Alan Mak & Simon Maynard: Building the Opportunity Society is our party’s most important long- term task

Alan Mak and Simon Maynard are Conservative activists, writing in a personal capacity. Their paper on the OpportunitySociety will be published in 2012.

Whilst restoring Britain’s public finances and securing economic growth is the Coalition’s most pressing short-term priority, building the Opportunity Society is our party’s most important long-term task, and should form the basis of a distinctive Conservative platform for the next general election. The Opportunity Society has two dimensions: first, a society where community spirit and pride are renewed, so individuals take greater responsibility for themselves and their neighbours; and secondly, and most importantly, a society where social mobility flourishes, so that people can go as far and as fast in life as their talents will take them. Greater social mobility and community spirit are crucial not only to creating a fairer, more open society at ease with itself, but also to creating empowered individuals, stronger communities, and an economically competitive nation. In the Opportunity Society the State’s role will be to empower and enable individuals to make the most of their abilities, reward their hard work, and bring down the barriers that prevent their success.

After 13 years of Labour, there is much to do. Today, the life-chances of British children remain heavily dependent on the circumstances of their birth. According to the Cabinet Office, only 20% of young people from the poorest families achieve five good GCSEs, compared to 75% from richer families, whilst the Sutton Trust found that between 2007-2009, four schools and one college sent more students to Oxbridge than 2000 other state schools combined. An LSE study found Britain lagging behind our competitors such as Germany, France, Canada and Australia in terms of social mobility. We can’t afford to waste such talent. Britain needs to be an Opportunity Society, where success in life is based on talent and ambition not family background, the school you attended or the postcode you grew up in.

Simon Maynard: Middle Class benefits aren’t just blown on wine any more – and that’s the problem

Simon Maynard is a lawyer and councillor for Chase Ward in the London Borough of Enfield.

In reaction to the recent furore over the suggestion that the Coalition is conducting a spending review of universal welfare payments – middle class benefits in journalistic parlance – the satirical website The Daily Mash ran an article with the headline ‘Middle class could be forced to pay for things they can afford’.  The article ‘quoted’ a “senior source” in government as saying: “`We looked into who would be adversely affected by scrapping the £87 a month child benefit for middle class families and realised pretty quickly that it was Oddbins and Majestic”.

The irony of this quip is that 15 years ago it might have been true.  In 1997 the number of people paying the 40 pence rate of tax – then the upper rate – was just two million.  Today that number has almost doubled.  And the culprit?  Fiscal drag. 

Google it and you will find any number of technical definitions that sound like they have come straight out of an A-level economics textbook.  You will even find reasons why fiscal drag is a good thing – which it is, in small doses.  But ultimately it amounts to a tax rise by another name.  Income tax thresholds remain static, whilst both prices and earning rise, with the obvious result that more people pay more tax.

Theoretically governments should address this periodically by raising income tax thresholds.  Indeed, back in 2008 the TaxPayers Alliance estimated that the 40 pence bracket should be around £5,000 higher than its current level to have kept pace with wages, whilst the Institute for Fiscal Studies calculated that families are, on average, paying almost £900 a year more to the government because of fiscal drag and other tax rises than in 1997.     

Yet giving money back was hardly the calling-card of New Labour, least of all of the profligate tax-and-spend policies of Gordon Brown.  First as Chancellor and then as Prime Minister, all Brown had to do was keep quiet and watch as more of the public’s hard-earned money found its way into the Government’s coffers.