When I started reading this piece, I was expecting to be annoyed. I anticipated that Clegg would make some moderately specious arguments, based on carefully chosen statistics. I intended to refute these arguments. But as I read on, all I could think was, he's not even trying. The last three paragraphs of the article don't even have anything to do with fairness or inequality; they're merely a defence of the Liberal Democrats decision to pal around with Tories.
Mr. Clegg, I'm not just angry, I'm also disappointed. Let us examine what is being said here.
Clegg begins by drawing a line between 'old progressives' and 'new progressives'. He doesn't bother to define progressive, but one can only assume that he means someone who promotes progress and improvement. The old progressives, it seems, happen to be concentrated in the Labour party. They believe that the more the government spends, the more progress will be made.
This is dismissed as, 'clearly nonsense'. Yes, it is simplistic and I doubt anyone would disagree. In fact, I doubt Labour would disagree. Clegg then makes the jump to paying off the deficit more quickly being progressive in and of itself, making no mention of any possible implications that this might have. Paying off the deficit is being carefully partitioned away from cuts to public services. The former can be painted as an economic imperative; the latter scares people. Discussing one without the other is dishonesty by omission. Clegg's justification for deficit panic is the risk of higher interest rates on mortgages, more debt servicing, and a greater burden for taxpayers. Frankly I'm getting tired of these three excuses. There are a multitude of assumptions under there, the most significant of which is that austerity won't cause the same chaos here as Ireland is currently enjoying.
Clegg doesn't go into this. Instead, he proceeds to say that lifting people out of poverty isn't progressive. I am not exaggerating. Quote:
Old progressives see a fair society as one in which households with incomes currently less than 60% of the median were to be, in Labour's telling verb, "lifted" out of poverty. The weakness of this approach is that significant resources end up being devoted to altering the financial position of these households by fairly small amounts – just enough, in many cases, to get them above the line. But poverty plus a pound does not represent fairness.
Mr. Clegg is saying that putting significant resources into making a lot of people's quality of life better is wrong. How can you counter that sort of breath-taking arrogance? What is unfair about helping people to move above the poverty line? The whole idea of a poverty line is that below it quality of life is inadequate and basic needs cannot be met. I'm sure the people helped by the state to heat their homes, pay their rent, and clothe their children didn't stop to think, 'Gosh, how unfair it is that the state is helping me! Damn their unprogressiveness!'
After conceding that poverty is a perhaps little bit about money, Clegg makes the connection with quality of public services. These would be the same public services from which the government is chiselling around £80 billion of savings over the coming years. Will this increase the quality of services to the poor? Do I need to answer that?
The three areas of public spending identified as progressive, and therefore worthy of protection, are early years, schools and the NHS. That's it. From this we can infer that there's nothing fair about protecting people from crime, so cut the police. Or from injustice, so cut the courts and legal aid. Providing welfare payments for the disabled, sick and elderly isn't progressive at all, so they can all be reduced. There is apparently no fairness in allowing people a half-decent home, so cutting the housing budget by half is no problem. Higher education isn't progressive, so universities can be encouraged to raise their fees in order to make up funding cuts. Caring for vulnerable children isn't progressive, neither is protecting the environment, nor responding to fires, providing transport, community centres, flood defences, job centres, libraries, trading standards, and so on.
The title of the article implies that the government is concerned about inequality persisting down the generations, yet no examples are provided of ways in which entrenched poverty will be tackled. This argument that cuts won't be made to the NHS, schools or early years is the only one tried. Quite apart from the fact that close examination of the CSR undermines it, all that the government are doing here is freezing spend at the level of the previous regime. This is supposedly progressive, although increasing the level of state funding to that level during the Labour years wasn't.
Faced with this slight difficulty in his public services argument, Clegg veers off into social mobility. New progressives want to remove the barriers to social mobility. That's entirely laudable, but what is the government doing about these barriers? Apparently just the Pupil Premium, which will be paid for through reductions elsewhere in the education budget. It's yet to become clear how it will work, but importantly it is for school children. The social mobility of everyone older is left unmentioned.
Turning now to tax, Mr. Clegg states:
New progressives want to reshape the tax base fundamentally, towards greater taxation of unearned wealth and pollution, rather than of people.
How nice. I presume a carbon tax is forthcoming? A land tax, perhaps? Extra tax on second homes? Clegg must surely working on those? Very quietly, though, as all he mentions are the changes to income tax and capital gains tax. I don't disagree that those changes seem seem to benefit those on lowest incomes most, as the IFS analysis showed. What goes unmentioned is the most regressive tax of all, VAT, being raised to 20% next year. There is also no reference to the purpose of most tax: to redistribute money. Wanting to move away from taxing people implies that this is no longer an aim of the government. Why not? Are we back to the Victorian notion that every individual is responsible for their own level of wealth, and if they can't earn enough to feed and clothe themselves they don't deserve help? How is that in any way consistent with social mobility?
The article then ends with an extraordinary three paragraphs that read as an attempt to justify the Liberal Democrats sell-out to the Conservatives. According to Nick Clegg, coalition governments are inherently progressive, whatever they do. Why? Because of pluralism. What might look like a calculated assault on public services, a callous betrayal of the vulnerable, and an extremely risky economic gamble is in fact a beautiful example of pluralism and compromise. So Mr. Clegg tells us.
I for one am not remotely convinced.
Reading between the lines, these so-called new progressives seem to think that a smaller state is inherently fairer. That giving people fair life chances means leaving the worst off to help themselves if they can. That markets will sort out poverty without the state bothering to get involved. All of this is in my view incorrect. Greater state intervention doesn't automatically reduce poverty and inequality unless it's done carefully, but without it inequalities just deepen and persist.
I don't know what the new progressives believe, but just look at who they are. Nick Clegg and at least another 17 of the 29 who comprise the coalition cabinet are millionaires; 23 if you believe The Daily Mail. George Osborne, a chancellor who takes pride in personifying the cuts, has an inherited trust fund and personal wealth of around four million pounds. 20 of the 29 cabinet members went to Oxford or Cambridge. 25 are male, 28 are white. Other than the royal family, can you think of any group in this country less qualified to lecture about fairness?
No comments:
Post a Comment