A Modest Proposal

Sean Gabb

Since 1997, Gordon Brown has presided over an explosion of state spending – and of the taxes needed to fund this. He has also more than doubled the British national debt. Most of the money has been spent on salaries and pensions for the ruling class and for its various clients. One of the main issues in British politics is how to stop this haemorrhage of our money into their pockets, and also how to get some of it back to help pay off the principal of the debt.

Here’s a proposal for quick and easy spending cuts.

No one in the public sector should be allowed to earn more than £40,000. No one in the public sector should be allowed to collect a pension of more than £20,000. This should include everyone from dustmen all the way down to Cabinet Ministers. Well, it should include everyone but those tax eaters – Trevor Phillips, Peter Mandelson, et al – who would just be sacked and deprived of all pension expectations.

This is a proposal that might allow cuts to some of the grosser salaries, but doesn’t, in itself, touch those pensions already granted. Everyone in politics seems agreed that the “public faith” shouldn’t be broken by arbitrary changes to contractual rights and obligations – as if the tax payers have an obligation to pay every bill run up by our tribe of hand-in-till politicians! Indeed, as if faith had ever been kept in more than the formal sense with the rights and expectations of those targeted by the State.

However, we could achieve the proposed reductions for everyone in the public sector by using the tax system. We don’t need to unpick contracts and tear up old pension agreements. The Government simply needs to impose a supplemental tax on everyone whose income is derived from the State. Therefore, Rupert Snottleigh, former Chair of the Lifestyle and Social Engineering Directorate for the South West Region, may feel snug with his £120,000 a year pension. My proposed supplemental income tax would take that straight down to £20,000. In the same way, the salary of the Prime Minister would be cut from £194,250 to £40,000 – would that cause any shortage of candidates for the job? Could it possibly reduce the quality of candidates? Of course, “Dame” Betty Woad, Head of the England Walking! Initiative at DEFRA, would see her salary cut from £247,000 to zero. She could also go sing for her pension.

These people have spent the past few decades talking rapturously about what high taxes can enable in the way of state solutions. Well, here are some taxes that certainly enable a few solutions. It would cut public spending by billions upon billions of pounds. It would also make me very happy!

Why should these people have pensions when ours have been made worthless by the burden of paying theirs? Or when our pensions have been made worthless by their regulatory efforts?

It might be worth imposing the same kind of tax on the management of all the banks we were forced to bail out the year before last. Certainly, my proposal is not restricted to those directly and wholly employed by the State. It also applies to everyone in the various quangos and executive agencies set up over the past quarter century. The test should not be formal corporate status, but the origin of an organisation’s budget. Therefore, the proposal also covers the BBC and the Church of England.

Bearing in mind how utterly useless she has been at remembering her Coronation Oath, it might also cover the Queen and her various hangers on.

So come on, Mr Dave – give us a reason for voting Tory!