This post has been hypoallergenically tested for leadership contest irritants and approved by the Soiling Association.
The pre-spat blurb from Mark Littlewood on Sunday’s Politics Show has understandably faded from view somewhat. Among its several exasperating features (Vox pop: “Have you heard of Nick Clegg? Have you? Go on, have you? No? Not at all? Not even if I prod you with this big stick?”) was a brief interview with a youngish twat-in-a-blue-shirt-in-the-street type who has voted Lib Dem at the last two elections and plans to vote Tory next time.
Why this defection by twat-in-blue-shirt? Well, apparently the Lib Dems need to really Sort Out Their Tax Policy. They need to realise that higher taxes isn’t going to appeal to young people on lower salaries who are finding it hard to make ends meet, even though it might mean more funding for public services. That’s why Cameron has won over so many younger people, says twat-in-blue-shirt portentously as he caresses his latte, with his stamp duty threshold raise and his inheritance tax policy.
I had to stop the Politics Show for a minute at this point and weep gently for a bit. All of what follows has been said before (and way better, like with figures and everything), but it’s always worth saying again, if only so that I can post it to my Facebook page in the hope that it knocks some sense into my idiotic Tory friends (love y’all).
I mean, maybe there really is no hope, if the electorate is this stupid (I said this post had been tested for leadership contest irritants – I never said I wouldn’t abuse the general public, especially when they wear shirts like that). It’s not the fact that twat-in-blue-shirt doesn’t know that the current Liberal Democrat tax policy would exceed his wildest dreams - it’s recently off the production line after all, and it’s the party’s job to bring it to the public’s attention, not the other way round. It’s that his reasons for favouring Tory tax policy are so tragically empty, senseless and overspun that it breaks my heart.
IHT is of course a tax specifically invented to annoy the People’s Republic of Mortimer, whether the Head of State is being forced hatefully to draw up calculations for people to avoid it or voluntarily reading silly articles about what an unearthly evil it is. It’s a tax on accumulated wealth which affects anything up to forty-eight people, of whom forty live inside the M25 and one is the Duke of Westminster*, so for twat-in-a-blue-shirt to be allowed to perpetuate the myth that it’s some sort of lodestone for the economic liberty of The People is risibly London-focused, and such an unselfconsciously Thatcherite piece of upper-middle-class bleating as to be little short of sick. (Incidentally, why would you give a toss about IHT as a supposedly selfish apolitical young person unless you are actually planning to murder your parents? Damned suspicious, in my opinion.)
But it’s not altogether twat-in-a-blue-shirt’s fault. The two main parties have successfully made IHT into a buzz issue, the kind of thing the editors of the Money section have on four-weekly turnover. This works marvellously if you’re in government or fancy your chances because the tax is dead easy to tinker with – there’s only one Act (IHTA 1984) and you can sign off regulations changing the thresholds around until the printer cartridge runs out if you like. Mark Littlewood, I assume, knows all this perfectly well as the party ex-Head of Press, but as liberals we have a certain moral and political obligation to nod and say “Hm, well it’s interesting to know that this is what you think, clearly we need to work on our message” rather than just beating people over the head for talking utter horse piss. No, criminally insane it may be, but we are stuck with IHT as a dealbreaker because it suits the media-stroke-major-party agenda. Fortunately, our policy on IHT is - lamentably, in my opinion – similar to Tory policy, so we still lose, but at least it’s only because no-one listens to us, rather than because no-one agrees (imagine my surprise).
Stamp duty is an altogether more interesting case. We don’t have an answer to the Tories here. A thorough read (okay, a CTRL+F) of the party housing policy will reveal absolutely no mention of stamp duty. Not one.
There’s a really, really good reason for this.
It doesn’t matter.
In a market where the average house costs ten times the average salary, it really doesn’t matter a flying bat’s fart** whether the 0% stamp duty threshold is set at £120K, £250K or £793,162 and fifty seven pence. It doesn’t matter whether it’s payable in pounds, yen, rupees, pomegranates or bits of fluff. It doesn’t make even the inciest, tiniest, weeniest scrap of a hairsbreadth of a difference to someone earning about £25k in London, or £17k in Devon (let’s say) who is trying to buy a rathole for respectively £140,000 or £90,000, whether they have to stump up a few extra grand for a bit of paper or not. Really. Truly. It doesn’t. Anyone putting themselves through the insanity of property purchase (I would like to know the thoughts of the Posh-Sounding Northumbrian on this, by-the-by) is officially the Person Most Likely to utter a manic giggle and slap it on the credit card along with the removal costs, half the deposit and the therapy fees.
Of course it makes it a fraction easier if you can already afford to buy. So would carrying all your furniture yourself. Or getting your dad to do it. But the main parties tout the precise whereabouts of the stamp duty threshold vis-a-vis their own arse as a property panacea on an equal level with home ownership schemes (which are problematic enough in themselves because at the time of writing they are only available to public sector workers called Colin who have lived and worked in the London Borough of Haringey for twenty-five years and have to travel more than fifty-nine football pitches’ lengths on public transport to get to work and always been very good and never taken a library book back late. That’s me out. I can change my sex and my name, but there’s chuff-all I can do about my library record).
To pretend that stamp duty, as IHT, is some sort of major personal freedom issue of our times and that tinkering with it will somehow promote a brighter future is a cynical, ghastly trick to pull on a taxpayer, an indicator of shockingly unimaginative policy-making and a sign that any prospect of our having “rights” on things that actually matter is in the toilet and we all ought to be constantly outraged. Oh, we are.
Howsobeit, it is by just these means that we have lost twat-in-a-blue-shirt. The second half of this post was going to be about how to win him back, but actually I’m now so depressed I don’t really care.
* It is just possible that I exaggerate somewhat.
** Hat tip the Cleggster via Paul Walter
November 20, 2007 at 8:17 pm
0% stamp duty threshold makes a difference to first time buyers with a 100% mortgage if they are stupid, if it is set low enough to affect them. Stupid first time buyers often don’t calculate for things like stamp duty and solicitor’s fees and things when they work out how much they can afford to spend on a house because they don’t realise how much these things will come to.
However, anyone stupid enough to buy a house NOW deserves what’s coming to them.
* suspects TIBS falls into that category *
Anyway, Mat has just come up with a cunning plan to bring down the Inland Revenue and all their little minions, so I must fly, because it requires my participation….
November 20, 2007 at 8:17 pm
Funnily enough, “what a twat” is exactly what I said about that Tory boy. Then I got distracted by the shennanigans so ended up forgetting about this.. glad you remembered!
I mean, he’s advocating policies that he won’t benefit from, unless, as you say, he thinks his only way onto the property ladder is to have his parents die and leave him their cash.
Of course, maybe it’s all the rage in twatty circles to pretend that Inheritance Tax *does* apply to you?
November 20, 2007 at 8:45 pm
I’m fortunate in that I was able to knock the seller down by more than 20% to a point where the house is Stamp Duty exempt, and also hopefully giving me some protection against a housing market slow-down, though not a crash.
But yes, when I’d decided it was time to get on the property ladder, I’d come to terms with the fact that stamp duty would have to go on the overdraft, along with solicitors fees, conveyancing fees, survey fees, mortgage arrangement fees, phone connection fees etc etc etc etc etc. It’s a winner for the government, and when it comes to buying a house it doesn’t factor too heavily – it’s an expensive process, and after a time there is a danger that all the cheques flow in to one another.
I think at a time when barriers to home ownership need to be removed, abolition of Stamp Duty, or a dramatic raising of the threshold, would be no bad thing but would perhaps not kick-start the housing market that much.
November 20, 2007 at 8:49 pm
PS, that bloke really was a twat.
November 20, 2007 at 10:17 pm
Sadly, twats do vote and, all other things be equal, I’d rather they voted for us (since we’re not twats) and not for anyone else (since they’re mostly twats, with a few honourable exceptions).
At the risk of sounding masochistic, we probably do have to blame ourselves somewhere for this. How is it that we’ve failed to convince people to vote for us when voting for us is in their own self-interest? I mean, if we posit the existence of a ‘twat constituency’ amongst the voting public, a group of people who are largely self-absorbed and vote for policies which will, they assume, make them better off, how is it that they’re not hearing us when we’re offering them exactly what they want? Lower income tax, for Christ’s sake!
I think there’s a big and ultimately really scary problem at the heart of this. The fact is that normal people don’t understand policy (or what I’d prefer to call ‘political engineering’). And, to be honest, nor should they. Plenty of people can operate a computer without knowing how many bits are in a byte, and plenty of people can vote in elections without having the faintest idea of what the precise effects of party policy are. They just know the kind of thing that parties talk about doing; if Tories talk about cutting tax, then maybe they might get around to cutting my taxes one day!
The reason for this, I speculate, is that rational decision-making about politics is expensive. It requires that you spend time learning facts, and spend even more time observing the causal effects of policies upon facts, and spend brain-power keeping track of all of this. Actually taking time out of your day to think about politics is something that most people aren’t terribly bothered with, just like they won’t take the time to learn the internal workings of a computer system: so long as the system pretends to be simple enough to understand, people will feel in control and will make up their own entirely daft reasons for ‘the way things work’. Everyone with an above-average knowledge of IT must have been confronted with the spectacle of the ordinary user who has invented their own quite mad rationale for explaining why their computer behaves in the way that it does. They’re pretty much the same with politics, except that politics is a lot more complicated and the politicians are trying a lot harder to conceal the complexity of what’s going on behind the scenes.
So, in conclusion, we probably need to figure out how to explain our tax policy in words of two syllables or less. Even words like ‘fairer’ (despite passing the syllable test!) probably carry the wrong connotations, because people also tend to assume that their earning potential is a lot higher than it really is, and will thus vote for unfair taxes on the basis that they expect to be the beneficiaries of this unfairness. If we want to cut income tax, we might as well just say ‘lower taxes’ and be done with it.
November 20, 2007 at 10:19 pm
I should point out that being irrational about politics is not necessarily irrational per se; our time and attention is a limited resource, and if we can get away with making a reasonable decision about how to vote whilst expending the least amount of thought on the matter, we’re probably right to do so. Our challenge, then, is to make understanding Lib Dem policy require as little thought and attention as possible.
November 21, 2007 at 7:33 am
Of course our tax policies are likely to result in an increase in house prices roughly equivalent to another earnings multiple by removing the council tax. But then everyone hates the council tax too (moreso than IHT according to the Taxpayers Alliance research) and we’re the only party (of the “big three” at least) with any policy for replacing it.
November 21, 2007 at 9:18 am
“Twat constituency” – love it.
Rob K, I agree that it is basically our fault (or at least, it will be if we get to the next election not having made any headway with tax publicity).
I also rather agree about the lower taxes thing, given that for most people that is what the effect will be. What always strikes me about messages though is that shorter does not necessarily mean easier to understand – you point this out yourself with “fairer”, which fails the communications test of being a realistic political proposition when reversed. I am always extremely sobered (which is probably just as well) when conducting my victimisation of innocent civilians in the pub, and trying out Lib Dem tax policy on them, to find how few of them understand “4p off in the pound”. And before you can explain, they’ve skittered off along the “kind of thing the parties talk about” line of thought. I also find that people like to assume an air of expertise, even if they (quite rightly as you say) put very little energy into understanding the system. IHT and stamp duty are both self-contained and relatively simple to understand, and attract people because they promise the sound of expertise for little effort, which is probably why the media colludes in the deception that they are of universal importance.
Having written that about stamp duty, I actually wonder if Rob F is right. If we can knock 4p off the basic rate, surely we can send the 0% threshold into the stratosphere and get naughty dirty cars to pay for it without too much bother? It wouldn’t do much except make us look good, but hey, if people think it would, and we just used it as an appetite-whetter for the proper good stuff…
And now I am depressed again.
“increase in house prices roughly equivalent to another earnings multiple by removing the council tax” Jock, how so? I am a ranter rather than an economist. Elaborate ye (or link ye).
November 23, 2007 at 4:49 pm
Arggghhhh please nooooooo, don’t ask about that, you’ll get huge rants about Land Value Taxation. I have tried to understand but simply cannot. The theory goes, as far as I can tell – if there is no council tax, the price of big houses in formerly high council tax areas will increase. However, surely the market will be depressed as high earners will pay more tax than they would have done council tax?
November 23, 2007 at 11:57 pm
[...] Posted by Alix under Polly-ticks | Tags: communications, tax | Once upon a moon I wrote scathingly of the twat-in-blue-shirt voter we have lost to flimsy Tory tax “policy”, and was quite [...]
August 16, 2008 at 10:51 pm
[...] How can we win back twat-in-a-blue-shirt-in-the-street? And do we care? [...]