I have to admit that last night's Sky Televisi9n debate with Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak was, overall, disappointing and uninspiring.
Beth Rigby did her best to bring to life two boring candidates to be Prime Minister, but at the end of the day, she had to work with the material that she got. When the most interesting thing that Rishi Sunak could say about himself to increase his appeal to voters was that he ate a lot of Twix, the scale of her task was apparent.
That said, she fell into the trap into which so many journalists appear to be falling at this election. She pushed the question of tax time after time, after time. That was a mistake. What was clear from the audience reaction was that what people wanted to talk about were public services, their quality, and the quantity of their supply.
Like, it seems all journalists, Beth Rigby has not realised that taxes are not an essential part of life. They are only the corollary of the supply of public services.
They are not even a precondition of the supply of those services because government always pays for everything it sorbs upon with money newly created on its behalf by the Bank of England.
The quantum tax required from the economy is, then, always the balancing figure within the fiscal equation, seeking to find the appropriate compromise between controlling inflation and providing economic stimulus.
All this nuance was lost when focusing upon tax alone, without ever discussing why that tax might not be at an appropriate level given the demand for public services in the country.
I can only hope that during the remainder of this election campaign there might be an improvement in the quality of debate on this issue. It is clear that both our leading political parties are talking nonsense about tax, with neither presenting any honesty about what levels of tax might be required given their wholly unrealistic appraisals of the scale of costs that they will have to incur to supply the services that the country will undoubtedly need.
As a result I just hope that debate might now be focused on issues like the health service, social care, education, environmental change and other critical matters. What level of tax is then required to balance the required level of spending becomes an appropriate issue for debate. Putting tax first is, however, wrong. That is not what happens within the economic operations of government. That is not what happens within the actual priorities of any sensible government. And that is not what the public are most interested in.
it is time that journalists, and politicians, got this right.
Thanks for reading this post.
You can share this post on social media of your choice by clicking these icons:
You can subscribe to this blog's daily email here.
And if you would like to support this blog you can, here:
Pushing taxes is a neoliberal ploy: no-one likes paying taxes, we all wish we could pay less.
But the other side of the coin, public services, are quietly forgotten, because the neoliberal plan is to replace them with private services, and to profit from them.
The last 14 years shows that a profit-led culture results in the lowest living standards in several generations, poorer access to healthcare, and raw sewage in our rivers.
Sadly all of the mainstream media, TV and newspapers are complicit.
Yes – the focus on tax is not a mistake, it is a strategy.
Mr Tresman: I agree with 100% of what you are saying. Given the cuddles between LINO and big-finance the following (although US focused) is highly relevant:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/jun/11/income-inequality-college-graduates-finance-consulting
Extract: “I’m surprised that only a third of graduating seniors at Harvard and similar places are heading into finance and consulting. In this era of raging income inequality and billionaire robber barons, the bags are gigantic. At Goldman Sachs they start at $105,000 to $164,000/year. At McKinsey, $100,000 to $140,000.”
Keep in mind people in these orgs are in very very close contact with LINO. The focus is further money extraction by US entities from the UK (ref Vassal State – Angus Hanton) & indeed, to facilitate this the further replacement of public services with private – all to help those @ Goldmans, McKinsey etc to fill their pockets. For them sewage filled rivers (or a global financial crash – 2008) are incidental.
As you say, tax is the corollary of public services (and controlling inflation caused by a government creating and spending new money).
The other item in which there is an unwarranted focus is “growth” or “productivity”. The Conservatives (madly) think they can get growth by doing much the same as the last 14 years but harder. Despite taking a hard line after the last election on an issue guaranteed to damage the UK economy, that is Brexit. Without asking why for example France per capita is a fifth to a third more productive than the UK.
And Labour think they can get growth by making a few small “fully costed, fully funded” changes while leaving most of the Conservative politics and rules in place. Just as mad.
A focus on the total amount of tax, or the overall GDP or growth or productivity, miss is allocation and distribution. It doesn’t just matter what these single mass figures are for the whole country: it matters how they are shared out. And the last few decades has seen an inexorable march towards greater inequality.
Agreed
Two incredibly mediocre leaders. Let’s give Starmer the benefit of the doubt and assume that his user safe approach is just to get elected and he’ll implement some radical plans once he’s in No 10. Oh just seen a pig fly past our house.
Twix? How apt. Under the packaging that is just what we have, two identical chocolate-covered biscuits which are demonstrably the same.
🙂
@Ian
Small state also means a bonfire of environmental and social regulations.
No protection against pollution.
No protection when Human Rights are dumped.
There is no way these will be privatised, though consultancies for the big4 are always on the cards.
The 80% cuts in the Engiish Environment Agency since 2010 are all part of the small state vision. That is totally dystopian.
They continue to talk about tax funding government spending when we know it doesn’t.
They also don’t go into details of how much of government spending effectively funds itself. For instance giving a nurse £10,000 results in £2,800 in employees NI & tax and £1,300 of employers NI. Leaving a net figure of £5,900 which they then spend on goods, some with VAT done without. So some of the remainder will be taxed variously by income tax, NI & corporation tax and then this flows into more taxes.
So, the nurse does not get £10,000 then
R4 Today headline quote from Starmer – ‘Tax and Spend’ is ‘not in his repertoire’.
Its as though ‘T and S’ is synonymous with something like Theft and Sewage. As we have already said on here – the language of our Newspeak is such that ‘spend’ is now a dirty word – essentially meaning ‘wasting money’ or ‘money down the drain’.
The Today interviewer of Labour’s Mcfadden carries on the collusion – McFadden trumpeting that the whole of the programme in the manifesto will be ‘about growth’ – but the unspoken underlying perspective is implied throughout the ‘interview’ – only the private sector creates growth which produces the money which can then be ‘spent’.
‘Investment in the public sector’ to create growth is not part of current political language or discourse.
No surprise this morning to see Rigby getting praise from her colleagues, the very same people who created this ludicrous atmosphere of fussing over trifling irrelevant details.
In my opinion she wasn’t up to it. But nor was Etchingham last week. Or Nick Robinson’s interviews. And so it goes on. no wonder the country is in near perpetual decline.
I observed that the media questioning of Sunak after that whacky manifesto launch at Silverstone was also of embarrassingly poor standard. All of them utterly missing the point and not up to it.
Of the three she has been the best
The design of taxation can also influence the relative rewards from investment options. You’ve urged a shift from rewarding economically unproductive savings. The government can invest directly in R&D, in infrastructure, can release or ‘encourage’ the private sector to make less use of critical resources to facilitate priorities in the public interest. Again, it’s tax as secondary means after the primary aims are addressed.