As a loyal former Labour member of parliament I occasionally supported policies for which my passion was less than total. Yet rarely did I sense a whole queue of them steaming up together, like proverbial London buses, as they appear to me today. I am talking about minimum wage, mansion tax, ‘after Scotland’ and the NHS.
Why do we need a ‘mansion tax’? It will disproportionately impact south-east England, where Labour has haemorrhaged votes since 1997. It will be portrayed as discouraging aspiration and will need new assessment and enforcement procedures. What’s wrong with council tax? Labour expediently shelved a property revaluation in 2007 and the coalition has not undertaken one since; thus this revenue stream is reduced. English council tax relates to 1991 property values, lumping all homes valued at more than £320,000 in the top band. Revaluation plus adding bands of half, one and two million would require mere tweaking rather than creating a new bureaucracy; it would bring in more money, its tiered nature would appear fair and it may even put a brake on house prices.
Labour rightly established the Low Pay Commission where unions and employers agree an annual rise in national minimum wage independently of ministers. What is to be LPC’s future if ministers are to decide the rate of the minimum wage? This would undermine the independence and credibility LPC needs to deliver a rising minimum wage every year. Of course an incoming government should share its aspirations with the commission but the detail, pace and affordability of the task should be the commission’s decision, not the politicians’.
Who actually benefits from raising the minimum wage? Thanks to tax credit tapers some people lose over half of any rise created in this way as the Treasury recoups costs, a significant government saving from a system which subsidises stingy employers. A big rise in the basic tax allowance, balanced by changes to other rate thresholds, does not fall into the same trap; and how about making the living wage, not just the minimum wage, a condition for companies to win government contracts?
On the NHS, the current debate is about what we can afford, where extra money will come from and how many more staff we need. Yet we’ll never afford a better health service if we rely on the supply-led criteria of the last half-century. We are living longer. Chronic disease is more prevalent, for a variety of reasons. Most worryingly, ill health from avoidable causes is at a record high and growing, from childhood obesity to type two diabetes and the persistence of smoking.
We make our NHS sustainable by reducing demand, not continuing the old ‘predict and provide’ ethos. That means engaging communities to better support elderly, infirm and lonely people, better food labelling, controlling sugar and salt content, better nutrition education and improving access to healthy food. It means more use of alternatives to drugs, educating people to make better use of GP and A&E services and a lot more self-management of conditions, not least mental health, through the use of personal budgets and expert patient initiatives. It means making the NHS into a health service and not a sickness service.
On devolution in the wake of the Scottish referendum the question of English votes for English members of parliament is of supreme indifference to me. The number of truly ‘English-only’ votes in parliament is tiny: for example, I would argue that by making our capital work better London’s Crossrail, endorsed by a parliamentary bill, is a United Kingdom issue and not an ‘English’ one. The real challenge is to restore to local government discretionary powers it used to have and devolving many of those powers even further – to natural, engaged and capable communities, alongside capacity-building measures where necessary.
These concerns are sincere and heartfelt; my worry is that we either don’t mean what we say on these policies or we are creating rods for our own backs.
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Tom Levitt is former member of parliament for High Peak. He tweets at @sector4focus
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When started reading and finished this article, I thought it was by one of the “in-crowd,”
“Bright Young Things” aspiring “Career Politicians,” “Wanabes” (so often favoured by Progress editorial) that was beginning to see the light! Instead of jumping onto the yet “more reform
bandwagon,” this was a considered, well-argued piece. Then, I looked up Tom and saw that he was an older, experienced guy. It emphasised the view that wisdom DOES come with age, provided one has had varied life experience. We need more contributors like Tom.
New Labour and the Tories have done so much damage to the Public Sector in the guise of “reform.” It is utterly demoralised with low self-esteem and morale. Teachers and Nurses are sick to death of Career Politicians trying to make a name for themselves. For career ministers, there are no brownie points making a case for doing nothing.
If New Labour had the guts, they would re-nationalise the utilities, which are out of control. Old, experienced people like me argued at the time of Privatisation that one is replacing a state monopoly with a private one. In the former we had control over it. Now, they more or less do as they please. But New Labour just worships the god of the Market, even though it is proven to be
a false god in the long run. Instead of feeding the property developers and investors by building over the South East and destroying the countryside, there needs to be substantial council and housing association development for real homes for those unable to buy.
Little wonder the Grey Vote is voting UKIP in droves!
But then, what do we older, experienced people know? We are contemptible ignoramuses!!!
Instead of Miliband surrounding himself with “child advisors” (I’ve seen his entourage at conference) he wants to have mature people like Tom who have knowledge by experience, not just out of a book!
OLD GRASSROOTS GEEZER