GOVERNMENT SPENDING
Below is a copy of an article by Simon Heffer which appears in today’s Daily Telegraph:
Cameron and Co must get to grips with spendthrift councils
By Simon Heffer
(Filed: 21/02/2006)
Since we can safely assume that few of us actively want to be poorer, the figures published yesterday about the imminent rises in council tax will have made universally grim reading. For the 10th successive year, the tax is to rise above inflation.
An English band D bill has gone up by 84 per cent since Tony Blair came to power in 1997. We must specify "English", because Scottish bills have risen by a mere 40 per cent during the same period.
All we suspected about Labour's client state is revealed in these figures. The party's natural supporters are favoured by such a philosophy: and it is funded in practice by the party's natural opponents. That is what Labour politicians mean by "social justice".
Happily, this is also one of those increasingly rare occasions when Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition at least goes through the motions of saying how upset it is about this flagrantly unfair treatment of the English council taxpayer. Eric Pickles, who speaks on these matters for the Tories, attacked the rises on Sunday.
He said that the figures over the past nine years showed that council tax had been used as a "stealth tax" on the English: and he is right. He also pointed out how Gordon Brown had bought the votes of pensioners last year - an election year - by putting an extra £200 in their pockets to help with the council tax. That bounty will not be paid again.
However, a more effective Tory critic of this profligacy has been Sir Sandy Bruce-Lockhart, the chairman of the Local Government Association and, until last year, the leader of probably the most efficient county council in the country, Kent.
Sir Sandy hinted at another aspect of central government's unfairness to local councils. These bodies receive on average 75 per cent of funds from the centre, only 25 per cent being raised locally.
While Labour's clients in its heartland always have plenty of money for their local pet projects, or to employ their co-religionists on an epic scale, many councils struggle to deal with the burdens central government places on them. These, by their very nature, are increasing faster than the rate of funding from the centre, notably the ageing population and the social services that must be provided for it.
There is a pile of trouble building up for the Government on this. A well-organised and increasingly militant campaign by local taxpayers threatens a boycott of the council tax unless the Government shows some sign of bringing soaring costs under control.
For the moment, it is doubtful such prudence will be brought to bear. The only way to make serious inroads into council spending is to sack people.
There are plenty of unproductive employees whom councils could fire, but that would mean Labour axing its own voters. And, of course, to make a political point, some councils would retain idle staff, and instead sack people who look after old ladies in care homes, or who teach children how to read and write.
A review by Sir Philip Gershon of local government spending is, to put it mildly, taking its time. Even if Sir Philip were to report that billions could be shaved off council expenditure, however, it is far from certain anyone would take any notice.
He recommended huge savings - through sackings, not least - in central government, and these economies have proved to be more promised than realised. Centrally as well as locally, Britain is on a spending spree. We are all paying for it, and we are getting precious little value.
In their new social democratic phase, the Tories seem all too easily to forget what politics is about: to examine the ideas of your opponents and, when they are wrong, to attack them. Mr Pickles has made a start, but it is only a start.
We await a cogent, hard-minded analysis of why local government costs so much, of why such waste is unsustainable both economically and morally, and, most important of all, how it is to be tackled and stopped. I fear we may wait for some time.
It is not that individual Tory-led councils are not sometimes helpful in pointing the way. West Norfolk district council, by undertaking an audit of what services it actually provides and what it needs to provide them, has cut its tax by three per cent next year. It is, however, the only one to do so. In many councils, the elected members are, as one councillor put it to me, "in thrall to the officials".
Officials, who have empires to maintain and jobs to keep, are ever on the search for new "partnerships" and "initiatives" that justify their existence and keep the bills high.
This is not a party political point: many Tory councils are just as bad as Labour or Lib Dem ones. Local government, which used to be by local ratepayers for local ratepayers, has gone the way of everything else in our wonderful welfare state: it now exists primarily for the benefit of the people it employs, rather than for that of the people it notionally serves.
It used to be the case that the Tories would instinctively see the urgency of fighting such waste, but that was before the new dispensation in which public spending, in all respects, became a good in itself.
There is no point the Tories attacking Labour's naked redistributionism unless they are prepared to come up with proposals to stop it. I don't just mean stopping the flow of money from the South-East to Labour's urban English fiefdoms, or the even more blatant and deeply undemocratic transfer of funds from England to Scotland, which appears to have been the hidden cost of devolution.
I mean stopping redistribution from the private to the public sectors: and acknowledging the financial necessity of ending this rape of the productive parts of our economy. This used to be common sense. Now, the Tories approach the issue with a sense of fear, if they approach it at all.
It seems the current leaders of the party fail to understand the importance to the electorate of controlling taxes because, quite simply, they fail to understand the electorate itself. In a report last weekend in The Sunday Telegraph, somebody termed a party "insider" (from which I think we are supposed to infer that he or she is close to the leadership) revealed the party's secret weapon for keeping its core vote onside.
The "insider" said: "The bottom line for traditionalists is hunting and Europe. So long as Cameron stays sound on those two issues, Right-wingers will follow him anywhere and swallow pretty much every other U-turn he makes."
Leave aside for the moment how this betrays the patronising and insulting attitude of the party's leadership towards its core vote, which it seems to regard as an apparently brain-dead group concerned only about the incursions of Johnny Foreigner and the right to hunt foxes.
The ignorance of this smug, complacent belief is breathtaking. Even out on the provisional wing of the Tory party, the main concerns are far more compelling than these.
They are about, first and foremost, the failure of our public services; the failure of law and order; and the failure to give value for the huge amounts of money taken out of the pockets of the British people - and especially of the English people - by the state.
The Tories just don't seem to have got this. And, most of all, they just don't seem to have got how hard this licensed extortion is for pensioners. In forcing rises in the council tax, Labour is doing only what we expect of it, as a party wedded to an unacceptable level of corporatism. The Tories must now decide whether this is yet another of Labour's policies in which it wishes to be complicit, or to get off its haunches and at last pledge to do something about it.
Cameron and Co must get to grips with spendthrift councils
By Simon Heffer
(Filed: 21/02/2006)
Since we can safely assume that few of us actively want to be poorer, the figures published yesterday about the imminent rises in council tax will have made universally grim reading. For the 10th successive year, the tax is to rise above inflation.
An English band D bill has gone up by 84 per cent since Tony Blair came to power in 1997. We must specify "English", because Scottish bills have risen by a mere 40 per cent during the same period.
All we suspected about Labour's client state is revealed in these figures. The party's natural supporters are favoured by such a philosophy: and it is funded in practice by the party's natural opponents. That is what Labour politicians mean by "social justice".
Happily, this is also one of those increasingly rare occasions when Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition at least goes through the motions of saying how upset it is about this flagrantly unfair treatment of the English council taxpayer. Eric Pickles, who speaks on these matters for the Tories, attacked the rises on Sunday.
He said that the figures over the past nine years showed that council tax had been used as a "stealth tax" on the English: and he is right. He also pointed out how Gordon Brown had bought the votes of pensioners last year - an election year - by putting an extra £200 in their pockets to help with the council tax. That bounty will not be paid again.
However, a more effective Tory critic of this profligacy has been Sir Sandy Bruce-Lockhart, the chairman of the Local Government Association and, until last year, the leader of probably the most efficient county council in the country, Kent.
Sir Sandy hinted at another aspect of central government's unfairness to local councils. These bodies receive on average 75 per cent of funds from the centre, only 25 per cent being raised locally.
While Labour's clients in its heartland always have plenty of money for their local pet projects, or to employ their co-religionists on an epic scale, many councils struggle to deal with the burdens central government places on them. These, by their very nature, are increasing faster than the rate of funding from the centre, notably the ageing population and the social services that must be provided for it.
There is a pile of trouble building up for the Government on this. A well-organised and increasingly militant campaign by local taxpayers threatens a boycott of the council tax unless the Government shows some sign of bringing soaring costs under control.
For the moment, it is doubtful such prudence will be brought to bear. The only way to make serious inroads into council spending is to sack people.
There are plenty of unproductive employees whom councils could fire, but that would mean Labour axing its own voters. And, of course, to make a political point, some councils would retain idle staff, and instead sack people who look after old ladies in care homes, or who teach children how to read and write.
A review by Sir Philip Gershon of local government spending is, to put it mildly, taking its time. Even if Sir Philip were to report that billions could be shaved off council expenditure, however, it is far from certain anyone would take any notice.
He recommended huge savings - through sackings, not least - in central government, and these economies have proved to be more promised than realised. Centrally as well as locally, Britain is on a spending spree. We are all paying for it, and we are getting precious little value.
In their new social democratic phase, the Tories seem all too easily to forget what politics is about: to examine the ideas of your opponents and, when they are wrong, to attack them. Mr Pickles has made a start, but it is only a start.
We await a cogent, hard-minded analysis of why local government costs so much, of why such waste is unsustainable both economically and morally, and, most important of all, how it is to be tackled and stopped. I fear we may wait for some time.
It is not that individual Tory-led councils are not sometimes helpful in pointing the way. West Norfolk district council, by undertaking an audit of what services it actually provides and what it needs to provide them, has cut its tax by three per cent next year. It is, however, the only one to do so. In many councils, the elected members are, as one councillor put it to me, "in thrall to the officials".
Officials, who have empires to maintain and jobs to keep, are ever on the search for new "partnerships" and "initiatives" that justify their existence and keep the bills high.
This is not a party political point: many Tory councils are just as bad as Labour or Lib Dem ones. Local government, which used to be by local ratepayers for local ratepayers, has gone the way of everything else in our wonderful welfare state: it now exists primarily for the benefit of the people it employs, rather than for that of the people it notionally serves.
It used to be the case that the Tories would instinctively see the urgency of fighting such waste, but that was before the new dispensation in which public spending, in all respects, became a good in itself.
There is no point the Tories attacking Labour's naked redistributionism unless they are prepared to come up with proposals to stop it. I don't just mean stopping the flow of money from the South-East to Labour's urban English fiefdoms, or the even more blatant and deeply undemocratic transfer of funds from England to Scotland, which appears to have been the hidden cost of devolution.
I mean stopping redistribution from the private to the public sectors: and acknowledging the financial necessity of ending this rape of the productive parts of our economy. This used to be common sense. Now, the Tories approach the issue with a sense of fear, if they approach it at all.
It seems the current leaders of the party fail to understand the importance to the electorate of controlling taxes because, quite simply, they fail to understand the electorate itself. In a report last weekend in The Sunday Telegraph, somebody termed a party "insider" (from which I think we are supposed to infer that he or she is close to the leadership) revealed the party's secret weapon for keeping its core vote onside.
The "insider" said: "The bottom line for traditionalists is hunting and Europe. So long as Cameron stays sound on those two issues, Right-wingers will follow him anywhere and swallow pretty much every other U-turn he makes."
Leave aside for the moment how this betrays the patronising and insulting attitude of the party's leadership towards its core vote, which it seems to regard as an apparently brain-dead group concerned only about the incursions of Johnny Foreigner and the right to hunt foxes.
The ignorance of this smug, complacent belief is breathtaking. Even out on the provisional wing of the Tory party, the main concerns are far more compelling than these.
They are about, first and foremost, the failure of our public services; the failure of law and order; and the failure to give value for the huge amounts of money taken out of the pockets of the British people - and especially of the English people - by the state.
The Tories just don't seem to have got this. And, most of all, they just don't seem to have got how hard this licensed extortion is for pensioners. In forcing rises in the council tax, Labour is doing only what we expect of it, as a party wedded to an unacceptable level of corporatism. The Tories must now decide whether this is yet another of Labour's policies in which it wishes to be complicit, or to get off its haunches and at last pledge to do something about it.
posted by erc @ 10:30 pm
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