of GDP, rules that are not coincidentally reminiscent of those of the eurozone, where they were suspended during the pandemic but are due to be reactivated from the end of 2023. Labour will certainly go into the next General Election with a commitment to adhere to whatever departmental spending limits it had inherited. Of course Labour would not abolish non-domicile tax status, the defenders of which cannot explain where its beneficiaries would go, since it exists nowhere else on Earth.

We are heading for a hung Parliament. To strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty, we need to hold the balance of power. Owing nothing to either main party, we must be open to the better offer. There does, however, need to be a better offer. Not a lesser evil, which in any case the Labour Party is not.