If I ruled the world… well, despite the words of the old song, every day would not necessarily be the first day of Spring. But there are half a dozen things I would do. And that Labour should seriously consider, in my view, if the party gains office in the next election.
We vote on May 4 in the local elections. The indications are that this will be a Labour landslide. (Declaration of interest: I am a Labour Party member and activist.)
There are signs nationally that the Conservatives are having difficulty finding people prepared to stand, and be seen to wear a blue rosette in public. In my area, the Labour candidates are going through unopposed to the town council and at least one Conservative heavyweight is not standing again, if town gossip is correct.
Transforming party fortunes
A lot can still happen, but the overall probability is that Labour will be the ruling party after the next election. There are, I believe, six initiatives with the prospect of transforming the party’s fortunes over its first five years in office. And transforming the country. These should not be manifesto commitments – politics is a nasty business and you do not set out to alienate vital swing voters. But what you do on gaining office is another matter.
(Regular readers will know I have written about a few of these before. But as a Labour government looms, it is probably worth putting together a checklist.)
One: Reverse the voter ID restrictions imposed that hamper the ability of the young to vote. This is a given, but it might go hand in hand with a Commission to examine the consequences of the introduction of Proportional Representation.
Rejoin single market
Two: Rejoin the Single Market. Again, this would not be a manifesto commitment, but the removal of restrictions on imports, exports and free travel would provide an immediate economic boost to an incoming Labour administration, which is just what it would need. We all know this – but look again at the official figures on the cost of Brexit, from the UK’s official statistical watchdog.
Three: A Wealth Tax on individuals with a high net worth, as well as an impost on excessive corporate profits. Again, I have written this before. It is no less compelling today. As to corporate wealth, see this. This is not a cost-of-living crisis, it is a “greedflation” crisis – corporates are seeing higher and higher profits as they push up the cost of goods and services because we now expect them to go up.
See this analysis from my old friend Larry Elliott.
Incidentally, do you know which radical Marxist revolutionary first introduced the notion of a windfall tax on excessive corporate profits? She was called Margaret Thatcher. See this.
Four: The criminalisation of all forms of tax avoidance. That goes hand in hand with the wealth tax. The rich should not be able to pick up the phone to well-paid advisors and avoid it. The best way, as I have suggested, is to make all tax avoidance a strict liability offence, which means that there is no defence to it.
Nothing has changed since I wrote this. You don’t think the money is out there? Again, have a look at this, from that firebrand of socialist thinking the Daily Mail.
Review media ownership rules
Five: A review of media ownership. It is normal in other functioning democracies for there to be a requirement for those owning large chunks of the media to be citizens of the country and to pay tax there. See this. My former employer, Rupert Murdoch, had to take on US citizenship to buy into US TV.
In so doing, that future Labour government would seriously upset the owners of the Telegraph titles, the Mail titles, the Sun and The Times. Plus, probably GB News. Did you think they were ever going to say anything nice about you, though? Murdoch supported the Blair-Brown government in 1997 because the Major administration had plainly run out of road. He is unlikely ever to support Keir Starmer.
Six: Reform the system of appointing MPs, double their salaries, ban second jobs and keep control of who is made an MP much closer to the central party and away from the local activists who are not representative of voters for the party itself, let alone the constituency. We get away from any appointments of a pig with a blue rosette, or even a red one. As I have said here before, a piece which gave rise to a degree of upset and controversy. How dare I say something nice about a Tory?
Any system that has selected Jonathan Gullis, Edward Leigh, Lee Anderson and Desmond Swayne, to name but four, has something wrong with it. There are probably Labour MPs just as bad – we just don’t know it because they haven’t been in power for 13 years.
So there it is, what Labour should do in its first five years in office. And probably to remain there after that. These ideas are truly transformational.
We will have to see.
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