If the right's ideas on inequality were any flimsier they could be worn by Rihanna
|
Version 0 of 1. Imagine you're a Tory MP. For some of you, I suspect, this will come as naturally as impersonating a giant badger, but try. So you're an ambitious Conservative – with a headache. Your chancellor boasts of a recovery, which hardly anyone else seems to think exists. The otherwise accident-prone Labour leader enjoys a poll bounce every time he faces down big business, whether Murdoch or the energy firms. Meanwhile, whether it's votes for Farage or sales of Piketty, you keep spotting a growing public unease with dominant elites. The proximate cause of your headache is inequality. What to do? You can try and rubbish the figures showing the widening gulf between rich and poor. Or change the question, to talk about how the whole world is getting more equal. But the voters won't necessarily buy this: when Ipsos Mori asked the public this spring which issue they considered the most important in Britain, poverty/inequality had its strongest showing ever, ranking above schools, hospitals, crime, inflation, pensions and housing. For a forthcoming report, the pollsters asked more than 16,000 people from 20 countries whether "large differences in income and wealth is bad for society": 67% of Britons agreed – a bigger proportion than in egalitarian Sweden. All of which leaves you, the true-blue hotshot, little option other than to roll up your sleeves and wade into the debate. Congratulations: you've just thought-experimented your way inside the mind of Dominic Raab MP. This Wednesday, the Conservative member for Esher publishes a pamphlet setting out how the right can take on Ed Miliband, Thomas Piketty and Spirit Level authors Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett – and win. This has two of the key ingredients to be a significant intervention. First, the author. In his four years in parliament, Raab has established himself as one to watch. Party grandees privately refer to him as the cleverest of the bunch (someone text David Willetts). According to Spectator editor Fraser Nelson, he's "one of the most impressive members of the Tory backbenches". The karate black-belt has that other telltale sign of the 40-something high achiever: a body-fat percentage lower than his shoe size. Second, if the big question of our time is how to tackle the wealth gap, the solutions are far from settled. Polls repeatedly show that voters are disturbed about the chasm between them and the 1% – but that they also support welfare cuts, and shy away from taxes that might make them personally worse off. Other issues split neatly between the parties: NHS for Labour, fiscal prudence for the Tories. Inequality may be a classic preoccupation of the left, but in British politicsthe issue could still go either way. The problem is that faced with an inviting net and a havering goalie, Raab muffs his chance. The ideas laid out in his Meritocrat's Manifesto are thin. Gossamer light. Any flimsier and they could probably be worn by Rihanna. Over 30-odd pages, he reels off a string of proposals that at best are nice but meaningless – and at worst would actually widen social gaps. So he calls for schools to have greater powers to select pupils – despite the Ofsted chief inspector, Michael Wilshaw, warning that selective schools are "stuffed full of middle-class kids". To "make work pay", Raab wants to raise the national insurance threshold to £10,000, in line with income tax, thus spraying a lot of cash on well-off workers. He'd like to extend the coalition's apprenticeship programme, for which Morrisons provided the most places. A stamp-duty cut to make expensive homes that little bit less out of reach. On reaching the section titled Hold the Elites to Account, I sat up. Was this going to be where Raab laid out his bait for disgruntled Ukippers? But no: the centrepiece was a plan to give shareholders more powers on fatcat pay. Raab obviously wasn't paying attention during the so-called shareholder spring: for all the investor fuss over rewards-for-failure, the overwhelming majority of deals went through. Fund managers heckled Bob Diamond for shaking £6m out of Barclays, but voted two to one to accept it. As Tom Powdrill of corporate-governance monitors PIRC points out, even after the financial crisis, only one UK-listed bank, RBS, has ever lost a pay vote – and that was because the government's own fund managers nixed it. Raab's pamphlet is a failure, then, but an interesting one. Because in grabbing on all the traditional rightwing levers, he shows how ineffective they've become. While the left worries over fair shares, the right stresses everyone getting a fair shot. But in Britain, soaring inequality sits alongside a collapse in social mobility. According to economist Miles Corak, in today's Britain, if I earn £100,000 more than you, on average my kids are going to earn £50,000 more than your kids. Thus is privilege handed down the generations. Were I on Raab's side, I'd note how much of Britain is clogged up with rent-seekers and mickey-takers. Not among the battered unions or benefit claimants, but in the banks, which have come through the financial crisis almost unreformed; Branson and the train operators, who make easy money for investing next to nothing; the utilities, which pay their investors handsomely, pay the taxman next to nothing and expect the British public to stump up for their investment; Serco and Capita and G4S, with their business models of running public services for as much profit as possible. And that's where a "libertarian" like Raab should start if he wants to win back faith in British capitalism: by taking on the corporate monopolists and boardroom rent-seekers. The best thing a free-marketeer could do right now is recognise how far short Britain falls of being a free-market economy. |