It was a privilege to address the Green Party’s Reading conference, and a relief not to be hooted off the stage. For I had stood against the Greens (and everyone else) as an Independent in the Eastern Region Euro elections of 2004. I was therefore accused of splitting their vote. I polled 93,000 and the Party’s estimable lead candidate, Margaret Wright, 84,000. So I would argue that the Greens split mine.
I promise not to do it again. The lead candidate this time, Rupert Read of Norwich, stands a good chance of being elected. Not only are green issues more prominent than they were, but the political landscape has changed so radically that a decent party outside the mainstream, offering something other than politics as usual, will stand a much better chance with the voters. Public trust in public life is an issue they can relate to.
It was also the issue that accidentally swept me into the House of Commons nearly eleven years ago - not only me, but the entire New Labour Government. As Tony Blair reminded us, it was “a time of hope beyond ordinary imagining”. So why did they let it go so nonchalantly? Why the party funding scandals, from Bernie Ecclestone to cash-for-peerages? Why did they undermine two fine public servants, Elizabeth Filkin and Sir Alistair Graham, who were champions of honest politics? Why indeed did they send the armed forces to war - the most serious decision a government takes - on the basis of a falsehood?
I was so bewildered by all this that one day, after I had seen an MP trade his vote for a peerage, I decided to write a book about it. The sub-title, New Labour’s Breach of Trust, gives some idea of the story line. And the miscreants were not only on the Labour side. The disgrace of Derek Conway, paying his sons more than £40,000 of taxpayers’ money while they were full-time students, revived memories of the Tory sleaze of the 1990s.
And a whole slew of other allegations followed, touching even the Speaker’s chair. The outcome is not far short of a constitutional crisis. The Speakership is the last repository of absolute power in the country. No MP dare raise a voice against him. There is no mechanism for removing him between elections, if he is reluctant to be moved. Not only that, but he presides over the committee that is supposed to conduct a “root and branch” review of MPs’ expenses. Some of the members of that committee are themselves well known for their creative accounting.
Here lies a wonderful opportunity for the Greens - as indeed for all respectable minor parties and Independents everywhere. It will require a promise that the parliamentary expenses of a new MP or MEP will be an open book for all to see at any time. And it will mean putting the restoration of public trust at the top of the agenda alongside the more familiar green issues.
The public are angry. They are looking for politicians they can be proud of. Now, that would be a change.
Martin Bell’s new book, The Truth That Sticks: New Labour’s Breach Of Trust, is published by Icon Books and is available now.
There is a popular view that real grown up politics are just about the economy and people’s pockets. Worrying about the environment, education and health is for wimps. Real politicians like Gordon Brown build their reputations on economic competence - while politicians, like John Major, fail when they get the economy wrong.
Green politicians, then, are perceived to be the most unrealistic of all: worrying about distant threats like the weather getting a bit warmer and having fantasy plans for expensive expanded public services.
Yet it is actually the grey politicians who are engaging in a fantasy about the economy - that it can go on growing indefinitely. Green politicians are the true realists - the only politicians that recognise that the party is over and who are putting forward practical plans for a new economy.
Changing the economy is a huge task. Particularly when it comes to reducing the dominance of huge multinational companies and building a new diverse economy based on small firms, community enterprise, cooperatives and other mutuals and a re-invigorated public sector. But the economic policies that are of most immediate concern to most people are tax policies, which have to be addressed as part of the answer to the question ‘what would you do now?’
So what is tax for? Obviously to raise money for public expenditure, and it is important that our taxation plans match our expenditure plans. But it has two other important functions. First it re-allocates income between rich and poor. Second, it encourages people to do good things and discourages them from doing bad things, especially environmentally good and bad things.
Let’s start with re-distribution. The centrepiece here is Citizen’s Income, the proposal to pay a regular income to everyone regardless of circumstances. There would be supplements for disability, single parents and housing and special rates for children and pensioners. That’s easy to understand. What is more complicated are the other two legs of the policy: the abolition of most existing benefits and all the means tests associated with them and changes to income tax.
We propose a much simpler income tax system, with the abolition of employee’s national insurance (which is simply an income tax in disguise) and no personal allowance. We favour a graduated system, with lower rates for lower incomes and rates above the present to rates of 40% for the highest earners.
Secondly eco-taxation. We favour a range of taxes on environmental bad things, from petrol to air flights. We differ from the other parties in two ways. First we’d have much higher levels of eco-taxes - the proposals from the other parties are simply insufficient. Second, we’d not balance them by cutting income tax. It’s far fairer to poorer people to balance eco-taxes by cutting another indirect tax that everyone pays, and the biggest of those is VAT.
To view the Green Party’s tax proposals in detail visit:
http://policy.greenparty.org.uk/mfss/mfssec.html and look at para EC700.
