This year we must all slave for the Chancellor until Derby Day is over
CHRISTOPHER FILDES
That's splendid, Chancellor. After your last Budget and could it be that? I can write a date into my diary and pin a gloatchart to the wall. Only 83 more days to go until I stop working for you and can start to work for myself! I look forward to crossing them off. I have had to get a longer chart, though, for Tax Freedom Day is getting later and later. A century ago it was somewhere near the end of January, by the 1960s it had reached April, and, by the 1990s. May, but this year it will reach June and follow Derby Day. Every year Gabriel Stein of Lombard Street Research works out the date, for the Adam Smith Institute. He adds up all the tax we pay direct, indirect, national, local, including National Insurance contributions and works it out as a proportion of our total incomes. From this he reckons that, this year, the average taxpayer will be working for the Chancellor until 10 June. This Chancellor has been ingenious in raising taxes without raising rates, and his revenues have come in like a spring tide. On top of this, the process of sticking new labels on benefits and calling them tax credits has knocked £5 billion off both sides of the Budget ledger, because the credits do not count as public spending, but are entries in the revenue accounts, with minus signs in front of them. Mr Stein is not fooled. He has put the £5 billion back in. Last week's Budget speech claimed that the direct tax burden on the average family was lower than at any time for 30 years. That was less than the whole truth, as the length of our servitude shows. Roll on Tax Freedom Day.
Besetting weakness
GORDON Brown's besetting weakness as a chancellor is to be sure that he knows best. So his budgets are stuffed with elaborate gadgetry of every sort, designed to manipulate the economy in every detail, and his Finance Acts stretch out to the crack of doom. He can always find good uses for our money, and in the years ahead his spending will grow half as fast again as the economy. He will pump money into the National Health Service, repeating the treatment of previous chancellors but doubling the dose. Might not this bloated monopoly respond to slimming or to surgery? In some ways he is a chancellor from half a century ago, when the gentleman in Whitehall really did know best, or said he did. Since then we have been taught that the rest of us are likely, between us, to know more than the gentleman, and to know better. If Gordon Brown believed that, he would be rolling Tax Freedom Day back.
Jump, jump
THE global economy, says the bank formerly known as J.P. Morgan, is on a precipice. The world's stock markets have jumped off it, but that, after all, is their job. They live by anticipation. They can see that the long party in America is ending in a hangover and that Japan has ordered a fugu fish sushi and eaten the poisonous bit. This may not be just the moment for our own dear Chancellor to carry on spending and to trust in the productive sector of our own economy to pay his ever-rising bills. As against that, it may be just the right moment to call a general election and get it safely out of the way, before the trouble starts.
Officious
FOR John Birt, there was sure to be life after the British Broadcasting Corporation — a peerage, of course, but a job to go to, as well. Now we are being told that his name has been inked in for Ofcom. Ofwhat? Yes, it's another new regulator, this time for everything from television to telecoms. Officious might have been a better name, for the powers proposed for it are something new, and in Ofcom Is Watching You (written for the Centre for Policy Studies) George Trefgarne sets them out. Ofcom, he says, will be allowed to draw up detailed rules to enforce what it thinks are acceptable standards and to monitor the providers of news. It will have the power to enter premises, confiscate documents, fine companies and punish individuals. Takeovers and mergers will be in its gift. It will concern itself with training, and will finance new broadcasters of its own choice. The idea that choice is something for the customers to make does not cross the official draughtsmen's minds. Instead they count on Ofcom to impose a creeping correctness. How Lord Birt would perform in the seat of power we are free to guess. If we were really lucky he might just remind us of Lord Reith, but, of course, without the jokes.
Arguing with Keynes
MY sainted predecessor, Nicholas Davenport, would be sad to see the National Mutual Life Assurance Society putting its hands up and putting itself up for sale. He was a director, and had been asked to join the board becaue the others wanted someone who could argue with the chairman, John Maynard Keynes. In the end they plucked up the courage to argue with Keynes for themselves, and appointed a suitably conventional successor who brought back tips from his clubs and stayed on for 35 years. One clubmate of his was a duke, who admitted that he, too, was a director of a life office. Which one?' "Pon my soul, I can't remember.' Nicholas stayed on, too, and became deputy chairman, but he had more fun with Keynes: 'Once, when a member of the board asked him to explain an economic point, he said: "No, really I can't, for if I did, you would never understand it." At least the National Mutual's directors, unlike the Equitable's, knew that the time to quit is when you are ahead. Nicholas might have agreed with that.
Of course, Ma'am
WADING through disinfectant, the Queen Mother came to Sandown to see her horse win the Barclays Bank Hurdle. My racing correspondent, Captain Threadneedle, tells me that the race is for riders with Service connections, and that Barclays sponsors it because, years ago, she told the chairman that his bank should do the decent thing. Sir John Thomson, who bred and owned the winner of a Cheltenham Gold Cup, took no persuasion, and his successors have felt obliged to keep it going ever since. They should make more of it, my correspondent says. He offers them a slogan: 'Barclays, the bank that does the decent thing by Royal command.'
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