Cameron Watt: Shrinking Brown’s supplicant state

Cameron Watt is Deputy Director of the Centre for Social Justice, he writes here in a personal capacity.

I’m here in Dublin’s fair city for a family wedding. Ireland’s economic miracle has received considerable and deserved recognition in recent years. As shocking research released this week lays bare the inexorable growth of the UK as a supplicant state, it’s highly depressing comparing the Celtic Tiger to Brown’s Britain.

In the Republic of Ireland, state spending accounts for just 34% of the economy. Incredibly it’s over double that in Northern Ireland – 71%. In Wales, government spending is 64% of GDP; in north-east England it is 63%.

My native Scotland, where the figure stands at 56%, is a microcosm of the problem facing much of the UK. Its considerable natural and human resources could have been harnessed during the last fifteen years of economic growth to tackle crippling state dependency. Aberdeen has been the epicentre of the North Sea oil and gas boom since the late 1970s. Edinburgh is second only to London as a UK financial centre, home to some world-class companies including the all-conquering RBS. Yet taken as a whole, Scotland’s economy – and, more importantly, society – is ailing. In Glasgow, Scotland’s biggest city, 26% of working age adults lie beached on out-of-work benefits, and in some areas male life expectancy is less than North Korea and the Gaza Strip.

Gordon’s cowardice and dishonesty have been exposed this week. However this research is a powerful reminder that our Prime Minister is not just weak and disingenuous, but incompetent and profligate. In the most benign of economic times, government has been become ever more bloated through the relentless growth in unproductive public spending. As Chancellor, Gordon had a golden opportunity to increase the independence of Britain’s citizens and boost private enterprise through lowering taxes. Instead, he’s created a supplicant state in which turbo-capitalist London props up Labour heartlands in the North, Scotland and Wales. Economically, the United Kingdom has never been more divided, and the polarisations are predicted to grow.

Most conservatives, me included, yearn for significantly lower taxes and a shrinking state. Yet George Osborne has committed Conservatives to match Labour’s spending plans for three years. Conservative Home readers oppose this stance by a margin of 64% to 24%. However, all of us should concede that it has blunted the most effective of Labour’s lines of attack during recent lines – scare tactics of “Tory Cuts”.

The Conservative Party can never begin to reverse the damage Brown has done Britain if we don’t win power. And those of us who live in London should not under-estimate the challenge of winning seats as Warrington South (where I campaigned during the last general election), where a huge chunk of the electorate are wholly dependent on the state for their livelihoods, either through public sector jobs or benefits. A party with few representatives from public sector backgrounds and which represents mostly the less dependent parts of the UK does need to offer reassurance to voters.

Earlier this week, Danny Finkelstein made the important distinction between low taxes and shrinking the state. Many Conservative policies at the next election will reverse the root causes of poverty and dependency over time, but they will require significant initial investment. Danny cites the school choice that will drive up standards and attainment in areas with failing schools. Another is the intensive, personalised programmes to help people get back into work that should accompany Wisconsin-style time-limited welfare-to-work. Strengthening marriage and families through reforms to the tax and benefits system and introducing preventative relationship education will also incur costs that will take a few years to recoup.

I am confident that in once in power, Cameron, Osborne and their team’s instincts towards lower taxes will bring about the change needed to start shrinking Brown’s supplicant state. As well as investing to save in the ways outlined above, I hope they will consider giving the devolved governments the responsibility and power to tackle the unsustainable levels of dependency in their domains. The Barnett formula is clearly giving Scotland more than her fair share of the UK’s resources. A reduced but fairer funding settlement, combined with fiscal autonomy and greater control of business taxation including corporation tax, could be just the shock treatment Scotland needs.  MSPs would have start concentrating their minds on generating investment and revenue, not just spending more than they are entitled to on policies such as free university tuition.

***

So, the Serjeant-at-Arms has ordered us humble Commons pass-holders to defer to our parliamentarian betters in everything. MPs have been given the green light to jump the queue in restaurants, bars – even at photocopiers. This memo follows complaints from honourable members miffed at not being treated with the reverence their elevated status so clearly merits.

Some months ago I was having lunch in Parliament’s Strangers canteen with a small group that included an MP of the most recent intake. He almost exploded with righteous indignation when confronted with the prospect of having to wait, oh, maybe two minutes to be served. As he stomped around the canteen fuming, the rest of us had to smirk, marvelling at such wonderful pomposity in one so young.

I suspect most MPs will be wise enough not to lord it over us lesser mortals. Those who do can expect swift reprisals through blogs and diary columns.

Comments

[Dontmakemelaugh]

Kelvin Mackenzie has caused controversy by stating the same. It is interesting the Cameron Watt is a Scot - I have read previously articles of a similiar critical nature by other Scots.
Can't be any truth in it - after all the majority of Scots vote for Broon, the Man of Vision.

[Teesbridge]

I think it entirely proper that our MPs should be afforded VIP treatment, and moreover that they should not be subjected to the indignity of having to ask serving-persons "Don't you know who I am?".

To that end some clearly visible mark of their distinction should be worn at all times.

I suggest a brightly-coloured cap with bells.

[David Lindsay]

Quite apart from the fact that public sector pay is taxed (do the Tories' media outriders know this?), now that public spending accounts for such a huge percentage, sometimes the majority, of economic activity in great swathes of the country, that makes the private sector in those areas dependent on the public sector. And these days, much, even most, of that private sector belongs to national or international companies, such as the supermarket chains.

Just how dependent are now those chains, or those of gastropubs, or the fast food outlets, or the car dealerships, or even the banks, or so many other companies besides, on the spending power of public sector workers? For that matter, just how so dependent are the Sun and the Daily Mail?

In any case, Scotland, Wales, the North and the Midlands (as well as the West Country, against the Lib Dems) are where the Tories have to win seats if they are ever to return to office. But carry on putting out articles like this, and you will just pile up enormous majorities in the South East of the kind that Labour used to get from the miners. Where are the miners now?

[David McEwan Hill]

Some ill-informed comments here. The majority of Scots have never voted Labour. Even at the heights of Blair's popularity he got nowhere near 50% of Scottish votes. The only party ever to get over 50% of the Scottish vote was the Tories in the 1950s. The Labour Party historically achieves in the 35 - 40% range but our daft electoral system gives them a majority of seats because of the concentration of Labour votes in central Scotland. The Labour vote in Scotland has shrunk over the last four elections and now stands in the low thirties. Gordon Brown - who is NOT popular in much of Scotland - will keep it going down. All the stuff about Brown being favoured in Scotland is piffle. We know him very well. At home he has a LibDem MP and MSP and his local councillor is SNP. It was inevitable that being exposed to public scrutiny would find Brown out. He is a completley false construct built up carefully over years of avoiding publicly challenging debate. He is also cynical, unscrupulous and totally self-serving - which even huge areas of the Labour party up here are aware of.
What should concern the Tory Party is the folly of Scotland's Tories who were doing awfully well after the Scottish parliament election with a sensible but not uncritical relationship with the new Scottish Government until they were instructed to abandon this position and have now joined LABOUR and the washed-up LibDems in a grubby coalition against he SNP. This is exactly what the SNP wanted - but assuredly what Scotland's demoralised Tories didn't.

[Scottish Conservative]

The fact that this bloke is Scottish is neither here nor there. It seems to be that Scots in and around the English Tory Party feel the need to prove just how unScottish they are by going on about how unfair the Barnett formula is, how we are paid for by England bla bla bla. Its almost like a form of triangulation "look im really not one of those awful chippy Scots at all, Im actually just like you - i think those odious Scots are awful as well". This is really about trying to ingratiate themselves with the anti-Scottish Kelvin MacKenzie style bigots who seem to make up a large proportion of the English Tory Party. The English Party is obsessed with 'the Scots are getting this the Scots are getting that' and all this endless grievance politics - no better than the SNP.

As for the need for a 'fairer' funding arrangement it was a different story when Scottish oil paid for the Thatcher revolution I didnt hear anyone whingeing then. I trust youll be repaying our net contribution from then as part of this new found fondness for fairness.

After the Scotland football game today I was listening to the phone in and Kelvin MacKenzie was brought up several times as were similar remarks by English Tories such as Boris Johnston. I felt ashamed to be a Tory as I listened to it - there is almost a straight contradiction between being a Tory and being Scottish even for an old right winger like me. As for the Scottish Party I dont expect a peep from them on this. God only knows what English Tory MPs would be saying if a Scot said that on Question Time, but will Scottish Tories say anything to distance ourselves from these sentiments no of course not. That wouldnt be Unionist. Not that English Tories give two hoots for the Union if that involves repressing some of their anti-Scottish urges. Thank God the rest of the English population are decent and dont think like this as evidenced by the audience in Cheltenham.

[David McEwan Hill]

To those who want a really insightful destruction of Gordon Brown from a Scot who knows him well I would recommend a look at McWhirter in today's Sunday Herald(the only remotely insightful Sunday newspaper in Scotland).
Brown is finished. No politician survives being a laughing stock. I suspect a clever and complicted plot has just succeeded in landing the Labour party with a lame duck leader.