Warning: I'm going to write about politics. I know, I know. Something best attempted when no-one else is looking, so I'm hoping the X-factor will provide some cover. And to think I'm an uber-Cameroon: hello sky, hello trees. Would it redeem my moderniser credentials if I admit that these thoughts formed in my head while I was bobbing around in an open-air swimming pool, not, like, while I was at a policy seminar or anything? Here goes.
It's time the party proposed a sharp rise in the threshold at which people start paying income tax. I think there's a tactical as well as a moral case for this.
(By the way: never trust writers who propose a thesis and then claim, as I just have, that their hypothesis is supported by a sequence of points so logical that they will bombard you into submissive agreement. I make political decisions on instinct, so consequently try to refrain from attempting post-hoc rationalisation of that which my stomach dictates. Everyone should take the Myers-Briggs personality assessment at some point in their career. I'm an ENTP, the feedback for which is "You offer pseudo-logical reasoning for something you just happen to want" - I hope no-one who works for me is reading this.)
Previously I shied away from the tax-cutting agenda, even while instinctively supporting it, because my mind is too full of the horrors of the electoral bloodbath into which we've voluntarily jumped at the last three general elections. Daniel Finkelstein had it completely right, I thought: calling for tax cuts gave Labour an open goal to aim at. As soon as any Tory even hinted at their possibility, you could hear the hum of all those union-funded mail-merged letters printing off at the union-funded Labour constituency offices, ready to be hand-delivered, with a little moue of concern, to every public sector worker in every marginal seat. We said: People Pay Too Much Tax; they heard: They're Going To Sack My Dad. And probably that nice woman who looks after Gran on Wednesdays.
The problem with avoiding this issue is the simple truth that we all pay too much tax, and that disproportionately, the less money you earn, the more of your income goes in tax, and the more quickly you get pushed into the means-testing maw of the tax credit machine. This is a rubbish situation at the best of times; it's an affront to civilised values in a recession. The question was always not whether people should pay less tax, but when it would be politically acceptable to make the case.
That time is now. I'm well aware that there are lots of learned economists who would argue contrarily. We're in recession, and government spending on social security etc will have to rise. Fine. But contemporaneously, all of us will be reviewing our household budgets and making economies where we can. Very few voters would find the concept of the government performing the same exercise incoherent; quite the reverse. And what better mechanism for forcing the government to reduce its wasteful spending than by reducing its income, i.e. by reducing the amount of the money it takes from our payslips.
I don't accept that it's either/or in any case. If we go for some Keynesian-ish spending on public works, most of that money will come from yet more borrowing, not from (falling) tax receipts. Of course government spending and borrowing will rise in the short term as recession bites. But it shouldn't rise inexorably, everywhere, on everything, should it? Until when? Until the markets won't lend anymore? Let's help the government rediscover some financial discipline by giving it less of our income.
(Tactically, and of least importance: Brown will offer tax cuts before the general election, to build on the momentum he'll get from winning the Glenrothes by-election, to "stimulate spending and protect the most vulnerable". This will make the well-founded fears of Daniel Finkelstein - fears I completely understand - look irrelevant.)
In times of crisis it helps to focus on guiding principles, the axioms, the magnets we use to set our political compass. Recession is a crisis. These are truths which I find self-evident: people on the lowest incomes pay too much tax and suffer the indignity of means-testing too often. They are also going to suffer the most from the recession. The Tory party focuses on the needs of such people or its function is redundant. Income tax thresholds must be raised, and the overall burden of tax must fall.
