A couple of weeks ago I was invited to address a Trafalgar Day dinner in Penzance.
Inevitably, as a great fan of Winston Graham’s Poldark novels, I reflected on the piracy associated with the coastline and the town: Piracy with the objective of tax evasion.
That same objective is also associated with our own heritage in the New Forest, just look at the place names on an Ordnance Survey map; ‘Picket Post’ just north east of Ringwood, to name but one.
The tax that piracy sought to evade was effectively the only tax that had to be paid: the Excise. Our forefathers would never have tolerated the extensive taxation that we now endure, especially the state intrusion into our private lives that is implicit in our income tax.
Of course, the other side of the coin, was that the state provided very little in the way of public services. Effectively, all that government provided for was the maintenance of order and the defence of the realm.
Government touched few aspects of life, which in turn had an impact on politics.
Frankly, it was of little consequence as to who represented you in Parliament, and political ideologies with which we are familiar to-day were unknown. So, if you were fortunate to have the franchise, you may as well sell your vote to the highest bidder. Inevitably ‘treating’ by the candidates was common. Of course, the fact that you would vote by public declaration at the ballot, sustained such transactional politics.
I am surprised that, notwithstanding generations of electoral reform, transactional politics remains implicit, and sometimes explicit, in a number of my encounters with voters. I’m often told that somebody will vote for me if I do such and such. Or, more often, that they won’t vote for me unless I don’t do such and such. The difficulty of entering into any such transaction however, is that -given the secrecy of the ballot- I will never know if they fulfilled their part of the bargain.
Instead, the transactional nature of politics is now sustained by the ‘offer’ that political parties make to voters in their election manifestoes, which increasingly involve large amounts of expenditure on all sorts of desirable initiatives. But now it is the voters themselves that will have to pay for the goodies that the candidates have offered.
Consequently, we are now in a cycle of ever higher public expenditure to afford all that the voters were offered, and ever higher taxes to pay for it.
Within this cycle a particularly damaging phenomenon emerges: in an attempt to diminish the unpopular consequences of ever higher taxes on the majority, the temptation is to levy them on minorities. This results in ever greater distortions in markets. It punishes enterprise and drives entrepreneurs elsewhere. Ultimately, it will kill the goose that lays the golden egg, a goose that is already paying the lions’ share of our taxes.
As we approach expenditure of £100 billion on benefits, and politicians are touting their willingness to be even more generous with our money, we have reached the position where more people are living on these benefits, than there are of us paying into the system to sustain them.
If we cannot break this cycle, and break it soon, we face economic oblivion, and we’ll all be reduced to piracy.
Sir Desmond Swayne TD
