 | |
Iain Watson, our Political reporter writes this week's newsletter.
We are at a historical turning point.
Not perhaps as dramatic as the reconquest of Spain, or the fall of the Berlin wall - but a turning point nonetheless.
As of this week, I've realised that the main qualification for journalism has changed from literacy to numeracy.
One of the best questions to be put from the floor of an election press conference (I can say that in all modesty, because it wasn't mine!) was whether this campaign owed more to accountancy than ideology. Or put another way, isn’t it all about taxation, not inspiration?
It wasn't like that in the old days. In 1979 Mrs Thatcher campaigned to curb union power and to sell off council houses, and not on the offer of a slightly more generous tax relief if you save for your pension. And when Keir Hardie became the first socialist to be elected for West Ham in 1892, it wasn’t - as far as I'm aware - on the basis that Liberal and Conservative spending plans had a 'black hole'.
So why do I feel so strongly about this? Perhaps because it's been a week when my email inbox has been stuffed full of press releases and ‘dossiers’ (i.e. treat the content with extreme caution!) from Labour and the Conservatives, attacking each others' figures. The most oft repeated but utterly fallacious line is that their opponent's plans don’t 'add up'.
The numerically challenged amongst us can easily settle this argument by using a calculator. But what we find is that ALL the figures publicly available do indeed add up after all!
What is much more difficult to discern is whether the underlying assumptions behind them are true, or false…in other words how the individual figures were arrived at before they were added up. In the end it all comes down to trust rather than tax plans.
I interviewed the pollster Andrew Cooper of 'Populus' this week, who carries out the surveys of voter opinion in the 'Times' newspaper. He said that despite trickling out their tax reductions in three tranches over the past few weeks, most voters think the Conservatives would actually increase tax..AND cut services to boot. The term ‘double whammy’ comes to mind. The Conservatives’ £4bn tax cutting package, which they completed yesterday, is of course very modest, less than 1% of total tax take - and there have been off the record murmurings from some of their candidates that it's been modest to the point of bashfullness.
But in fact both Labour and the Conservatives share a common interest in giving the impression that the tax cuts are a bit bigger than they actually are...that would allow Michael Howard to suggest he's taking the country in a decidedly different direction while Labour could raise fears that the Tories would slash public spending, rather than simply increasing it at a slower rate, which is the case.
Getting to the bottom of these claims and counter claims isn't as easy as you might think.
Some of the big accountancy firms have gone into purdah until after May the 6th - obviously to avoid charges of party political bias. But if, in the process, they don't upset one of the biggest providers of contracts in the country – i.e. the government (whoever forms it) - I'm sure that's an unintended advantage. So the independent Institute of Fiscal Studies has been invaluable in refusing to shirk political debate and fearlessly to pass judgement on the credibility of each party’s economic claims. (I've interviewed them twice so far in the campaign but perhaps we should just give them a regular slot on the show).
That said, the parties -and I include the LibDems here - adopt the 'Bing Crosby' approach to IFS reports: they accentuate the positive, and eliminate negative.
If the same way of thinking was applied to other walks of life, you'd begin to wonder if you could ever be certain of anything. Take even the most basic thing we all experience...the weather. For example, the Conservatives could claim it rains more under Labour governments, while Labour could say the sun shines more under Tony Blair. Both statements could be true but they would leave out any mention of drizzle, hail, snow, overcast days, skin damage from the sun's rays or anything else that might detract either from their own record or their attack on their opponents. Meteorology not ideology?
Anyway, as Ronnie Corbett might say, I digress.
Back to accountancy.
We were tipped off about the final tranche of the Tory tax plans on Wednesday...that is, the proposal not to charge stamp duty on house purchases under £250,000 (as opposed to £120,000 under Labour).
But we had to hedge this a little on air on Thursday morning as initially the Conservative press office wouldn’t tell us that tax cuts would be the topic of a press conference due to start the minute we came off air at 9am, never mind confirm whether we'd got it right about stamp duty. All parties like to keep their cards close to their chest at election time, understandably, but the concept of concealing the topic of a press conference from…er, the press, was a new one on me.
So once we came off air I hurried round to the, by now, overt event to hear the official announcement on tax. But I must say I think the Conservatives really missed a trick.
The shadow Chancellor Oliver Letwin gave an answer so detailed on the variation in regional house price indices that while we all 'powernapped' for the duration, he could have announced the slashing of public spending, the privatisation of the NHS or the intention, when in government, to place his Labour opponents under house arrest and no-one would have batted a closed eyelid.
The one party apparently unaffected by this triumph of accountancy over ideology is the LibDems. Or rather, their leader, Charles Kennedy. Having failed to answer adequately questions about who would be better or worse off under his local income tax proposals at his manifesto launch last week, he failed all over again this week in an interview with Jeremy Paxman. Then, less visibly, he got his figures in a twist on one of his many campaign visits. Young Donald James must be bawling the house down every night and making it impossible for his poor father to concentrate on his own policy documents. Or perhaps the loquacious Charlie hasn’t caught up with my realisation that numeracy now matters more than literacy. Then again, a failure to spout endless figures may just underline the message that the LibDems are indeed the real alternative...
Iain Watson
___________________________________________________
|
|
