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This demeaning race to the bottom Samuel Brittan The Financial Times 29/04/05 Strange as it may seem, as elections approach my sympathies move towards the hard-pressed politician. Typical remarks made by so-called ordinary people to the television cameras are "What has the X party done for me?" or "They are all in it for the money, aren't they?" In fact, financial scandals occur at the fringes. No sane person would seek high political office for financial gain. The potential rewards are much less than in most business and professional careers and the risks much higher. The bigger corruption is the temptation to believe that the end justifies the means. The popular cry "What have they done for me?" reveals an unattractive greed and venality. I feel like responding with John F. Kennedy's remark: "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country". At the time I did not like the implied personification of the nation. But I can now see its point. A week before Christmas I wrote a column on the theme "There is no such thing as the state" (December 17, 2004). I was making the logical point that the state is simply a mechanism. There are two motivations behind such an analysis. One is simply to point out that members of a modern government are in no position to be personally mean or generous towards its citizens. The state is simply a device by which citizens redistribute incomes towards each other or arrange for the provision of such services that they rightly or wrongly regard as better provided collectively than through the markets or through personal philanthropy. This leaves open entirely what such transfers should be and which are the public goods best provided collectively. Nevertheless, the mass of payments to different pressure groups, beloved by politicians, merely leads to what is called "churning". That is, people pay out from one pocket what they receive from the other: examples are the winter fuel allowance financed by the middle-class elderly from their own tax; or caps on council tax, paid for in a similar way. This is not only confusing and wasteful, but leads to an unnecessary dead-weight tax cost that distorts economic decisions. Some readers will know that I would eventually like as many as possible of these payments to be netted out in a positive or negative income tax, which would make the whole process more transparent. But even now, voters half sense what is being done. Hence Tony Blair's view that we are near the limits of what the state can tax. The prize for bribing ourselves with our own money unfortunately goes to the Liberal Democrat manifesto. It is true that since prominent Lib Dems published The Orange Book: Reclaiming Liberalism last year, I have cherished some hopes that some sections of the party might strive to recover its Gladstonian heritage; but that is for the far future. Labour has a relatively civilised and coherent manifesto in decent English - once past the verbless sentences of Blair's "personal" introduction. The credit for this goes largely to the Downing Street adviser Matthew Taylor. If I nevertheless support the Lib Dems it is for the negative reason that Mr Blair's lack of feeling for due process and civil liberties makes it impossible for me to contemplate supporting him for another term of office. There is the further impossibility of voting for a Conservative party that is contemptuous of Margaret Thatcher's heritage and really does appeal to the lowest common denominator. Some of the most economically sensible individual proposals are to be found in the Green manifesto. But they are submerged in an extreme anti-business fervour and espousal of central economic control. While there are a few individual Greens whom I would be delighted to support, in most constituencies the best way to give the two main parties the come-uppance they deserve is by a Lib Dem vote. Far worse than electoral bribes is the race to the bottom that characterises the present election. At first, Labour seemed to be leading it - for instance, the veiled anti-Semitic hints in its "Fagin" posters. But the party changed course and is now trading instead on voters' worries that they might have to provide something for their own health and education. Would that they did! The downward race is now being led by the Conservatives who are trading on public fears about immigration, school discipline, hospital bugs and so on, under the influence of spin doctors who only care about seats retained or won on May 5 and could not care less what happens afterwards. One must pray that the Lib Dems will have the sense to use any leverage they may have in the next parliament for the only purposes that can unify the "social" and the classical liberals, namely civil liberties and electoral reform. If they downgrade the latter in favour of so called bread-and-butter issues they risk becoming just a dissident appendage of Labour, just as the National Liberals of the inter-war and postwar years became of the Conservatives.
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