A non-budget – and an ongoing scandal

Gordon Brown’s tenth budget was something of a non-event – long on political knockabout, short on real action, short on real news. He continues to increase real taxes by stealth using “fiscal drag” e.g. not increasing allowances in line with inflation.

When Brown’s promises are examined in detail they often look more and more hollow. Take the promise to make spending in state schools match what is currently spent in cash terms in private schools.

As the BBC’s chief political correspondence pointed out, If you look for the details of this promise in the Treasury's Red Book – which gives the details of the actual proposals rather than the political rhetoric - and you find that the "long term ambition" to match what private schools spend in state schools comes with no figures attached, no target date and no explanation of how it will be paid for.

In other words this promise is totally meaningless. All the government would have to do to meet it is to increase spending on state schools in line with inflation, and at some point in the distant future it will eventually and inevitably reach the cash amount spent today in private schools, with no real benefit whatsoever to state school pupils.

Meanwhile the row about the funding of the Labour party chunters on. This probably bores many people who not involved in politics, but those of us who do take an interest are practically falling off our chairs with astonishment.

The most extraordinary part of the so-called “cash for peerages row” is not the fact that rich men gave the Labour party money. All political parties have to raise money, and it is not necessarily evil to give money to a political party – we will not be better governed if nobody gets involved in politics and no money is available for political debate.

Neither is it necessarily wrong that some of the people concerned have been nominated for the House of Lords, though it was unfortunate that the public appointments commission was not given a full and frank account of the money they had lent to the Labour party. There have been questions and debates about nominations for the House of Lords from all the major parties and some of the minor ones (there were recently questions over the current nomination by the Green Party) but most of the people nominated have had a distinguished record both in business and in public service.

There are, however, two things which are truly extraordinary about the current saga. The first is that the elected Chairman and Treasurer of the Labour Party, of whom the latter has to countersign the accounts, were not told where £14 million was coming from. Not to publish information which it is not a legal requirement to publish is one thing – to hide it from your own people is another. Home office minister David McNulty was asked on the Politics show yesterday who Lord Levy, Labour’s fundraiser, was accountable to, and replied “He is accountable to the Prime Minister.”

Which brings me to the other extraordinary aspect of this affair – the complete double standards which Tony Blair so often applies.

What really gets me about Tony Blair is not the fact that he makes mistakes – everyone does. It is the sanctimonious way the “New Labour” inner circle are quick to condemn anyone who disagrees with them, including any members of the Labour party who oppose something TB wants, and claim to be specially virtuous, while simultaneously practicing most of the things they condemn in others.

Their default method of dealing with any argument is an attack on the integrity or competence of the person who stands up to them – such as the attack the Labour Home Secretary made on the Treasurer of the Labour party yesterday for standing up to demand the information he needs to do the job for which Labour’s own legislation makes him responsible. Previous victims of the same tactic included a hospital patient in her 90s who was accused of being a racist, rail safety campaigners, and any academic who produces a study with inconvenient results.

But New Labour demand the understanding and sympathy for themselves which they deny to everyone else.

Previously they condemned the lack of transparency in party funding. They made a great show of passing laws to resolve this – but on their own admission, they left loopholes in those laws which they then exploited themselves. And now Blair expects praise for plugging the loopholes!

When Blair first described himself as a “pretty straight guy”, John Major responded that if he was “I’d hate to meet a corkscrew”. Quite.

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