CENTRE POINT
Mr Clarke believes the electorate is being economical with the truth
SIMON JENKINS
In next week's budget Kenneth Clarke could easily win the next election for the Tories. All he has to do is give the middle classes what they want. This, according to the latest British Social Attitudes, is a coher- ent package of more public spending and higher taxes to pay for it. The voters want more money for the welfare state, law and order and help to industry. Mr Clarke might even consider ring-fencing extra taxes for such spending. He need not worry about the money: just raise taxes and spend. So say 63 per cent of British adults, includ- ing 55 per cent of declared Tory voters.
So what is stopping him? The answer is that Mr Clarke believes that the survey is lying. Every poll says that the public wants more spent on the welfare state and is pre- pared for higher taxes to cover the cost. But Mr Clarke thinks this is mere bravado, put on for the benefit of the pollsters. Nobody likes to be thought anti-welfare or ungenerous towards the poor, least of all when cross-examined by a stranger. Such polls are `unpriced' philanthropy. In the privacy of the polling booth, the voter feels his wallet pressing to his chest. The cross goes to the party that promises not to light- en it. Generosity is for the pavement. The ballot is mean.
Tory governments have long acted on Mr Clarke's conviction. They call the elec- torate's bluff. Chancellors are told by party managers not to raise spending and not to raise taxes. Indeed they should struggle to cut both. According to the survey, this tax- cut option is hugely unpopular, supported by just 4 per cent of the electorate. The Government's central policy has minuscule public support. Yet the Government believes the opposite. Polls on voting inten- tion are credited with vast insight: polls on taxation are rubbished.
Somebody must be wrong. The editors of the BSA surveys have become understand- ably concerned. They have been asking about taxing and spending for ten years and watched a clear trend develop. In 1983, a third of their sample wanted more taxes and more spending, but over a half were in favour of the status quo. Today the tax- and-spenders have doubled to 63 per cent, while the status quo is supported by just 29 per cent. This change has taken place over a decade in which both public spending and the average tax burden have actually increased.
Nor is this all. In his report on the find- ings, the commentator David Lipsey points out that the fastest rise in this 'wet' senti- ment is now among Conservative voters and those calling themselves middle-class. In 1983 just a quarter of Mr Clarke's own supporters appear to disagree with him. But he believes they too are lying.
The evidence for Mr Clarke's lie theory is not inconsiderable. Most glaring, the Tories have won four general elections on the strength of it. Labour's Tony Blair is terrified of being thought to favour higher taxes. He agrees with Mr Clarke in distrust- ing the apparent message of the electorate. Everybody wants more spent on welfare the 'safety-net syndrome' — but in truth nobody wants to pay for it out of their taxes. Surveys that ask about personal taxes alone find people overwhelmingly protest- ing that theirs are too high. 'More taxes' tends to mean more of someone else's taxes, or at least of indirect taxes. It is an article of faith for democratic politicians the world over that personal taxes are hated. The public will always vote for the party that cuts them: 'Read my lips.'
I sense that the matter is now not so sim- ple. As Lord Salisbury remarked of a gen- eral election, 'The Great Oracle speaks but no one is quite sure what the Great Oracle said.' In the first place, the Tories have not `won' the past four general elections in the pollsters' sense and Tories need to remem- ber that. Voters supporting high-spending parties, Labour and Liberals together, won a popular majority at all of them. Thatcherism was always a minority religion.
More significant is that, however many electors may claim to believe in tax-and- spend, the proportion is clearly growing. There is no gainsaying the polls on that. Conservative strategy assumes it is shrink- ing. Nor can it be denied that the rising support for welfare spending (and taxing) is particularly strong in the floating middle of the electoral spectrum, where party tacti- cians love to congregate. This is strongly reflected in responses to right-wing claims about welfare. Twice as many people now feel unemployment benefit is too low as feel it is too high. Claims that 'most unem- ployed people could find a job if they real- ly wanted one' or that welfare 'encourages people to stop helping each other' are strongly rejected. Respondents are also specific over where they want their money to go: more on health, education and pen- sions but, most emphatically, less on defence and the arts.
The joy of oracles is that anybody can play at interpreting them. I believe that the BSA survey accurately reflects a trend. But it does not indicate growing public altru- ism, if anything the reverse. Fifteen years of Toryism has not shrunk the public sector but sent it up market. No longer is it seen by middle-class voters as a selfless donation for the relief of the poor. It is a safety net for themselves, their children and their elderly relatives. They see taxes spent on welfare as another form of insurance. Nothing obsesses the middle classes like insurance. Taxes are a precaution, a bul- wark against the potential horrors of the free market economy.
The Tory welfare state is now far more extensive than was Labour's in 1979. Apart from its burgeoning clients, millions of pro- fessionals depend on it for their livelihoods, doctors, teachers, lecturers, criminal lawyers, social administrators. Not surpris- ingly these people approve of public spend- ing because they get more out of it than they give back in taxes. They support par- ties and policies that promise to protect their direct interest. Such people may not want their taxes to rise; but more of them seem ready to contemplate the prospect. The Tory Government has the worst of all these worlds. It gets no credit for expanding the popular welfare state, but is blamed for threatening to undermine it with cuts. This was Lady Thatcher's most ironic revolution. She turned the image of the welfare state from that of a working-class charity to that of a middle-class interest. By never taking a real knife to it, she allowed the Tories to invade and colonise it. They are a notoriously ungrateful bunch. They now declare that the welfare state should go on growing, but under Labour custodianship.
Simon Jenkins writes for the Times.
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