UPDATE: 11.35 am
I have just been asked to speak at this meeting.
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Labour is planning a 'One Nation' tax event. I get sent the details. It says:
Monday April 29
A One Nation Tax System
4.30-6pm Committee room 10
Speakers. Catherine McKinnell (Shadow Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury), Paul Johnson (Director, Institute of Fiscal Studies), Chris Wales (Adviser, PWC) Chair. Kitty Ussher (Labour in the City, Smith Institute)
If you would like to attend please email onenationregister@gmail.com with subject header TAX
Labour Policy Review organised with Labour in the City and the Labour Finance and Industry Group
Britain's tax system needs to support a fairer and more dynamic, wealth creating economy. What kind of tax system fits with the values of One Nation Labour and are there lessons to be learnt from the Mirrlees Review in any future Labour tax reform?"
It's such an inside event they don't even specify where Committee Room 10 is (it's the House of Commons). But that's not the point. The real issue is that, so far as I know, this is the only tax event planned to date by the Jon Cruddas policy review team and the invited speakers all have a track record of being pro-City and anti-corporation tax, as, fundamentally, is the Mirrlees review itself. It would, in fact have been hard for Labour to have chosen a more inappropriate line up to discuss this issue at this time.
Chris Wales, a former Arthur Andersen partner, was chief tax adviser to Gordon Brown. He is known to have been heavily in favour of the disastrous merger of the Inland Revenue and HM Customs & Excise - which was designed to bring tax under Treasury control. No doubt he also advised on the Labour policy of offering low capital gains tax rates - unlike the Tories before them - a policy that has massively fuelled tax avoidance. When he left Brown he went to Goldman Sachs. Now he's at PWC - the very last people who should be advising Labour on tax, as Margaret Hodge MP has made all too clear.
But most notoriously, he was the driving force behind the Oxford Centre for Business Taxation. This centre, backed with £5 million of FTSE money, has been the epicentre of the drive toi undermine the effectiveness of the UK corporate tax system since its inception. Wales has himself told me, in Oxford, that the aim for the UK has to be a corporation tax rate of not more than 15%. Oxford supports tax havens, vigorously. It seeks to undermine all serious estimation of the tax gap or its significance. It has done its best to challenge the idea that developing countries are exploited by the international tax system. Its director, Mike Devereux, wrote in the FT in December that the best way to reform corporation tax was to abolish it. A man more out of step with where Labour needs to be on tax is hard to imagine.
So too the IFS I'm afraid. Devereux headed their work on the Mirrlees report which recommended exempting large parts of corporate income from tax.
As for Kitty Ussher, she was the most pro-City of all the New Labour ministers, falling over herself in her desire to ingratiate herself with it in ways now so discredited. Since leaving office she has supported Labour in Black - the group whose aim is to import George Osborne's economic policies into Labour wholesale.
Add these three together and you have a pro-City, pro-tax haven, anti-corporation tax, pro-austerity, pro big business tax cut line up that is about as far removed from public sentiment and where Labour needs to be as it could be possible to find.
There is no hint of the tax justice agenda here, although I have met Jon Cruddas during this review.
There is no hint of the direction of travel that Margaret Hodge has taken the UK down on this issue.
There is no hint of the tax gap issue.
Instead there is just the bankrupt policies of failed neoliberal New Labour. And in that cased I'm entitled to ask what is going on, as I already have of Jon Cruddas, who has not replied.
If this is where Labour is going then it deserves to be condemned by all with an interest in tax justice - because this is a sell out of the worst sort imaginable.
I'd recommend two things. First, my submission for Unite to the Labour policy review. Second, chapter eight of 'Over here and under-taxed'. In both there's an agenda for Labour to really pursue. The one that it looks like it's taking is a sure path to austerity, failure, inequality, unemployment, increased tax for ordinary people in this country and despair. And no one should expect me to shut up about that. Because I won't.
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This is all so depressing. So, are you going to accept the invitation and argue the case once again or shake the dust off your feet and move on?
I’m going – if they let me in
I’ve just seen your update, Richard, to say you’ve been invited. The key thing here is was this planned or simply a reaction to your fully justified and hard hitting blog this morning. If the latter, then that bodes ill: you’ll be there as a sop.
By the way, if you hear anything from John Cruddas on how and why it’s come to pass that what it appears we’re seeing is a very sharp lurch to the right as the starting point for these policy reviews can you share that with us.
I think things happened….
I will not be a sop
But this process has been harmed by such lack of judgement
If this is the best Labour can do it really is depressing and rather pathetic. I can’t say I’m too surprised though, given the extent of Labour’s capitulation to neoliberal nonsense under New Labour.
I suppose Labour look at the disaster that is this government, and expect to get voted in with a big majority in 2015, so standing up for the values and institutions you’d expect them to do, and roundly condemning the ideology that got us into the mess we’re in isn’t something they’re going to bother with.
Inspiring isn’t it?
Politicans know where the money is and they want their slice of it. They’ll have to be shamed into acting actually in the interests of the electorate. I still think both major parties will split and reform into the Neoliberals and their opposition. Then perhaps it might be worthwhile voting. Not till then though.
This is absolutely, utterly outrageous. On this evidence, the City has captured the Labour Party. If so, God help us all.
Labour has to get rid of Balls and others like him from the frontbench. Ed Milliband’s heart is in the right place but Balls hasn’t repented one bit. It’s shocking that Margaret Hodge and the PAC are driving the tax agenda politically and Cameron and Osborne are making insincere noises to be on the right side of public opinion while labour is silent. Only last year Labour could not bring itself to criticise the Tories and LibDems’ opposition to the bankers’ bonus cap! They clearly take the votes of their core supporters for granted. Let’s hope some left wing comedian will seize the opportunity and offer an alternative platform 🙂
One of the most depressing things about our current state is the fact that bodies which were previously respected because their pronouncements drew on views from a wide range of interests now confine all input to the same small and homogeneous group. The public are not really aware of how the discourse has been narrowed:and it may even be that the politicians are now so far out of touch with reality that they do not realise how they have been captured (though that is hard to believe in the case of labour because they do still have links with trades unions who must have a different analysis presumably) Reports issued under the aegis of labour are pretty much in the same boat as those produced as Treasury enquiries: but they are produced by financial services people not by a civil service or any other group which aspires to objectivity, however limited that must be. The result is a perception that their conclusions must have validity because they are nearly unanimous and because they are still considered to be free of self interest to a large extent.
The narrow base needs to be brought to the public attention: but that does not happen in circumstances where these people are presented as “experts” while trades unions and charities are portrayed as “interest groups”
The composition of such groups is part of the discussion in a paper linked here: which I think is worth reading, though it is long
http://thosebigwords.forumcommunity.net/?t=51300641#lastpost
So this is why Labour ( to whom I still pay a sub on the quiet) have seemed so completely strangled on the economy. I hope you can put a large spanner in the works – but I don’t hold out much hope in the face of domination that is Goldman Sachs & the City.
Labour will never get re-elected on the Balls ticket of ‘more of the same but a bit slower’. Yet we so desperately need a socialist government to stop the appalling sell-off of state assets, the dash for gas and general destruction of all social responsibilities. Only a fundamental rethink of economic policy as advocated by Michael Meacher will save us from a bent oligarchy.
Go for it!
I’ll not be withholding my punches
About two years ago I went along to a Fabian society meeting a Clare College in cambridge, where John Cruddas was giving a talk.
I was rather bored and frustrated as I find John Cruddas flowery at best and emptily rhetorical worst.
There were many bight Cambridge students there who were young Labour members, so I thought I would bring the proceedings down to earth. I had just read Treasure Islands, so I asked what would Labour do about the 120bn avoided and evaded in tax, and would they reverse the cuts etc.
He just stood there like a rabbit in the headlights. Or like a double glazing salesman hoping to charge more by looking like he had never seen a bay window before. He then waffled for some time, but the students kept looking round at me they seemed to get it. The John said well yes, I would support tax justice, but by then it did not seem very sincere, just something to please the punters. I am convinced that he is indoctrinated with the neoliberal clan.
I foresee, and soon, a divorce of unions from labour.
And I also consider that to be as a result of planning by the party hierarchy.
Funnily enough there have been comments made elsewhere that the conservative party have become “divorced” from their “core” voters.
So it seems that the corporate [financial-sector] capture of the party-politic is being done on both political fronts.
So we will have, soon, a bought government rather than a democratic government, on both sides of the political spectrum.
We already have that. The unions should have stopped supporting labour a long time ago, at least since they failed to reverse out draconian anti union laws when they had the chance. That told me all I wanted to know about who was paying the piper, and about who the piper was
This is profoundly depressing. Thank goodness you, Richard are going too. John Cruddas is widely seen as being different to New Labour but in fact, he supported David Miliband in the Labour leadership contest and is very involved in Blue Labour with Maurice Glasman.
The fundamental problem is that under Blair, prospective Labour MPs were carefully vetted to ensure that any left wing thought was eradicated from the PLP.
I was going to suggest that this is outrageous – of course it is, but it is hardly surprising. Some very good research in this area undertaken by Centre for Research in Socio-Cultural Change (CRESC) at Manchester University http://www.cresc.ac.uk/
This article in particular springs to mind
http://www.cresc.ac.uk/sites/default/files/City%20State%20and%20National%20Settlement%20CRESC%20WP101.pdf
Very long but worth a read if you have 30 mins or so. Political class entirely “captured by the “City” state”
This: http://www.cresc.ac.uk/sites/default/files/LEVESON%20FOR%20THE%20BANKS%202012%2007%2001.pdf
…is also very good (much shorter)
Chris
Thanks
Thanks from me too, Chris. I have time to read stuff – for a change – just now 🙂