Jonathan Todd

Peter Oborne reports on a CCHQ note which states:

“The Conservatives have never won a General Election from a starting point as weak as they face now …  To become Prime Minister, David Cameron must surpass the electoral achievements of both Margaret Thatcher and Winston Churchill.”

The vogue for presenting David Cameron as the PM in waiting has made it far easier than it should be to forget how big a mountain he has to climb. James Macintyre reports of private polling commissioned by Number Ten that shows Labour ahead of the Conservatives. This would mean that Cameron hasn’t even left base camp, never mind virtually ascended to the summit, but Iain Dale suspects the hand of Labour spinners in the Macintyre report.

Even if Dale is right to do so, this explanation cannot be attached to the positive polling for Labour in yesterday’s Observer, which is more than enough to make the “PM in waiting” very nervous, not least given the cracks in Tory discipline and Labour’s renewed resolve to be fighters, not quitters.

30 years since Margaret Thatcher’s election as PM. I enjoyed BBC Parliament’s coverage. But David Willetts is a Thatcherite no more. Boris Johnson is. Maybe, if he is to find the ambition for London that Philip Stephens says he still lacks, it will be a Thatcherite ambition. This at a time when The Spectator, the magazine that Johnson used to edit, of course, is urging David Cameron to live up to what they see as Thatcher’s legacy:

“The challenge for David Cameron is huge. If, as seems likely, he becomes Prime Minister next year, it will be his task to ensure that future generations do not look back on the years 1979-2009 as a blip — an aberrant resurgence — in the otherwise steady decay of a once great nation”.

Johnson seems more eager to embrace Thatcher than Cameron. Perhaps, the differing attitudes of these two rivals for the leadership of the Tory Party, reflect a deeper fault line in the Tories – or, maybe, Cameron is simply more sensitive to the national mood than Johnson. Cameron may remain loath to reveal himself as a Thatcherite while public opinion continues to be as starkly divided over Thatcher as Tim Adams recently observed in The Guardian:

“It’s exactly 30 years since she came to power, nearly 20 since she was unseated and still none of us can rationalise, quite, what we feel about her – either our loathing or our adoration. Even as her era and her “-ism” abruptly ends – in the bail-out and humbling of her market economy, the smashing up of the banks – no one can get to us as a nation quite like she can”.

There is no Thatcher myth. There never was. There is a massively polarising figure and fierce debate about her policies. In contrast, a book has recently been published with the title Tear Down This Myth: How the Reagan Legacy Has Distorted Our Politics and Haunts Our Future. Amazon tells us of Will Bunch’s book:

“Nearly two decades after leaving office and four years after his death, the legend of Ronald Reagan looms larger than ever over America’s political life. Nowhere has that been more evident than in the 2008 presidential campaign, with Republicans – especially presumptive nominee John McCain – appearing to run more aggressively for the Reagan mantle than for the White House itself, and with even Democrats debating how to add some Reagan lustre to their progressive platform”.

I know that Gordon Brown had Thatcher round for tea but no Labour person seriously wants to add some Thatcher “lustre to their progressive platform”. That would be absurd. Philip Collins has done a good job of explaining why this is so.

So, why does the UK attitude towards Thatcher seem so different from the US attitude to Reagan? Was Reagan less divisive? Only fighting Communists without, rather than “enemies within”? “Enemies” which never existed on the same scale in the US as they did in the UK, suggesting the less ambiguous US attitude towards Reagan may find its historical origin in the weaker socialist traditions in the US. This is the right nation, after all.    

Interesting set of book reviews from Julian Le Grand in the latest Prospect. He comments intelligently on The Spirit Level by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett – a book which David Aaronovitch has also recently commented upon. Le Grand also reviews Unjust Rewards by Polly Toynbee and David Walker.

It’s worth a look. He advocates a policy on inheritance tax – also, wrongly, known as the death tax – that I previously been sympathetic to myself. This is to “hypothecate the revenues from inheritance tax to the new Child Trust Fund. In true Baconian fashion, the wealth of one generation would thus be used to fertilise the growth of the next. It might also make inheritance tax more popular, or at least less disliked”.

This hypothecation is fundamentally just: redistribution, via the Child Trust Fund, from those who are born into wealth to those who are not. It also challenges the misconception that the death tax tag encourages: that the person being taxed is the person who has died, rather than those who stand to inherit unearned wealth.

The death tax language perfectly framed the inheritance tax issue from the perspective of George W Bush’s Republicans, while the linking of inheritance tax and the Child Trust Fund nicely frames these policies from a Labour perspective. Framing policies in ways that speak to your values allow beachheads to be created – Policies that are easily understood by the public but which cut to the core of your governing philosophy. Selling council houses performed this function for Margaret Thatcher. The minimum wage did the trick for the early Blair years. Labour desperately needs to quickly establish other beachheads. Le Grand’s idea might be a good way to start.

Frank Field can have some funny ideas, such as a national government – with Peter Mandelson, Ken Clarke and Vince Cable in charge. However, his proposal of a new higher rate of tax on the super rich, which could be totally off-set against charitable giving, merits more serious consideration. This “new philanthropy“ seems entirely in tune with Barack Obama’s ”new era of responsibility“, with its hope “that the responsibility of giving would take root as the super rich helped existing charitable bodies, set up their own foundations, or back foundations of friends or people they admired, rather like Warren Buffet’s support for the Gates Foundation”.

Indeed, “the aim is nothing less than a revolution in our society”, inspired by government nurturing “a new giving culture. While Governments have a key role in kick-starting a giving habit, the aim is for the new philanthropy to become a habit which is socially prized. It is a plea for moving from regulation to once again of making giving on the widest possible scale an affair of the heart”.

John F Kennedy’s 1960s plea to “ask what you can do for your country” was largely lost in a haze of hashish smoke; just as Margaret Thatcher’s desire to usher in strengthened family values via free markets ran into the sand. Politicians’ exhortations to responsibility can so often fall on deaf ears but, perhaps, Field has a smarter idea for inspiring more responsible, socially concerned and fraternal conduct. We have been rightly quick, via ASBOs and the like, to remind poorer members of society of their responsibilities and now, particularly after the chaos reaped by bankers, seems a very opportune time to ensure that the richest members of society are also properly conscious of their responsibilities.

The consensus seems to be that New Labour is as dead as Cameron’s Conservative modernisation project. Desperate times have reawakened ideology from a generational slumber, so we are told. Labour are a party of social justice, prepared to openly advocate higher taxes for the rich. The Conservatives seem to be shifting rightwards in opposing this. All of which delights Polly Toynbee. Only one dark cloud on her horizon: “the VAT cut will help the poorest least”. Presumably, she would prefer the Liberal Democrat plan to lower the basic rate of income tax from 20p to 16p in the pound. However, this analysis ignores the point made by Tom Copley: “indirect taxes, favoured by Thatcher, always hit the poor hardest”. Thus, lowering indirect taxation helps the poorest the most. This is because a larger proportion of the incomes of the poor are taken up meeting VAT than is the case for the rich. In essence Labour are reversing the direction of taxation under Margaret Thatcher. She raised indirect taxation, Darling lowered it. She cut direct taxation on the rich, Darling promised to raise it in 2010. So ideology is back. But the consistency of the VAT cut with this return to ideology seems to have been missed. Consequently, we might see it as the last stealth tax. There have been a range of redistributive stealth taxes deployed over the past 11 years and we should add yesterday’s VAT cut to this list.