No 54 - Rehabilitation & Running on Empty
Dear James,
The headlines say it all. Mr Gove snorted cocaine. Mr Stewart smoked opium. Mr Hunt tried cannabis and Mrs Leadsom did the same. It seems that your party is going through some sort of drug rehabilitation programme that has to begin with a confession. ‘My name is Gove and I was a drug user.’ I am tempted to ask you what your own preference was James!
Meanwhile there has been a massacre on the streets of the Sudan, our global climate has reached 413.54 parts per millions of CO2, Xi Xinping has met Putin in St Petersburg to plot the autocratic takeover of the world and President Trump continues to wage tariff warfare everywhere. And your party continues to aspire to a ‘Global Britain’? Who is your party trying to kid James?
The absence of any heavyweight thinking amongst the contenders for your party’s leadership appals me. While the 11 mediocre candidates scrap amongst themselves and impose their tedious and half-baked messages upon us all, the real things that should matter are being ignored. The country is crying out for radical and thoughtful change and yet, instead of bold new thinking and policies, we are subjected to the promise of a tax cut here, a small increase in the schools’ budgets there. They are simply nibbling at the edges. Your contenders are mice in the bull ring of the international arena.
Your party has lost the plot James. It is running on empty. It has no intellectual depth and no ideas about what it is or where it is going. Once upon a time you were considered by many to be the natural party of the UK, the economically competent party and the party that best represented stability and continuity. Today you are out of date and out of touch with the country that has changed dramatically beneath your feet.
What is your party for James? The clue is in the name. The ultimate target of the Conservative Party is to conserve. But to conserve what? Conservation of many things is to be desired I agree. But what the Tory party has conserved over the years are such things as land distribution (1% of the nation owns 50% of the land), social inequality, educational advantage for the few and over-reliance on financial services for tax revenue. Now I am not advocating anything as radical as breaking up land ownership but I am suggesting that land should pay its fair share of tax.
This week, largely ignored by the press, the Labour Party published a Report on Land. In an article by Philip Collins in the Times last Friday, the writer reminds us that your very own Winston Churchill MP has often said that ‘Land is the greatest monopoly’. Land today, valued at £5tn, accounts for 51% of Britain’s net worth. Yet the owner of land has only to sit still and do nothing but watch the value of his land increase. At the moment 45% of tax revenues come from taxes on income – or work. Surely, this is madness`? Why disincentivize the workers of our nation and incentivise the idle? Surely, we should be taxing land and not work? A tax of 1% on land would generate £50bn which would allow us to cut income tax by a third or corporation tax to be eliminated totally. If we taxed land at 2% so much more could be done. More for the NHS, for schools, for the common good.
But such a measure would cut across the main thing that your party has always conserved James. From long before the Great Reform Act of 1832 – indeed from perhaps as long ago as William the Conqueror’s total land grab in 1086 when 1,000 nobles were handed all the land in the country as tenants-in-chief - landowners have dominated our politics. And since the late 17th century it has been the Tory Party that has carried that great tradition forwards. Although very much disguised beneath the necessary plethora of minutiae in government policies, it is the landowning membership of your party and their followers who will soon decide our next Prime Minister. Plus ca change?
So let’s forget about the various drug misdemeanours. Wouldn’t it better to start thinking about what your party is for James? Who it represents? What it should be? Because until that exercise is undertaken, how can any policy put forward by your contenders for PM be relevant to the needs of a modern nation in the twenty first century?
Kind regards,
BH - Your Concerned Constituent