House of Comments - Episode 119 - You Say Avoidance I Say Evasion

The latest House of Comments podcast is now out.

This week I am joined by former Lib Dem activist Sara Scarlett to discuss tax avoidance/evasion, Peter Oborne's resignation from The Telegraph and how enlightenment values or the lack of them can play a part in extremism.

You can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes here.

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You can download the mp3 for the latest episode directly from here.

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listen to ‘Episode 119 - You Say Avoidance I Say Evasion’ on audioBoom

Any feedback welcomed in the comments below.


PS: A big thanks to Audioboom for hosting the podcast. We would also like to thank Kevin MacLeod from Incompetech.com for our theme music.

Peter Oborne's "Tory moment" argument is full of holes

I greatly admire Peter Oborne as I have said on here before. He has done some sterling work over the years, especially in exposing political hypocrisy but a piece he wrote for the Telegraph yesterday in which he claims that the right is winning the argument in every major area of policy is wrong-headed in my view.

Mehdi has already had a crack at fisking the article here so I won't go through all of it but I wanted to highlight a couple of things from the last 10 or 15 years that prove Oborne is wrong.

His central thesis is that it is "widely accepted" that the Labour government was an utter failure and therefore the political momentum is now with the right, that their ideas are in the ascendency and even many on the left are coming to accept this.

I don't buy it. Here are just two examples of things that the "liberal left" brought in that the Tories have accepted through gritted teeth:

1. Equal rights for homosexuals. Labour did some good work in this area when they were in power. The equalised rights for age of consent were introduced on a free vote in Labour's early years despite bitter opposition led by Conservative Peer Baroness Young. And a few years back they introduced civil partnerships.
2. The minimum wage. One of the first acts of Labour in 1997 was to introduce this. The Tories were deeply opposed to any such move and I vividly remember how convinced Conservative spokespeople were that it would damage the economy and raise unemployment. Of course in the event the economy was fine and a decent floor was put in to stop people, especially the young being exploited for derisory wages.

Some may argue that on point 1, some Conservatives voted for the measure and whilst that may well be true many of them were deeply opposed. Does anyone seriously think that if the Conservatives had been in power from 1997 - 2010 that a vote would have been passed in the Commons to allow this?

Point 2 is unequivocal. The Tories would never have brought this in.

And yet in both cases, a few years later they accepted they had been wrong and now support all of these measures. Indeed David Cameron made a big thing in his early years as leader of saying that marriage can be between a man and a man or a woman and a woman. But it took three big election defeats to force them to accept they were wrong on this. I strongly suspect that they would not have done that on their own.

So there are two big examples of where the left (and the Lib Dems who also played an important part in seeing these measures adopted) made the running in recent years and the Conservatives have been playing catch-up.

One other point I wanted to make is that Oborne really goes off beam when he claims that:

"[throughout the] post-war period...the liberal Left, as general election results show, has tended to be unpopular with voters. But its progressive ideas have enjoyed a disproportionate amount of traction among British governing elites."

Balderdash. At no general election in this period have the Conservative party ever achieved 50% of the vote. In fact with the exception of 1959, the Labour and Liberal (or Lib Dem) plus SDP vote when they were around always totalled more than the Conservative vote. Oborne's point can only be made to work if you ignore that fact. Just because first-past-the-post delivered majority Tory governments does not mean the "liberal left" as he puts it has been unpopular with voters. More that the votes for that bloc have been split allowing the Conservatives to form governments on far less than 50% and in some cases less than 40% of the vote.

The idea that the Conservatives are having some sort of "Tory moment" where they are now in the ascendancy on all major issues is ahistorical and not supported by the facts.

Peter Oborne should be in favour of breaking the 2 party stranglehold

I like Peter Oborne. He is partially responsible for my decision to get involved in active politics. I read his books "The rise of political lying" and "The triumph of the political class" a while ago and both books helped nudge me a bit further along the road to making the leap from interested of observer to participant. I told him so when I met him the The Convention on Modern Liberty last year.

His analysis of the "political class" as he defines it is compelling reading. It is formed of the people who take political power and patronage for granted and who wish to continue with this self-perpetuated 21st century narcissistic oligarchy within politics and the media. He doesn't however include all MPs within this definition. Only the ones who are part of the establishment. The way that Oborne thinks that the current egregious state of affairs will ultimately be resolved is in the penultimate paragraph of the book:

"It is almost certain therefore, that the next great political movement will come from outside the Political Class. Just as the Political Class has emerged from the wreckage of the party system so it is certain to produce its own antithesis. At some stage a British politician may well discover a new language of public discourse and methodology of political engagement which communicates simply and plainly to voters."

Now does that sound a bit familiar? It almost sounds like what has happened over the last week or so. An outsider not sullied by association with the Labour/Conservative classes that have ruled us for more than half a century has come along and is speaking a language that appears to connect with people. He is talking about breaking up the duopoly of power and privilege and changing the system so that there are no longer safe seats that can be awarded by members of the political classes to their acolytes.

However Mr Oborne does not seem very enthused about this. In an article for the Mail on Tuesday entitled "The Great Liberal Deception" he was very negative about the recent success in the polls of Nick Clegg and the Lib Dems. Although he does not explicitly state it, the tone of the piece seems tilted against electoral reform implying that Peter Mandelson is behind a shady deal for a hung parliament which might lead to this.

Now perhaps this is not so surprising. Oborne is at heart a conservative. However given the sterling work he has done, he must recognise that if we are going to get the sort of changes necessary to shake the political classes out of the comfortable position they have settled into in recent decades, now is the best time for this to happen.

A change to the voting system to eliminate safe seats would be a big step in the right direction for what Oborne ultimately wants to see. Politicians accountable to the people who elect them rather than the parties who select them. And the only way we are going to get this is via a breakthrough by the Lib Dems. The other parties will clearly not do this on their own.

Perhaps Mr Oborne should reflect on this. It's certainly a point I will put to him if I meet him again.

Has Oborne discovered a Bank of England scandal?

In Peter Oborne's column in the Mail yesterday he reported the following:

At the end of 2006, the Bank of England pension fund made a sudden and very extraordinary decision. It sold all the equities in its portfolio and invested them in index-linked gilts - even though it realised that such a move would increase the annual cost of the pension fund by some £45million.

Looking back, this was a brilliantly farsighted decision because shares have since fallen in value by almost 50 per cent. It seems clear the the Bank of England fund managers understood the nature of the looming economic crisis well before anyone else.

At the time, they said their decision was based on concerns about 'unsustainable' positions in credit markets and the consequences of a possible credit crunch. When I put this story to a Bank press officer yesterday, it was dismissed as 'absolute nonsense'.

This does indeed pose some intriguing questions and I am surprised that there has not been more coverage of this in the MSM and on other blogs.

If there turns out to be any truth in this then I think it will increase the anger of ordinary people who are all sufferring, especially those who have recently retired or are due to very soon but who were not in a position to be able to forsee what was going to happen and thus make the decision to move out of equities in 2006.