CentreRight

Gordon  Brown has cost the UK £3 trillion, run up a £700 billion budget deficit and forced a prospective Conservative government into making some tough decisions.

Yesterday marked the release of my new book, co-authored with David Craig, called Fleeced! How we’ve been betrayed by the politicians, bureaucrats and bankers…and how much they’ve cost us. It is the very first book to bring together the total cost of government spending, the bailouts, the banking crisis and Westminster expenses scandal in one comprehensive text and lays bare the terrible truth about Gordon Brown’s criminal miscalculations since he assumed control of the UK economy in 1997.

Yesterday also marked the start of the TUC conference. As Tim Montgomerie has noted elsewhere on this site, no one has taken much notice of this event for some time, but with public sector cuts now high on the political agenda and Labour floundering around for any support it can muster, the TUC has once again become worthy of media attention.

Unsurprisingly, despite the dire financial straits in which Britain currently resides, the unions are looking to protect public sector jobs, wages, expenses and gold-plated pensions from any planned cuts (which is ironic given that Unison has recently abolished their own employee final-salary pension).

Nevertheless, the TUC may not be alone in trying to block spending cuts by the next Government – there are other vested interests which the Conservatives (assuming they are the next Government) will come up against, and it could be politically expedient for the Party to take them on straight away.

First are the consultants, who George Osborne rightly highlighted in his conference speech last year as a source of spending cuts to off-set council tax rises. By our reckoning, consultants cost the British taxpayer £2.8 billion a year. The NHS, for instance, spends around £600 million a year on management consultants, a cool £15,000 per manager in an already bloated system.

Ken Clarke’s announcement on the BBC Politics Show yesterday that the Conservatives would support the Lisbon Treaty if the Irish ratified it before the Tories come into Government was intensely disappointing. While many eurosceptics had been naturally concerned about the vague promises that “we will not let matters rest there” trooped out by numerous Shadow Cabinet members in the hot seat in recent weeks, many had hoped faithfully that the strong implication that the Conservative leadership would deliver  a retrospective referendum was accurate. It is now down to David Cameron to clarify that position.

When Ken Clarke was invited into the Shadow Cabinet, the nation was told that he would not be allowed to force the Conservative Party into following his unnatural and unpopular support for closer EU integration. Sadly, it seems that yesterday he attempted to rush the Opposition into just such a commitment. Originally, he accepted publicly that he was out of step with majority Conservative and public opinion, and promised to bend to the Party line on Europe. He appears to have forgotten that pledge and blurted out his own, personal opinions as the Conservative Party’s official policy yet again.

Surely it must only be his personal view, because the arguments made by everybody else against the Lisbon Treaty and for a referendum remain as strong as ever. The case made by David Cameron against Lisbon is still as compelling as it was 13 days ago when he said that the Treaty would transfer too much power to Brussels, and that it was a part of the “endless process of building a European superstate” which is anathema to his and most people’s vision of our future relationship with Europe. Mr Cameron was right to promise to change the law so that powers can never be given away to the EU without a referendum first – and Ken Clarke’s comments are clearly incompatible with that promise.

Today, the Commons vote on the level of the BBC licence fee. The Government seems to be planning to approve yet another increase, whilst the Tories are proposing a freeze. A freeze would of course be better than another rise, but in actual fact a cut is perfectly possible.

Leaving aside the larger issues of organisational waste and so on, which must be dealt with in order to produce larger reductions, there is a £6 slice of the licence fee which could be got rid of with no problem at all: the digital switchover levy.

This was added in 2007 to raise the BBC a total of £800m over 5 years that would be spent on the hardware changes involved in moving to digital TV broadcasting and the public awareness advertising to make sure everyone knew about it and got their telly set up in time.

In Parliament back in 2007, Tessa Jowell in her capacity as Culture, Media and Sport Minister made very clear that this was going to be a temporary levy:

'In particular the licence fee settlement will fund the £600m scheme we are putting in place to help elderly and disabled people make the switch and as part of our comittment to the universal broadcasting ensure that no-one is left behind. [...] The BBC will also pay for the £200m public communications campaign being run by Digital UK to ensure people are prepared properly and informed properly for switchover.

Next Thursday a new book by me and David Craig - author of the influential Plundering the Public Sector and Squandered books - will be released, The Great European Rip-Off.  You can pre-order the book already but, in the meantime, we have revealed dynamite new evidence of how too many MEPs enrich themselves at the taxpayers’ expense.

Among the explosive findings in the book are details about the Galvin Report which contains evidence of widespread abuse.  MEPs have been paying expenses to shell companies, huge bonuses are paid to use up an MEP’s staff allowance and travel expenses are wide open to abuse.

We have also shown that, while still living comfortably and enjoying the basic staffing and facilities they need, MEPs can rack up enough in dodgy expenses claims to emerge a millionaire after a single term in the European Parliament.  On top of that, thanks to a combination of tax changes, exchange rate movements and a pay rise MEPs will be getting a 47% pay rise this year.

Not all MEPs are rotten.  The Conservative MEPs, under the leadership of Timothy Kirkhope MEP, led the way earlier this year by publishing expenses details online, but there are far too many MEPs abusing their expenses and enjoying the gravy train.  For many European parliamentarians, getting elected has become a route to personal enrichment rather than a way of serving their constituents.  This doesn’t just cost taxpayers’ money that is lost to fraud but makes honest politics impossible.

When the Conservatives are thinking about their next party political broadcast, they might like to look at a powerful TV Ad produced by Ridley Scott in the mid-1980s called the Deficit Trials.

Unfortunately, the major networks in the US didn't carry it at the time because it was deemed to be too controversial, but I think it would make a powerful impact now were the Conservatives to produce a similar Ad for a British audience.

Iain Martin notes in the Telegraph today that the Conservatives need to replace a “doomed policy predicated on the idea of sharing growth that is now non-existent”.  He is absolutely right and the party’s leadership clearly accept that.

If they thought that “sharing the proceeds of growth” was relevant to the troubled economic times we are currently enduring then they would be proposing spending cuts and tax increases; sharing the recession-driven fall in government revenue just as they proposed to share growth-driven increases.  You don’t have to be a Keynesian to think that is a pretty unappealing idea and that is why they're looking for a new economic policy.

Here’s an idea for a policy better suited to a recession: “Sharing the burdens of recession.”

We can put some stylised numbers on what that would mean.  The European Commission expects that the UK economy will shrink by roughly one per cent next year, roughly £15 billion.  State spending makes up roughly 40 per cent of the economy.  If spending were cut by 40 per cent of £15 billion, if the public sector did its share of the belt tightening, then that would mean savings in public spending of £6 billion.  That would be enough to put £100 a year in the pocket of every taxpayer.

You could definitely go further, and the TaxPayers’ Alliance would, but if you put that £6 billion into a simple tax cut that would benefit everyone (e.g. increasing the income tax threshold) it would be a major step towards making the Conservatives the party of choice for anyone wanting to see more money in their pocket.

Are savings of £6 billion achievable?

Definitely. The TPA has already set out a single measure that would save nearly half the amount required:  Scrap the regional development agencies.  Eric Pickles has already said, to quote from the Birmingham Post, that these bodies are “unrepresentative and unaccountable, and the best thing that could be said about their performance was that they hadn’t done any serious damage.” There are plenty more clear and tangible savings to be had in the 1,162 quangos and agencies that litter Government.  From English Partnership to government funded consumer pressure groups and NHS regional bodies there are ineffective organisations and programmes that can be scrapped.

Sharing the proceeds of growth is a slogan suited to very different economic times, the good times which we enjoyed until recently.  Now the proper question isn’t how we will share the proceeds of a growing economy, but how we will share the burdens of a recession.  The Conservatives should provide an answer to that question which will appeal to a taxpaying public that wants politicians to deliver value for money. Families are tightening their belts. So should government.

Russell Brand, a BBC presenter, phoned Andrew Sachs, to brag about his alleged sexual exploits with Mr. Sachs granddaughter. Jonathan Ross, a BBC presenter, famous for being famous, goaded him on. Now Mr. Brand has been forced to resign and Mr. Ross has been suspended. This happened because two people complained to the BBC about comments made in their show, other complaints followed later.

Whatever one thinks of Brand and Ross, and I must say I don’t think either of them fulfils the BBC’s remit to provide quality programming, this episode reveals the warped priorities of the BBC.  We all paid for their ill judged comedy routine because if you receive TV broadcasts, you are required to pay the BBC licence fee. However, no one died, the statements were not racist and they did not encourage violence.

There are numerous other examples of far worse views being suported, at our expense, by the BBC.  At the same time as Brand and Ross made their offensive call the BBC comment sections on Israel include numerous comments, allowed by BBC monitors, which are profoundly racist and excuse and in some cases encourage aggression against Israel.  A recent example can be found in the Antisemitism Discourse in Britain 2007 Report by the Community Security Trust.

Anti Semitism is regrettably alive and well in Britain. A large minority of the British public agree or somewhat agree that Jewish people are only loyal to other Jews, have too much power in the financial world and control US Middle Eastern policy. This is the assessment of a new report by the Community Security Trust detailing Anti Semitism in Britain in 2007.

Particularly alarming are the results of a 2007 European opinion survey by the Anti Defamation League which is cited in the report. This survey canvassed the views of Britons on Jews, Israel and anti Semitism. It revealed that a significant minority of Britons hold anti-semitic beliefs.

This minority believes that Jewish people who work to promote the interests of British Judaism are agents for Israel. They use the terms Israel, Jew and Zionist interchangeably in voicing their criticisms and are unable or unwilling to distinguish between them. Their perception of British Jews has become dependent on the actions of Israel herself and they believe that British Jewry unduly influences parliament through shadowy groups such as Conservative Friends of Israel and Labour Friends of Israel to support the Israeli state. In short, there is according to a significant minority of British people, a Jewish conspiracy to control the world and all Jews are somehow in on it.

Alex Deane has posted on the extreme views being taught in Regents Park Mosque as shown in tonight’s Channel 4 Dispatches programme Undercover Mosque: The Return. The TaxPayers’ Alliance wants the Government to ensure that those responsible have their state funding eliminated until they put in place procedures to ensure the end of this hateful preaching.

British Muslims are being indoctrinated to hate Britain and its values in British Mosques. Viewers will witness preachers in London’s Regents Park Mosque urge worshippers to murder gays and ex-Muslims and to hate non-Muslim Britons. Eighteen months ago, Dispatches original programme Undercover Mosque showed preachers praising the murderers of British troops and asking their followers to “live like a state within a state, until you take over”. The Government must act now to stop funding the groups mentioned in the report because they have clearly failed to tackle extremism.

Taxpayers provide significant financial assistance to British Muslim bodies. In 2005 the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) received £50,000 from the Home Office. In 2006 the MCB was awarded £300,000 by the Department for International Development. The Government’s Pathfinder Against Violent Extremism scheme, launched in 2007, is distributing £70 million to Muslim community groups. We need to ensure that none of this money goes to extremist groups or groups which fail to combat the extremists in their midst and that this expenditure yields clear positive results such as greater Muslim cooperation with the police or more moderate preaching in Britain’s mosques.

A joke to brighten up Monday morning...

A driver is stuck in a traffic jam going into Central London. Nothing is moving north or south. Suddenly a man knocks on his window. The driver rolls down his window and asks, 'What Happened, what's the hold up?'

'Terrorists have kidnapped Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling. They are asking for a £10 million ransom.. Otherwise, they are going to douse them with petrol and set them on fire. We are going from car to car, taking up a collection.'

The driver asks, 'On average, how much is everyone giving?'

'About 2 litres'

(Apologies to CentreRight readers who also received it by email over the weekend - I couldn't resist sharing it with everyone else).

Nigel Evans' tax transparency initiative - which Tim and Sam have blogged about on ToryDiary - reminds me of an episode which Lee Rotherham and I wrote about in our first Bumper Book of Government Waste.

In 1974, Prime Minister Harold Wilson sent a memo to his ministers saying, “In the coming weeks, I want to show that as a government we are sensitive to little points which may be trivial in the context of government policy but carry a disproportionate weight in people's minds."

Among the “little points" was tax and, in particular, openness with taxpayers on how revenues were being spent. Wilson wrote to his Chancellor, Denis Healey, suggesting that taxpayers should be given a diagram showing how taxes were used. “One of the complaints which I often hear from constituents and others is that in contrast to the local rates, no one ever bothers to tell them how their taxes are spent."

He added: “I find it hard to believe that the job of putting this extra slip of paper into each envelope would bring the Inland Revenue machine to a halt." Thirty years later, we are still waiting.

We haven't had time at The TaxPayers' Alliance to sift through all 93 pages of the 'Review of Allowances' published by the House of Commons Members Estimates Committee at 10am this morning, but we have been through all the recommendations and on our initial reading there is one glaring omission from the proposals - Transparency.

All the tough talk in the report will mean nothing if the public is denied access to the details of expenses claims. For example, the report proposes that MPs should to be banned from using taxpayers' money to buy new kitchens, televisions and other household goods for their second homes in London. Good.

It also says that there will be tighter checks on how they spend their expenses, including spot checks by the National Audit Office and a complete external audit once a Parliament. Again, good.

But nowhere in the report does it say that the recent advances in transparency, won through the hard-fought Freedom of Information battle spearheaded by Heather Brooke, should be recognised and officially adopted by the Commons.

The most recent high-profile abuses of the expenses system show that the Fees Office cannot be trusted to monitor expenses and enforce the rules on our behalf. Any member of the public should be allowed to sift through their MP's receipts (or any other MP's receipts) to ensure that their tax money is being carefully spent.

If the system continues to operate behind closed doors, away from the gaze of taxpayers and voters, it will be all to easy for the abuses to creep back in. Without this guarantee, the majority of MPs who are honest and hardworking will continue to be tarred with the same brush as the small minority who have, to be frank, acted like crooks.

Daniel Finkelstein won’t know this, but I sometimes tell the key supporters of the TaxPayers’ Alliance that our mission will be complete when the Comment Editor of The Times writes an article in favour of lower taxes. Judging from the sub-headline of his latest piece – “those calling for tax cuts are out of their mind” – we still have a considerable amount of work to do.

Our central disagreement is over our respective diagnoses of the Conservative Party’s recent defeats. Daniel argues that the Conservatives lost the past two elections on the basis of tax cuts and will lose a third should they pursue a similar strategy again.

I half agree with him on this. If they repeat an indecisive approach to tax (think Michael Portillo’s slow reaction to the Fuel Tax protests in 2000, or Oliver Letwin’s “believe me, no tax cuts” speech in 2004), they don’t deserve to win. Or if they unveil plans for tax cuts a matter of weeks before election day, as Letwin did in 2005, or during the election campaign itself, as he did before going into hiding in 2001, then it is certainly true that the electorate won’t take them seriously.

It's become a bit of a cliche to describe a blog entry as "must read", but in the case of Guido's post on David Cameron's strategy, it's true. Readers who have followed the TPA's polling will notice some familiar themes - taking a stand against Westminster, running from 'outside the beltway'. Take a look at slide 48 from our September 2006 conference poll. If this turns out to be part of a longer term strategy, the Conservatives are spot on.

Those interested in the evolution of this debate should also read this paper by Dominic Cummings and James Frayne who wrote it while running the successful No campaign in the referendum on the North East Regional Assembly in November 2004 - the only electoral test so far of a political campaign using the "anti-politician" message. Dominic Cummings is now an adviser to Michael Gove MP.

George Osborne's speech this morning on The Principles of Tax Reform is well worth reading. The pledge to create an Office of Tax Simplification, originally proposed by Lord Forsyth's Tax Reform Commission, is welcome and the overall desire to stop taxation by stealth and on the hoof changes to the tax system is undoubtely desirable.

Road hauliers will welcome Mr Osborne's response to a question from my colleague Matt Sinclair, who asked whether he would accept that the Pigovian case for green taxes implied an optimum level of green taxes, at the social cost, rather than unlimited increases in green taxation and whether he would accept that some green taxes are therefore already set too high. The Shadow Chancellor appeared to accept the logic of this point on fuel duty – arguing that the current Government’s use of it as a revenue raising measure was harming confidence in the case for green taxes. The Freight Transport Association launched a new campaign on fuel duty this very week, so if the Conservatives respond to this mounting concern it will be great news.

I must start by declaring an interest. I've known Allister Heath for over ten years, since we attended the London School of Economics together in the late 1990s. It was announced yesterday that Allister has been appointed Editor of City AM, the influential business daily with a circulation of just under 100,000. This is fantastic news because as Economics Editor and then Editor of The Business, Allister has been at the forefront of holding the Government to account for its mishandling of the economy and for arguing the case for lower taxes and a more free market approach from all the political parties. It is now mainstream opinion to criticise Gordon Brown for his raid on pension funds, the sale of gold when prices were low or declining public sector productivity, but Allister led the way in honing these critiques before they were fashionable. His appointment is definitely a victory for the good guys.

Our new report Council Spending Uncovered 2: Middle Management Pay is out today.  We've had a very predictable response from the councils.  Some have blamed us for their failure to separate out teachers from regular council workers.  Others have cited competition for staff from the private sector.

This is a pretty weak argument when you consider that many of these councils had dozens of staff paid more than the £60,000 average pay that directors at companies with turnovers of £5-50 million enjoy (according to research for the Institute of Directors, not online).  They're using their half a billion pound publicity machine to try and deny this report instead of accepting the obvious truth that the number of staff earning over £50,000 shouldn't be going up three times as fast in local councils as it is in the economy as a whole.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of people really attached to the status quo in the Council Tax debate: councils blame the Government and the Government blames councils.  No one takes responsibility.  Ordinary taxpayers pay the price in the form of a doubling of Council Tax over the last ten years with further big rises to come.

Hi Stephan, your reply to my post from last night is spot on. Government waste is not enough to convince people of the case for lower taxes. Voters do believe that politicians waste their cash - more than half the public believe that £20+ of every £100 the Government spends is wasted - but they don't believe that politicians have the wherewithal to tackle waste.

YouGov (you may have heard of them!) asked the following question for us in August last year. "Do you agree or disagree that if Britain reformed public services and cut waste it could lower taxes without having to cut spending on vital services?" 66% agreed - up from 54% in January 2007. Disagreement was at 18% and 19% respectively. This is very encouraging for tax cutters.

What is the TPA doing to push forward the public service reform agenda? Look out for TPA papers on the number of deaths caused by the NHS on Friday, and a paper on prison reform by Lord Ramsbotham, former Chief Inspector of Prisons, over the weekend. This is our core battle for 2008.

For more information on this subject, CentreRight readers may be interested in our Better Government position paper and our 2007 Party Conference Season Poll.

I've just spotted in the latest catalogue from Constable, that a new book is coming out in March on government waste. David Craig, of Plundering the Public Sector fame, will reveal that since 1997, public spending has increased by around a trillion pounds - £1,000,000,000,000 - over £50,000 for every household in Britain. The subtitle of Squandered, pictured right, is 'How New Labour are wasting over one trillion pounds of our money'. One interesting fact which emerges from the advert is that by 2009, each person working in the private sector will be paying more each month into the pension of a civil servant than they will into their own pension. That should make for an interesting election.

There's a great article in The Sun today about how Birmingham City Council is apparently charging council residents £138 every time it changes a light bulb. In the 2005 edition of the Bumper Book of Government Waste, we revealed that Hull City Council charged £50 a time to change light bulbs. Who said inflation isn't back with a vengeance?