Category Archives: Politics

Britain, Economic, Government, Politics, Society

Budget 2024: Reasonably competent but lacking in spark

BRITAIN

HAD the Conservative Party been 20 points ahead in the opinion polls, this week’s Budget by the UK Government would have seemed a sound and steady-as-she-goes statement.

Some of the measures it contained will help many of Britain’s hard-pressed families and businesses. A 2p cut in National Insurance contributions, the second in just four months, means the average worker will be £900 better off. The Conservatives insist they will abolish NI altogether – in effect, a second income tax by another name – as soon as possible.

There were tax breaks for second homeowners, a rise in the amount small firms and the self-employed can earn before having to pay VAT, and incentives for our booming creative industries.

The budget also cunningly shot two of Labour’s most cherished foxes.

The Chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, tightened restrictions on “non-dom” status for wealthy foreigners living here and extended the windfall tax on oil and gas firms largely because of the protracted war in Ukraine. Labour had planned to pour the money raised from these measures into the bottomless pit of the unreformed public sector and into recklessly accelerating net zero targets. Mr Hunt has used it instead to fund tax cuts for the workers – a commendable move.

If elected, Labour would now have to finance its schemes by either reversing the NI cut, raising other taxes, or saddling the country with even more debt.

By raising the ceiling at which higher earning parents begin to lose child benefit from £50,000 to £60,000, he is saving half a million families an average of £1,300 a year.

A laudable budget, but will it be enough to turn around Tory fortunes? Politically, they are stuck in the trenches and more probably needs to be done to get them back on the offensive.

Despite the budget’s reasonable competence, Mr Hunt’s budget lacked spark. There were troubling omissions: no help for the young to get on the housing ladder; no extra cash for our beleaguered military; no scrapping of the perverse tourist tax; and, most discouragingly, no income tax cut.

There was plenty of rhetoric about the virtues of a low-tax economy. Yet, we remain more heavily taxed than at any time since the 1940s. Freezing allowances has been the worst culprit, dragging millions of people into higher tax brackets, but there is no sign of a thaw. Work must be seen to pay.

Since lockdown, productivity has crashed, especially in the public sector. Although the Treasury has pledged to tackle this culture of sluggishness, we have yet to be told how.

The macroeconomic predictions for this year are good for the Government. Growth, though still low, is forecast to rise, banishing fears of any lasting recession, and inflation to fall below 2 per cent, driving interest rates down and the cost of borrowing.

The Conservatives could yet sail into a general election on a wave of optimism. There may even be time for a genuinely bold tax-cutting mini-Budget in the autumn.

This was a redistributive budget that has helped many, but by no means a sure-fire election winner. For the Conservative Party to win this year’s general election, more still has to be done.

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Britain, Government, Middle East, Palestine, Politics, Society

Guarding our freedoms in the battle against extremism

BRITAIN

HISTORY AND EXPERIENCE shows that where there is an increase in tension in the Middle East is often followed by an increase in terrorist activity in the West.

It should come as no surprise, then, that our intelligence agencies are warning of an increase in “chatter” on the communication networks used by Islamist fanatics.

The analysis suggests that the situation is as bad now as at any time since the terror outrage of 9/11, 2001.

This is a worrying indication of a rising temperature, and Westerners would do well to heed it. You do not even have to take sides on the long-running Israel-Palestine dispute to recognise that events in Gaza are causing immense distress throughout the Arab and Muslim world – angst which violent zealots will be happy to exploit for their own ends.

Such people swim in the murky waters of extremism, so when there is more extremism, they are safer and stronger.

We must add to this the appalling increase of anti-Semitism in Britain over recent months, including the open support for Hamas expressed by some participants in repeated demonstrations in London and elsewhere.

Enter now the maverick George Galloway, whose undoubted victory in the Rochdale by-election, will be disturbing for many. Mr Galloway’s political win arises directly out of the failure of Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party to sort out its deep internal contradictions on anti-Semitism in its ranks.

Sir Keir seemed tough enough on this nasty form of bigotry when it flourished among hard-left supporters of the deposed leader Jeremy Corbyn. But as the behaviour of Labour’s now-disowned official Rochdale candidate, Azhar Ali, showed, Labour’s past wooing of the Muslim vote had made it less vigilant about anti-Semitism in such places. And so, Sir Keir had to abandon his own standard-bearer in what is being perceived as one of the most important by-elections, pre general election.

For the Labour leader, this is a question of competence, leadership, and principle. He claims to have changed his party so often that it is tempting to wonder whether he isn’t all that sure he has done so. Anti-Semitism in the Labour Party remains rampant and rife.

For the nation, however, the election of Mr Galloway is a warning that the civilised majority among all faiths must work a great deal harder to resist the siren calls of militancy and extremism.

The vote for Mr Galloway is understandable, but for voters elsewhere in the country not really excusable in anyone who values civilised debate. The attitude of his Workers Party of Great Britain to Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel places him far from the civilised limits of our political discourse.

There is much in Britain that brings citizens together, whatever our faith and background. But as Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has rightly warned: “There are forces here at home trying to tear us apart.” So, how do we beat these forces?

There are Government initiatives, such as the Prevent programme, which try to identify the problem of radicalisation early and to counter it with education.

There is simple vigilance and awareness, though the Government must be careful before imposing any more of the travel restrictions and surveillance that followed 9/11. The long-suffering public have had their liberties and freedoms more than constrained in recent years.

There is the public condemnation of repellent views – and at the very limit, there can be the prosecution of people for bigoted incitements.

Britons should never forget that our nation is founded on freedom. We will not save that freedom by restricting it out of existence.

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Britain, Government, Politics, Society

Disaffection is threatening our free and stable society

BRITAIN

FOR WHOM really was the winner in last week’s by-elections? “None of The Above” Party seems a more appropriate declaration given that 60 per cent of the electorate did not bother to exercise a right to vote in either of the seats being contested for. That’s a democratic crying shame. We elect our MPs about a dozen times during our adult lives.

Some will not try to diminish the Tory failure, but it was considerable. Nor should we assume that Labour is too weakly supported that it cannot win a General Election, for it is not. Or that the Reform Party is not a major threat to Rishi Sunak, because it is. Disaffected Tories are moving in their droves to Reform, unsettling for the Conservative Party if they have ambitions of holding on to power. More than ten per cent of Conservatives have already migrated. Yet, these simple truths are mere squalls on the surface of British politics.

Troubled depths lie beneath, which are full of potential dangers for our stable and free society.

Politics in the UK has fractured over the past quarter of a century. Until the eras of Thatcher and Blair, this country was still divided politically on much the same lines that had divided it in 1950. One big party stood for the industrial working class, the inhabitants of council estates and 19th Century terraces, and also for a small layer of city-dwelling radical intellectuals. The other stood for tree-lined suburbs and the countryside, white-collar workers, for small businessmen and professionals.

But by the time Mrs Thatcher had finished, and Mr Blair had begun his swinging social revolution, we were a different country.

All the old frontiers had melted away, just as the Iron Curtain bulldozed down made headway for a new Europe. Vast new problems grew and overshadowed the old ones: the replacement of industrial jobs with high-tech work or with call-centre drudgery, the flood of women into the workforce and away from the home, the astonishing expansion of universities, the transformation of family life, the computer revolution, and, perhaps above all, large-scale immigration.

Loyalties shifted and blurred, as the Brexit referendum showed beyond doubt. Politics had become troubling and deeply divisive.

In spite of that, Tory and Labour politicians still sought to win votes by using the old spells and incantations, which no longer worked – more police officers on the beat on one side, ever-expanding promises to fix the NHS on the other. The wider public, unfooled, look on with increasing dismay.

How is it so many pledges and promises are never fulfilled? Why is a rich country, full of skills and talent, now so lacking in good government that we navigate our lives amid a maze of potholes and crumbling roads, unprotected by an absent police force, and the many who are stuck in queues for everything from a dental appointment to hospital admission for a medical procedure or major operation? Public angst is growing.

We should not, however, despise our politicians; of whatever affiliation they may be. We live in an ancient and free democracy, and it should be allowed to thrive. Most people will understand that politicians bear a heavy responsibility and in many cases are personally devoted to serving their constituents. The great majority of parliamentarians are honest and well-intentioned.

But something has gone badly amiss in their relationship with those they represent. If left uncorrected, and the widespread discontent and disengagement now rife among us are not assuaged, a portal will open through which dangerous extremists can enter mainstream politics.

Such extremism is personified in the worrying figure of George Galloway, who appears now to have a real chance in the chaotic Rochdale by-election. As a lone maverick, Mr Galloway can do little harm. But what if other, similar figures, begin to profit from discontent and disaffection? A gateway certainly exists for trumping exploitation.

Our mainstream politicians should stop trying to placate voters with mere slogans and instead recognise that their concerns are real and pressing. The whole point of democracy is that such discontents be addressed.

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