The FishTank

Since last week’s budget the Guardian has been awash with sob stories about those adversely affected by the coalition’s money-saving measures. Some have been people in a state of denial – convinced that the thousands of pounds of benefit they receive for a house in inner London is not a large sum of money, or that all was milk and honey before the credit crunch; others have been ill-informed – claiming that VAT rises will affect those on the lowest pay more than those with money to spend, or that the public sector and the economy are one and the same thing; still more have been wilfully misunderstanding – describing measures designed to help people move to follow work or to work longer as if they were measures to force them to do so. All, however, have been united firstly in being written by obvious Labour voters and secondly in being written by victims not of the coalition, not of the bankers, but of New Labour.

Take one case in today’s Guardian. A single-mother, divorced, formerly working full-time to raise her one child, finds herself suffering from stomach pains and other stress-related symptoms. Her doctor advises her to give up work – advice she follows without reluctance as it gives her more time with her child. She still makes money from writing, but for the most part she is better off from the benefits that pay her rent and cover her council tax. Now her writing job is being axed and her benefits reduced. She has, she says, done all the right things, but is being punished for it.

Only, of course, she hasn’t. Because for every mother like her there are dozens of young women who have no child, not because they don’t want one, but because they are realistic enough to understand that even if they could afford to raise them, they would have to work long hours and hardly see them. They could, like the columnist, have chosen to do it anyway, but they have chosen to put it off until it is viable – if it ever is. Some, particularly on the left, would characterise these people as selfish, declining to have a child because they give their own lives precedence, but isn’t it is vastly more selfish to have a child you can’t support?

And then there’s the stomach pains and the weight loss. Some people are martyrs to conditions such as this. Irritable Bowel Syndrome, M.E. – complaints both real and imagined blight many in our highly charged modern lives. But the doctor’s advice, if reported accurately, was wrong. Stress in the workplace is not a reason to stop working – it is a reason to look for another job. That a person would choose to give up work, knowing they will be dependent on the State, clearly not intending to return to the workplace any time soon, this is a symptom of a culture fostered by New Labour – a culture which, left unchecked, will destroy our society.

Of course, that statement left unqualified probably sounds as exaggerated as any in the Guardian’s pages, but consider forty years ago. During the 1970’s, there were many households where people struggled to make ends meet – industrial unrest and rapidly rising inflation meant that putting food on the table was a genuine concern. Some fathers – mine included – worked such hours that they barely saw their children, and job security was incredibly uncertain in the teeth of the three day weeks and wildcat strikes that dragged a struggling nation to the IMF. People lost jobs and responded by looking for new ones. Reality was stressful, but few claimed that stress was debilitating enough that they shouldn’t have to work. And the reason for this was because the State – whether under Labour or Conservative governments – gave short-shrift to the workshy. You kept working not just because you ought to, but because you had to.

Underneath this unrest, meanwhile, the British economy was transforming. Low-skilled heavy industry jobs like steel-working and mining – the heart of many of the industrial disputes – were slowly but surely losing their competitive edge. Strikes and skyrocketing wage inflation meant that the country simply couldn’t afford to keep the industries going. When the Miner’s Strike of 1984 brought the coal industry to collapse it was the end of an era. It was also the start of a new one.

Because one of the things that militant unionism did was to breed a sense of entitlement. Miners who were paid higher than average earnings for a relatively unskilled job could have retrained and got other jobs. Many did, but many more chose to martyr themselves to long-term unemployment rather than take less money in a job they considered beneath their dignity. They weren’t thrown on the scrapheap – they climbed on it for themselves. And Labour, despite Clause IV, signed up to this new agenda of unionised inactivity. If voters could be persuaded that Conservatism was about keeping the poor under the heel whilst the rich got richer, then both the working class and the new underclass would be their natural constituency. So, when the Conservatives tried to do something about the increasing abuse of the welfare state by workshy teenage mothers, Labour threw reality aside and attacked the Government as the nasty party. When spending was restrained in the face of recession, Labour accused the Conservatives of deliberately setting out to attack the poor. They built a vote round those who chose a life on benefits and those gullible enough to believe it was Conservative policy to ruin the poor for the sake of the wealthy.

In office, the project picked up pace. New Labour might not have invented the idea of reclassifying the unemployed, but they built on it, moving millions from unemployment to incapacity benefit, creating the myth that those who lost their jobs in the mines were somehow disabled as a result of that loss. They introduced tax credits, taking money from the poor and making them fill in reams of paperwork in order to get it back. They might have claimed the money came from the rich, but the 40% top rate of tax – only lowered there in the late 1980’s – didn’t rise until after the credit crunch, and capital gains tax – now seen as a tax on rich property owners – was lowered on Gordon Brown’s watch. Far from encouraging people to self-reliance and industry for the good of the country, Labour actually went as far as to encourage – or at least allow – doctors to write off perfectly healthy people as disabled, increasing the underclass and – as they thought – their vote share as they went.

And so it might have continued were it not for the credit crunch. The danger in 2008 was not of us becoming a second Greece, it was of us becoming a second Sweden – a country with punitive taxation and an addiction to benefits, where anyone who has the capacity to prosper flees, leaving the remainder to fund their welfare state by exporting raw materials. It might work with a nation of 8 million people – it would be a disaster in a nation of 62 million. The credit crunch rewrote the script: the deficit had been at its highest in 50 years before the crunch, but nobody had batted an eyelid. With the collapse of Northern Rock, attention turned quickly from the state of private banking to that of public finance and the necessity of retrenchment.

What would have happened without that crunch? We can only speculate, but it’s not unreasonable to assume that Labour could have won the 2010 election and gone on to increase the deficit close to current levels over the course of a parliament. In that time, more and more people would have become trapped in benefit dependency. Eventually taxes would have risen, and each time they did it would have reduced our national competitiveness, more so if other countries were also free from recession. The Guardian wouldn’t have seen it that way, of course: the same culture shift that has made people think it’s fine choosing to live off benefits has made pariahs of anyone who refuses that choice and prospers. The rich are there to be soaked – unless they’re popular celebrities – but just as in the 1960’s and 70’s jobs and businesses would have left, the tax take would have fallen and the deficit risen. Eventually, tough choices would have been forced on the government – or possibly even taken for them by the IMF. And it’s the IMF who have mooted the idea we should remove VAT exemptions on food and baby clothes – measures that genuinely would hurt the poor.

One thing the Guardian has got at least partially right is that Conservatives have embraced austerity as an opportunity. Osborne was quick to change the agenda, his age of austerity speech another masterstroke from an often underestimated politician. As with much of their reporting, however, the Guardian either missed or chose to ignore the point. The Conservatives are not, as the New Labour dogma has it, striving to attack the poor and the needy to enrich their friends in the city. As the only party to genuinely understand the market the Conservatives know what will happen if matters are allowed to continue as they have been. They alone appear to understand that business is mobile and that soaking the hard-working to support the workshy is a recipe not for a neo-Edwardian age of happy idleness, but a slide into poverty, potentially losing us our place in the G8 as other countries follow China and Brazil in rising above us. This shift in international league tables may seem unimportant, but it is symbolic of a deeper truth. For people in a country to get better off, the country as a whole has to get better off. For this to happen, businesses have to open more markets and export more products. And that means we have to be a good place both to find workers and profits. If we want to encourage businesses to set up in this country, to pay us taxes and give us jobs, we have to reassure them that they won’t, in a few years time, be facing increasingly punitive taxation in order to support a growing legion of people who have decided that work is fine for people who like that sort of thing, but not for them – they enjoy watching daytime television with their children too much.

In the end it is always possible to find people who consider themselves hard done-by after a budget. Every shift in spending or taxation creates both winners and losers. The Telegraph were as biased as the Guardian when they campaigned about the rumoured rise in capital gains tax, but they appear to have accepted George Osborne’s decision with good grace. The Guardian are, however, obsessed with attacking the coalition’s budget. It is as if this were an unjustified smash and grab raid on the poor in a time of surplus. With the exception of the 10p tax debacle, I don’t recall their ever looking so hard for losers in Labour’s budgets. But that’s the thing, really. A credible newspaper would be one which could differentiate reasoned critique from political bias and you can’t expect that from a paper which has spent thirteen years living off of public sector job adverts, can you?

The invitation for the right honourable John Hutton to head up a review of public sector pensions for the coalition has caused considerable disquiet with the less-than-honourable John Prescott. At the same time, sundry Millibands and Darlings are accusing the Conservatives of lying about the state of the public finances in order to pursue an ideologically-driven cuts agenda. Pundits in both Lib-Dem and Conservative camps also seem determined to colour every action of the new government with the betrayal of their party. As the new politics causes an outburst of the old tribal instincts it’s worth considering if it is really right that politicians should be so driven by ideology.

The simple answer would, of course, be no. It is, after all, ideology that prevents Labour from accepting any reduction in the size of the state – no matter how ruinous the cost of keeping the gravy train on the rails. It is ideology that drives some outspoken right-wingers both in the Conservative Party and the Telegraph to see any moves to raise Capital Gains Tax as wrong. And can the unions, insisting that there should be no cessation of bread and circuses if it means less of either for their members be anything other than ideological in nature? When ideas come from ideology, reality it seems departs stage left or right depending on preference.

The trouble is, of course, that ideology in its simplest form is a set of shared values that informs policy. It was Margaret Thatcher’s belief in individual reliance and meritocracy that led her to champion the private sector industries that strove for efficiency and profitability over those who thought they could just strike until the rest of the country picked up their wage bills. It was that same belief that led her to extend people the right to buy their own council house – liberating them from a dependence on state provision like no government before. Whilst those of a left-wing bent will still complain about both of these policies (less about the latter than the former, it has to be said) they cannot argue with the fact that in the pre-Thatcher decade it was the continual strikes by inefficient unionised industries that regularly brought governments to their knees and caused an inflationary spiral that made non-unionised workers worse off. By 1983, the average mine-worker was earning 25% more than the average manual worker in other industries and, had Thatcher blinked, there’s no saying how far that differential would have gone before the miners finally brought the country cap in hand to the IMF. It was Thatcher’s ideology that helped her to face down the miners, but her ideology was informed by the grim reality of the decade prior to her premiership. It wasn’t until she did something that wasn’t informed by her ideology – the poll tax – that she finally fell.

For Labour, meanwhile, it was ideology that kept them from office. Ideology had built the party, championing the rights of workers in an age of vastly unfair industrial practices. By the 1980’s, however, that war had been largely won and formed the basis of political consensus. The party were left clinging to the fragments of ideology they had never successfully enacted and that, as time went on, were becoming increasingly irrelevant and unpopular. Michael Foot’s 1983 manifesto, which called for large-scale nationalisation, nuclear disarmament and leaving the EU, struck the public at a time when most people spent their summers in Europe on package holidays whilst recovering from the memory of three day weeks, power shortages and widespread industrial unrest. Nationalised industries meant unionised industries and in an age when nationalised British Rail were banned from using the simple slogan ‘We’re Getting There’, promising the same fate for any remotely profitable business was political suicide. It wasn’t until Tony Blair parted definitively with the nationalisation agenda – succeeding where Hugh Gaitskill had failed forty years earlier and ditching Clause IV – that Labour finally became electable.

New Labour was, of course, a party without ideology. Whilst some of the old guard – people like John Prescott – still talked the old rhetoric (if you can use the word rhetoric in Prescott’s case) the party had for the most part moved on from the politics of envy and decided it was fine to be rich. Some of them even joined the ranks of the landed during their tenure. It was an era less divisive than that which went before – it was also an era less decisive.

New Labour’s fundamental weakness, ignoring Iraq, ignoring the sleaze that mired their final years, was that without a set of values on which to form policy they were forced to chase headlines as a way of appealing to people. Promises were made, ignored and made again because the short memory of the media made it more beneficial to make grand gestures than actually to realise them. Targets were imposed on public services because the intentions sounded good – even if the results didn’t. Money was lavished on the poor without any consideration of where it would ultimately come from. It was one grand party, but when it ended a bitter Gordon Brown found himself holding the empties and trying to work out if he could claim enough back from them to pay the cleaning bill.

Because let’s be clear, for all his failings, Gordon Brown was not entirely the architect of the current mess. He was chancellor for most of its generation, but by all accounts his legendary arguments with Tony Blair were invariably about the balance between Blair’s largesse and Brown’s prudence. When Blair was driven out and Brown assumed the top job, his weak popularity rating made it politically impossible for him to do the right thing and fix things. He was forced to continue bread and circuses for the sake of survival and because, tarnished as he was with his predecessor’s failings, he couldn’t establish himself as an agent of change. Change had to come from elsewhere, which is why Cameron was right to make it the central tenet of his election campaign, but a public wary of another ideological vacuum to follow Blair were hesitant to endorse his particular brand.

And where are we now? We have a government formed from two parties who have been forced to look for their common ground and make that their ideology. Now, more than ever, the party of government has to be aware of what their policies are intended to achieve, rather than simply how they play to the public. It’s not a form of neo-Thatcherism, but a retrenchment narrative based on a belief that a profligate state is as damaging to the poor as it is to the rich. To keep both parties happy and the coalition intact it is vitally important that every policy decision is judged against the core values in their agreement document. And if they are not only consistent, but intelligent and – let’s be honest – lucky, the public will see the country turn the corner and thank them for their efforts. They will see tribal gain-saying from whoever occupies Labour’s leadership as increasingly irrelevant, cheap party point-scoring rather than a considered view of what is good for the country at large.

In the end ideology does have a place in politics. It matters that a politician understands what he is trying to achieve, that a party shares a common ambition for their policies. But it also matters that a politician can see beyond the coloured rosettes and take on other points of view. A hard-right Conservative like Michael Howard would have been as constitutionally incapable of forming a coalition as a left-leaning Lib Dem like Charles Kennedy. A government led by a ideologue like John Prescott would be as damaging now as a government led by Michael Foot would have been in 1983. David Cameron and Nick Clegg are not devoid of ideology, but they are ideological realists, prepared to sacrifice some of their outlying views for the sake of a shared narrative that benefits their country. It’s a mature, sensible politics as needed by our times as Margaret Thatcher’s combative, unblinking politics were needed by hers. In asking the help of Labour MPs with similarly broad minds, what Clegg and Cameron are doing is not simply using the talent available to them (an important consideration given the amount of new blood in the Commons at present), it is also sending a clear signal that the coalition is not about power at any price, but about finding the right answers to problems the previous government – more concerned with tomorrow’s papers than those twenty years hence – were all too keen to sweep under the carpet.

A report published today suggests that the Government should lower the drink-drive limit from its present 80mg blood alcohol to 50mg. The BBC, in an editorial, goes further, suggesting a complete ban – to save confusion. Is their conclusion – that just one death due to drink-driving is too many – really justification for such an attack on civil liberties?

Of course, some of the commentariat don’t see it in this way. From the comfort of their urban existence, they see no reason why anybody should need to drink and drive. After all, that’s what tube trains and black cabs are for. If, however, you live in a rural village, with no trains, where buses are like the yeti during the day and non-existent at night, where even taxis don’t run after 6pm, the choice is between drink-driving and never going out for a drink. In fact, for civilized society it’s the difference between drink-driving and never going out for a meal. Country pubs up and down the country rely on a steady stream of customers who like a meal with some wine and who are sensible with it. If the statistics suggested that every driver who shared a bottle of wine with his spouse was likely to kill someone there’d be no question but that a ban was necessary. But, of course, they show no such thing.

Statistics on driving deaths aren’t actually all that detailed. From what data there is, however, we can see that not only are there now fewer road deaths than at any time since 1923 – and that’s fewer in total, not per capita – but that of the 2,538 or so recorded in 2008, only 430 were caused by people driving over the legal limit. Only this statistic tells us less than we really need to know. For the purposes of justifying a lower limit or a complete ban we would need to know how many of the other 2000 or so deaths were caused by people who’d been drinking but were under the limit and, significantly, how many of the 430 either knew or cared whether they were over the limit. These two pieces of information are critically important because on them hinges the entire justification for a change in the existing regime.

Let’s take the first point first. It would be little more than propaganda to suggest that every road death was caused by alcohol, but we can look at data on weather, sex, road type and time of day/week and draw some conclusions. Firstly, most road deaths are male. This is no surprise: even in our modern, equal society, there are still more miles driven by men than women, particularly on the extra-urban A roads where over half of all deaths occur. In addition, male drivers are more likely to be aggressive and to speed. Even so, the small numbers (1825 in 2008) suggests either that most men are extremely lucky or that the sex is less than universally bad behind the wheel. Deaths are also vastly more common in the 17-25 age band than in any other, suggesting that it is when aggression is coupled with youthful inexperience that it is most likely to make a lethal cocktail.

But is that cocktail alcoholic? Clearly not in all cases – after all, if 643 road deaths are of 17-25 year olds and only 430 road deaths involve drink-driving, it would suggest that no older people were involved in drink-driving deaths. This is unlikely, but if it were true it would suggest drink-drive deaths could be eliminated simply by raising the legal age for alcohol. What’s more likely is that youthful impatience, aggression and inexperience leads to speeding and dodgy overtaking – certainly a common cause for deaths on our local roads.

Looking at the time of day, roughly a third of all road deaths occur during commuting hours. This is hardly surprising, tired or frustrated drivers and busy roads make accidents vastly more likely. Since most people don’t have a liquid breakfast or spend their last hour or so at work getting tanked up, however, it can be assumed that these deaths are unlikely to be alcohol-induced. There are spikes on Sunday lunchtimes and Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights, but these will, for the most part, be from the 430 drink-drive deaths already noted. There are also a fair distribution of deaths during both day and night on weekdays. The night ones are bound to involve a number of people who are driving tired or who have poor night vision, the day ones could readily involve some of the 557 pedestrian fatalities, particularly the 156 children under 16, many of whom may have stepped onto busy roads at an inopportune moment. Whilst it isn’t impossible that deaths at these times would involve alcohol, it is unreasonable to assume that they constitute a significant proportion. After all, those who drive drunk at 3am on a Tuesday morning or 4pm on a Wednesday afternoon are unlikely to hold down a job long enough to fund either a car or a drinking habit. Statistically, it is more likely that these accidents are caused by either the darkness or children with poor awareness of traffic. Banning the school run or imposing a curfew would undoubtedly save some of these lives, but only the most hardened anti-car groups would dare argue for either.

So, looking at the statistics overall, the clear suggestion is that whilst drink-drive deaths do occur at obvious drinking hours there is little evidence that the complete death toll involves a great many undiagnosed alcohol-related deaths. The risks of drinking up to the existing limit would seem to be overstated. There are other measures that would significantly reduce the number of road deaths – raising the minimum age for driving, for one – but nobody seems to be proposing these. Clearly, that one life saved isn’t that important.

But what about the second question? What if those 430 drink related deaths only happen because the drivers don’t know they’re over the limit? This is hard to judge statistically, but ask yourself just how credible it is. A man goes into a bar and drinks until it closes. He drives home and has an accident on the way. How likely is it that someone who has consumed perhaps 6-8 pints thinks he is under the limit? Or the two women who demolish a whole bottle of rose wine each before getting into their hatchback and driving off? Would you seriously believe that anyone would consider 750ml of wine to be less than the legal limit? Generally when people exceed the limit enough to be dangerous they do it by a wide margin. We are not talking someone who shares a bottle of wine and has slightly more than half of it, but someone who drinks heavily because they enjoy it and then drives dangerously because they think they’re good at it. The miscalculations of a man under the influence driving a vehicle at speed can be lethal, but it’s the attitude not the alcohol that is the defining factor. Would an absolute ban stop them? Has a ban on driving whilst on a mobile stopped anyone? The sheer likelihood that a person can ignore a law and get away with it means that a complete ban will have little or no effect. Arresting them after they kill someone will make as much difference as arresting them after they kill themselves. And without creating a police state that’s the way it will nearly always turn out.

So, if a complete ban won’t stop those who already exceed the limit and won’t have an appreciable impact on deaths caused by drivers who aren’t exceeding the current limit, what will it achieve? Apart from closing down country pubs and restaurants across the country, massively increasing unemployment and public resentment of the State, pretty much nothing. Labour undoubtedly commissioned this review, as they always did, to tell them what they wanted to hear and to give them an excuse for another erosion of our rights. It remains to be seen whether the coalition have ears for the same, but for a party who has made rolling back unnecessary impositions of the State their calling card it’s hard to see how they could square the findings of this report with that narrative.

Back before the election I was watching a debate about funding for long-term care and I happened to be annoyed by hearing an unusually fatuous remark from Charles Kennedy. I didn’t have time to address the issue then, but I thought I’d bring it up now as the issue is still one of importance. What Charles Kennedy said was that the issue of funding for long-term care wouldn’t arise if we weren’t – as a nation – so obsessed with the ownership of property.

Just think about that statement for a moment. What Kennedy was saying was that the current position where we force people to sell their homes in order to pay for care wouldn’t exist if they didn’t own those homes in the first place. It’s rather like saying we wouldn’t have a problem with waiting lists for cancer patients if we didn’t bother treating people for cancer. It’s frankly nonsense and it’s typical of a kind of I’m alright Jack, pull up the ladder attitude that you see more amongst rich socialists than capitalists. It’s the same mentality that allows a grammar educated Labour minister to be opposed to the continuation of such schools, especially when their own children are either in private education or they have carefully short-circuited selection processes to get them into the best state schools.

It’s also of a piece with the continual narrative about the Conservative’s – currently moribund – policy on inheritance tax. Far from highlighting the people whose houses have skyrocketed in value more by accident than by design (the same people whose example forced a revision of the Lib Dem mansion tax) the New Labour spin machine highlighted only a few thousand people, all of whom are presumably at death’s door given the way the tax break was continually equated with plans to cut the deficit over the next parliament. Anyone who has done well in spite of New Labour is, it appears, to be censured rather than congratulated. Or even better poisoned and then taxed to fund the latest government fiscal bonfire. Thankfully we’ve had a change of government and this attitude is on the way out.

I am, admittedly, somewhat ambivalent about inheritance tax: I don’t think it’s healthy for one’s offspring to be loafing around waiting for one to die and hand them a fortune, but that doesn’t mean I think the State has a duty to take the money away for the good of said offspring. The truth, however, is that sending a signal to people that if they go through life as a wastrel they are more deserving by the State than someone who works hard and saves their money is the kind of thing that disincentivizes work and creates the welfare dependency culture that has been fostered in our country. In the end it costs less to allow people to keep their wealth than to pay for all the people who, seeing no prospect of wealth, decide to live on handouts.

I don’t propose to handle the long-term care issue here, although some of my conclusions may feed into that debate. For the care issue to be resolved we need first to know whether the current care provision is cost-effective or merely profiteering from emotionally vulnerable people. Should it really cost more to live in care than it does to live in the Savoy or to be kept in a top-security prison? I suspect not, but I don’t have the figures to prove my suspicions.

Property, however, is more easily argued from principle. There are, after all, only three very simple cases for people’s residential arrangements: private ownership, private rental or public rental. Often, when you see a politician or a pundit making mileage out of this country’s ‘obsession’ with property they appear to be favouring private rental. My instant thought is that they either own rental property or would like a system which favoured rich people like themselves who wished to do so. Because, for the tenant in rented accommodation, private rental is the worst of all worlds: continually under threat of increased rent, often unable to make those changes which make a home one’s own, subject to the whims of the landlord when it comes to maintenance. Usually when you start renting a property the rent will be fixed at a rate higher than the same property would cost to mortgage. This doesn’t change as the owner’s mortgage is paid off, either. Rents move up as the prices rise, with even established owners putting their rates up inline with the market. If this weren’t the case then a council house sold off in 1980 (when average houses cost about £23000) would have a rent of not much more than £220 a month now.

And it’s not just the absolute cost of the rent that’s the problem; if you move you can’t take the investment you’ve made in your first home and use it to get a better property at the same or lower cost; if you stay put you can’t guarantee that your rent will even remain the same in fixed terms as inflation gradually lowers its value in real terms; and if you are renting you will never reach the day when the payments cease and the home is finally yours.

Public rental has, of course, more measures to protect tenants against the whims of their landlords and the maintenance tends to be better, but over the years public rents have risen closer to private ones and it remains the case that you will pay rent for the whole of your life. A prudent housebuyer might be clear of their mortgage by the time they are fifty. A tenant may only receive help with their rent when they reach retirement – by which time even a discounted rent will be significantly higher than the mortgage on the same property. Clearly, if we are in an ageing nation (and I have some doubts about this) then it will be cheaper to keep our pensioners out of poverty if they have, themselves, paid for the roof over their heads. It will also be easier if they need long term care and can be cared for in the home to adapt the property to their needs – something that would be a legal minefield in a private rental.

When it comes to passing property on, I don’t think this should be actively discouraged, but I do think there is an opportunity here for the State to make life better for pensioners and reduce the pressure on housing whilst leaving the decision in the hands of the homeowner. Equity release – the process where a company pays a homeowner an income in order to receive their home when they die – is something that already exists in the private sector, but take-up is low – largely because pensioners fear they will die having received only a small fraction of the value of their home. If the State were to regulate the sector or at least clarify legislation such that agreements both guarantee the homeowner residency even after they have received the value of their home and render any value remaining at death a part of the estate this would allow the elderly a second income that would greatly benefit their later years, rather than having them gift the property to their children at an age when they should be at the peak of their earning capacity. In fact, if the State were to offer equity release schemes itself then these could be an easy route to replenishing the stock of social housing. Consider, if the State enters into an equity release agreement at the age of 65 and the homeowner lives to the age of 90, the State could – even on generous terms – receive the house at its value ten years before they receive it. With even moderate inflation of 3%, that could be 25% cheaper than an equivalent house at the time – a larger gain than even inheritance tax would return.

A few years back Vince Cable, the so-called sage of Twickenham, announced that we were sitting on a bubble of private debt, mostly – as I demonstrated at the time – consisting of mortgages. He was wrong, because even with the credit crunch and in spite of Gordon Brown’s limited assistance, home repossessions didn’t skyrocket and bankruptcies remained low. Home ownership is one of the unique features of the British economy, both a protection against the expenses of old age and a private investment scheme that lasts a lifetime. A government which creates the keys to unlock that investment will do much to benefit both the elderly homeowner and the State itself.

Which Lib Dems lost the election? You’ll recall in my earlier article I looked at the internal divisions of the major political parties. In Labour and the Conservatives these divides are papered over in an attempt to create an united front. The Lib Dems are frequently criticised for the manner in which they espouse different policy positions in different constituencies (something that led Nick Clegg to be extremely vague and inconsistent in the debates). Traditionally, the media have viewed this Janus-like behaviour as evidence of opportunism, of a party saying whatever they need to in order to secure power. In the negotiations for coalition this is also held up as prime cause.

There is, however, another explanation. A deeply divided party without a firm party line may face in a different direction from seat to seat because the candidates themselves have different leanings. Newspapers analysing the electoral arithmetic over the last few days have claimed that Lib Dem candidates predominately consider themselves to be left-wing or left of centre. But are they really? Over the last decade or so, the media have been redefining the terms left and right wing. A distinction which once defined attitudes about the size of the state and its degree of intrusion into our lives has been distorted to define attitudes toward race and international relations. So, the BNP who are xenophobic but believe in the state dictating to people, are regarded as right-wing, rather than – as the official definition decrees – left-wing. UKIP, who aren’t racist, but are no less isolationist, are right-wing because they believe in a small state and individualism, but the media bundle them together in an attempt to embed the idea that right-wing is the equivalent of Star Wars’ evil empire and thus tarnish the Conservatives who equally believe in a small state but who are far less isolationist than either UKIP or the BNP. Given the connotations of associating their views with those of the BNP, any Lib Dem candidate asked to classify themselves on a left-right axis is likely to consider themselves as leaning left. If, however, you discerned their position by asking policy questions, the divide would likely be very different.

Why does this matter? Well, it matters if we ever do move to a more proportional system. One of the characteristics of societies with proportional governments is that, rather than having large, inwardly divided parties, they tend to have coalitions of smaller parties with individually distinct positions. Under first-past-the-post, parties band together because they need enough candidates to secure a majority; if parliament is a plurality, this united front can muddy the message and become a positive hindrance.

If we split each party along its fault lines and ran the election again, therefore, the results would not necessarily turn out as they have now. It depends heavily not only on the views of the Lib Dem MPs who won their seats but on those who were rejected. If the policies which failed to secure a Lib Dem vote on the doorstep were those of the left, then the right-leaning Liberal party would garner more votes; if the policies of the right were the turn off, the more SDP-oriented wing of the party would be in the ascendant. The result could bolster either Labour or the Tories (or, indeed, a centre-left New Labour splinter group).

There are those who promote PR on the self-interested basis that many societies with such a system have left-leaning governments, but it doesn’t follow that we would see the same here. Different countries have different political centres of gravity: Sweden’s is to our left, America’s very much to our right. It’s possible that in the first election run under PR there could be a spurious result that favours one faction over another, but as the people got used to the system they would learn how to use it to return the government they actually wanted. And when, instead of a party attempting to face left and right in different seats there are two parties presenting different choices, the electorate may not decide that left is the direction they wish to go.

With a hung parliament, it appears that electoral reform has become almost inevitable. Of course, in a democratic country, the system of government should always be kept under  review, but is a wholesale rewrite of our electoral system a way to deliver the elixir of fairness or simply the desire of a party which sees no other way to get its hands on power?

It was, of course, a classic bait and switch. When the expenses scandal broke it was equally scandalous the way the Lib Dems leapt into the breach with the proposition that the only reason MPs were helping themselves to our money was because of the way we voted for them. Labour too, saw an excuse to finally remove the troublesome House of Lords and replace it with a body which, rather than scrutinising and rejecting some of their more illiberal legislation, would rubber stamp everything sent through it. Journalists accepted the position without question, characterising Tory resistance as an attempt to cling to a status quo which served them best, conveniently overlooking the fact that – under some of the proposed changes – the Tories would have won the 2005 election. By the time we reached the election last week, it had become accepted fact that some kind of change was needed, whether recall ballots, fixed-term parliaments or fully-fledged rewrites of the voting system itself.

Some of these changes are sane enough: the recall ballot as a mechanism for ejecting an MP who fails to serve his community would have done much to quell the furore over the expenses scandal. There are questions about implementation – should they be allowed to appeal; if they are thrown out, should they be replaced by a member of the same party or force a by-election; should they be allowed to stand again at the next general election; should they affect their pension provisions? – but the premise itself is sound. Others are less clear: a fixed term parliament would not only prevent an unpopular government from choosing the best time for the election, it could also encumber us with a failed party or coalition who couldn’t quit even if they wanted to. Perhaps a better solution here would be to retain the existing system and allow a ‘tipping point,’ where a series of recall ballots of sufficient magnitude can trigger an election across the country. And measures either to restrict the powers of prime ministers or to trigger elections when they change seem eminently sensible.

The electoral system as a whole, however, is much more complicated. The Lib Dems clearly want change for their own benefit, which is why they stress the idea that the current system is unrepresentative. But would a pure PR system like in Israel, where the smallest parties can trade votes to get through policies – policies which clearly do not command the vote of most of the population – really be more representative? What place would there be for independent candidates? Surely, if we had the same number of MPs, except returned by proportion of votes, the only way an independent could get in would be the equivalent of getting 100% of the vote in an existing constituency! And even if it was, say, a celebrity who could command enough airtime to get those votes across the country, what would happen if they got enough votes to return two MPs? Would they have to clone themselves?

Even for the major parties, pure PR – or (STV) Single Transferrable Vote – is no better. Under STV, MPs are no longer chosen by a specific constituency. Instead, they are taken from a list chosen by the party. This means that government becomes more powerful and less accountable: more powerful because any MP who wishes to stay in power has to please those who choose the list, less accountable because it is impossible for the people to vote out a particular MP with whom they have a problem. In fact, the recall mechanism cannot work with STV, because an MP would not have a constituency to recall them.

The system being touted at the moment is called Alternative Vote or AV. Under AV, people still vote for candidates in their constituency, but they express a first and a second preference. If no candidate gets 50% of the first preference votes, the last candidate is dropped and their votes are redistributed according to the ratio of the second preferences. This is then repeated until someone has 50% of the vote. The trouble, of course, is that if the parties are genuinely distinct from each other then none of us should have a second preference. If we consider the deficit the most important thing and want to vote Conservative because we agree with their stance then, if neither of the other parties share that view, by definition we can’t have a second preference. By contrast, those voting Lib Dem or Labour will be able to choose a second preference, meaning that the system would almost guarantee a Labour or Lib Dem government. Democratic it ain’t.

So, is there no way to improve matters? David Cameron has talked about ensuring constituencies have equal size, which would definitely be more democratic, but is that as far as our reforms can go? It strikes me as odd that, given all the other policies we seem to have stolen from Sweden (tax credits, academies) we’ve never actually looked at their voting system.

Sweden has, like us, a system based on constituencies.  Unlike us, however, they have far fewer of them – 36 constituencies in total. Each constituency, however, returns more than one MP. The way it works is basically like this: each party can stand as many candidates as they like in a single constituency. The voters can then choose preferences for both party and candidate. The votes are divided by party and then by candidate, meaning that if a seat returned ten candidates and had votes of 38%, 29%, 28% for the major parties there would be four, three and three returned with the most popular from each party being returned in each seat. It’s simple, somewhat more proportionate and it retains the constituency link and the prospect of a recall ballot. It also has another benefit in that it does away with the drivel about candidate selection. If a party can stand as many candidates as they like then they don’t need all women shortlists or carefully placed ethnic candidates: they can allow all those they feel appropriate to stand under their banner and let the constituents decide whether they are better represented by one person or another. This could still return fewer women or minorities, but that would be the choice of the voters and it’s hardly democratic to foist an unpopular candidate on people just because you feel it ticks one or another equality box.

There are other elements to the Swedish system: limits to reject extreme candidates with small proportions of either the national or constituency vote; top up candidates to make up for rounding errors across the seats, but there’s no reason we would have to take the system exactly as they have it. As with the other policies we’ve pinched, the basic idea can be tailored to our needs.

Centuries ago, the UK led the world in creating institutions of government. Over the years other countries have made their own way. Some have followed us, others have trodden their own paths. It would be arrogant for us to assume that none of them could have come up with improvements on our achievements. It would, however, be foolish to allow ourselves to be dragged into a system which has been chosen because of the way it favours a particular party.

There was a time, perhaps on Wednesday night or Thursday morning, when I could have believed it was nearly over. When I could hope that, by time I went to bed on Friday morning there would be a clear result and a government ready to take office. But no, just for once the exit polls were entirely correct and when I turned in at 6am after a political marathon I felt, not like a man who has seen the winning tape, but one who has woken, Groundhog Day like, to find himself back at the start.

And the greatest irony is that Nick Clegg, after spectacularly failing to capitalize on his perceived success in the debates – indeed, actually losing seats – finds himself holding the (possibly poisoned) chalice of premiership in his gift. If he deals with the Conservatives, David Cameron will be our next Prime Minister; if he chooses to side with Gordon Brown, we will continue as if no election ever happened.

The media, as you would expect, are flooded with opinion pieces about which decision Clegg should take. Some of them attempt to reason intellectually, but many – particularly those in papers like The Guardian – are still using the same divisive drivel they were using before the election. Labour and the Lib Dems, we are told, are the only progressive parties in politics. The people have voted and it is the anti-Tory vote which has won. Honestly, if these people believe this nonsense they ought to be in some kind of home. As I blogged earlier, all three principal parties have divisions within them, the idea that Labour and the Lib Dems are somehow natural allies is spin.

And the motives for this spin are obvious. The Guardian has, over the last thirteen years, cultivated a symbiotic relationship – a sort of ‘you scratch my back and we’ll both stab the voters in theirs’ deal. The Guardian is, after all, recipient of considerable government patronage in the form of job advertisements. Or, more precisely, non-job advertisements: all those government roles from chief potato advertiser to climate change hot air generator have been advertised prominently in the Guardian’s pages. The Government will have created its non-jobs to falsify the unemployment statistics and in return for advertising revenue, the Guardian will have peddled the New Labour line on absolutely everything. You, as taxpayers have not only been paying for equality commissioners to talk complete bollocks, you’ve been paying Polly Toynbee to do the same. It’s the free-market equivalent of the propaganda sheets issued under Stalin.

It has, therefore, been the role of these tame paparazzi to spread the progressive myth. This is the myth that progressive means anything at all. Because one of the tricks deployed by New Labour right from the moment they coined their own name has been to take perfectly serviceable English words and employ them as Orwellian tools of control. Progressive means, in literal terms, something that is going forwards. If it had a political meaning, therefore, it would simply mean something that is making changes that takes society forwards. All fine and dandy until you ask the deficit-busting question ‘what is forwards in politics?’ Certain things clearly can be seen on a trajectory: extending the voting franchise, making government more transparent and accountable – these are definitely progressive given that our history from mediaeval times has been one of a gradual shift of power from the state to the individual – but which party is it that tried to exempt MPs’ expenses from FOI requests; who is it that created more and more bodies to monitor and control our every action; who put CCTV all over the country, allowed trials without juries and arrests without charge, gave more officials the ability to enter our homes without us being able to stop them? Was it the allegedly regressive Tories? No, it was so-called progressive New Labour.

And many of these statist anti-individualist measures were opposed by both Lib Dems and Tories. Both have a commitment to repeal statist legislation, to set the individual free. The repeal of illiberal law is as much a Cameronian policy as a bonfire of the quangos. Yes, there are Lib Dems who oppose the idea of working with David Cameron, but these are those on the left of the party – many of whom were Labour MPs before they split away to form the Lib Dem Alliance. Look at the Lib Dem manifesto, however, and you will see that their voice has much diminished since those days. The manifesto, despite a few differences, resembles more closely that of the Conservatives than that of Labour. Yes, they claimed it was irresponsible for the Tories to cut £6Bn out of the public sector now, but so did Labour and they’ve just committed us to giving £8Bn to a contingency fund in case Greece defaults on its loans. Yes, they argued against an absolute cap on immigration, but as I’ve demonstrated myself, their own unworkable regional measures unravel to justify just that policy.

In the end, it is for Nick Clegg and his party to decide what serves the best interests of the country. He will, not unnaturally, colour his views also with what will service his party interests. But what he cannot do is to allow the twisted ravings of a newspaper desperate to keep hold of government patronage to influence his decision. Because, whether it could be construed as progressive or not, allowing the media to decide who runs the country is not a path politicians or people will wish to follow.

There’s an awful lot about tactical voting in the media today: Labour telling people to vote Labour (or Lib Dem) to guarantee the Tory doesn’t get in; the Lib Dems saying people should vote Lib Dem to keep the Tories out; the Tories saying that people should vote Tory to get the Tory in… it goes on. Most of it is bound up in the myth of the ‘anti-Tory vote’ – an idea continually peddled in newspapers like The Guardian and gleefully lapped up by Labour.

The truth is that if there is an anti-Tory vote it is mostly amongst people who have already been fooled by Labour propaganda. Labour have, for the last thirteen years, been conducting an ongoing smear campaign, an attempt to characterise the previous Conservative governments as an evil as bad as Nazi Germany, not because they genuinely believe it – after all, they wouldn’t have stolen Conservative policies to get into office in 1997 if they’d thought them evil – but because they believe that making the Conservatives unelectable will, by extension, make them the only possible rulers in a one-party state. In 2007, when the Conservative vote was at a low ebb, it was a gleeful Labour Party who proclaimed the end of the Tories. David Cameron’s speech without notes killed that idea, and forced Gordon Brown to cancel the election he’d hoped would increase his majority and extend his term in office. Now, again, it is Labour who are peddling the idea of a ‘progressive alliance’ against the Tories and, again, it’s based not so much on ideological belief, but electoral calculus.

Why can I be sure that this ideological schism doesn’t exist? Well, the truth is that any major party tends to be divided inwardly, and some of these inward divisions are larger than those between the parties. The Blairite right of Labour – the ascendancy that garnered victory in 1997 – are the Labourites whose policies most resemble those of the Conservatives, with a free-market ideology, belief in private involvement in public services, light-touch regulation of finance and so on and so forth. Had Brown not been Blair’s chancellor, they would undoubtedly have coupled the above with a lower tax regime as well. It is the left of Labour that believes in the unalloyed power of the State, the duty to engineer society by wealth redistribution and the ‘mother knows best’ attitude that has come to be called the nanny state.

The Liberals, too, have their divides. Social Liberals bear a strong resemblance to the left of Labour, whilst Free-market Liberals more closely resemble the right of Labour and the Conservatives. The Conservatives don’t have a left-right divide in this way, but they do divide on specific policy issues, most notably on Europe – although the party as a whole has become more Eurosceptic since 1997.

Given that the people consistently voted for Blair’s right-leaning policies in 1997, 2001 and 2005 and it is only under Brown that the party’s prospects have become so dim, it would suggest far from an anti-Tory vote in the country, there is an actively pro-Tory vote and Labour fears that, if the Tories garner that vote, they will win the election. Labour’s landslide in 1997 was not a reaction against policies, but against a party, and now that the pendulum has swung the other way, Labour fear that they will similarly be driven from office and into the wilderness. To rub salt into the wound, this time there is, at a casual glance, a chance they could become the third party, as the Liberals did in the 1920’s.

Only, of course, it won’t work that way. The Electoral Commission has seen to it that boundaries are drawn in such a way that there is a chance – if only a slim one – that Labour could lose the popular vote and still win the most seats. Even if the Lib Dems overtake them in the popular vote, they are still likely to come third with only about half as many seats as Labour. If Labour can take votes from the Lib Dems in Lab/Con marginals, they may be able to shore up their vote enough to come first and the easiest way to achieve this is to convince Lib Dem voters that voting Labour will somehow be maximising the anti-Tory vote and ensuring the progressive agenda.

It’s a similar trick in Lib-Dem/Con marginals. Here, votes against the Conservatives are what counts. The Lib Dems will not, in Labour’s view, have any chance of getting enough seats to come first, so depressing Conservative seats increases the chances of coming first for Labour.

And if it works and Labour comes first? Talk about electoral reform is, of course, the carrot. Here’s a poorly guarded secret: it’s a lie. Anyone who honestly thinks that Gordon Brown, holding half the seats with a third of the vote is going to enact a policy that would require him to get 50% of the vote to keep the same degree of power is either mad or deluded. He knows that coalition means less power for him, that other European leaders would kill to have as much authority as a British Prime Minister. If you vote Labour in the hope that it gives Nick Clegg ascendancy and sweeps aside the old politics, then you’re going to be very disappointed.

Assuming, of course, that it’s not Labour who are disappointed. Because whatever the Labour spin machine have done to demonise the Tories, they have done almost as much, if not more, to tarnish their own brand. Axing the 10% tax rate, eroding civil liberties, starting illegal wars, branding people with genuine concerns about immigration as bigots, all of these contribute to an anti-Labour vote. We don’t know how strong it is, but Labour’s continued poor showing in the polls suggests there are quite a few people out there who hate Brown as much as they’ve been told to hate Thatcher. And Thatcher’s not running this time.

So, if people hear Labour politicians telling them to vote Lib Dem to ‘keep the Tory out’, whilst the Tories continue their message about voting Clegg and getting Brown, the penny might actually drop. People who are disenchanted with the tyrant Brown and who wish him brought down might consider that a different type of tactical voting is in order – one where they vote Lib Dem in Lib/Lab margins and Conservative in the Lab/Con ones. One which might, despite the Electoral Commission’s gerrymandering, deliver a real change in our politics, the first shift in the tectonic plates in ninety years. Obviously, I can’t guarantee that a Lib-Dem official opposition will be quite as wedded to the idea of electoral reform as they claim at present, but having both a new government and an opposition who can’t simply be dismissed as the cause of all the problems would be a much stronger combination than a squabbling coalition or a discredited wreck of a party clinging to the vestiges of power for a little longer. And, looking a little further down the track, it’ll be worth keeping an eye on those internal party divides. Because those might just be the first signs of a much more significant realignment of politics to come.

If there’s one word the parties have attempted to stamp through this election like Brighton Rock it’s ‘fair.’ Taxes have to be fair, cuts have to be fair, even the voting system has to be fair. And it’s this kind of language that feeds disengagement – not because people don’t want fairness, but because it’s what the Americans call ‘apple pie politics’, where a politician uses a touchstone that nobody in their right mind would argue against – the importance of family, a stable economy – and then by overusing the word tries to imply the opposition is opposed to it. This is contrast to the other overused word, ‘change’ which only resonates when there is a feeling that we’re going to Hell in a hand-basket and people might quite like to get out before the wicker catches fire.

The trouble with fair is that everybody has their own view of what it means. So you hear public sector unions peddling the line that it’s unfair that the failure of a few bankers should cost them their jobs. It’s a stupid argument, partially because we already had a record deficit before the credit crunch, but mostly because a large chunk of the public sector spend before the crunch was coming from those same bankers. Did we hear them complain that it was unfair they were being taxed to pay for whinging bureaucrats? Of course not. That’s not to say they didn’t complain, of course, but for some reason the papers are more likely to report what unions say than banks…

And you hear various pressure groups saying that cuts in their favoured areas would be unfair to someone. Schools, the police, theatres, everybody, it seems, except the Egg Marketing Board (who presumably only get reported in one of those weird papers on Have I Got News For You) claim that their slice of the pie is critical for fairness. All of which makes it more than likely that any government will put some taxes up. It’d be nice to think that we could do the same as Canada, rebalance our public and private sectors with a real war on waste, but back in the real world it seems a dim hope.

And taxes are even more contentious. The Lib Dems have majored on the idea that the tax system is already unfair; that the poor pay a larger proportion of their income to the taxman than the rich. Even after the BBC systematically demolished this argument, they still stick to the line. I won’t repeat the arguments for that here, suffice to say that the Lib Dems don’t include the amount the poor claim in tax credits when they are doing their sums.

No, the myth being peddled without argument now is VAT. Labour insist the Tories will raise it: not because they’ve seen any evidence, but because they’ve done it before. None of the parties has ruled it in our out, largely because they can’t. One of Labour’s most insidious acts under Gordon Brown has been to suppress any form of public spending review. Brown has been waiting from day one to call an election the moment he thought he could win it, and publishing figures that demonstrated how he has systematically wasted the public money (especially since he couldn’t blame it on a predecessor for whom he served as chancellor) would have been to hand serious electoral points to the opposition – which is why David Cameron has had to rely on anecdotal evidence for waste in his TV debates.

But is VAT actually unfair? When John Major first taxed fuel payments, the furore suggested that pensioners would be dying in their homes. Labour, rather than repeal the measure, responded with their highly politicised winter fuel payments scheme, a typical measure to garner headlines whilst only helping the minority. But if VAT went up now, it is likely that only those goods that are fully VAT rated would qualify for the rise. Fuel would not be affected. Would the poor really lose out?

Let’s take an illustrative example. How would an average low-earner be likely to spend their money. Let’s put them on £15,000 – lower than average, but not unusual for someone in a menial public sector job or working a forty hour week in retail. After tax, £15,000 is £1022.85 a month. Average rent on a small flat will range between £300 and £400. This isn’t VAT rated. Council tax will add at least another £100 to that, and fuel bills (rated at the lower level) could be another £50. Food, for the most part not VAT rated would take another £150 – £200, assuming the person doesn’t live on ready meals. Taking just those elements, that’s already £600 – £750 of earnings. Add the usual home insurances, life insurances and pension payments, and our average low-earner could be left with only £100-£200 of disposable income, which is then their entire exposure to normal rate VAT. If they’re running a car inside that bracket, then most of their VAT will be on petrol and they will have been impacted as much by the Government’s fuel duty escalator as by any VAT rise.

Because the truth is that neither the poor, nor the very rich are particularly exposed to VAT. VAT falls most heavily on consumer goods and luxuries. The very rich buy these, but without using much of their disposable income; the very poor buy them only when they can, and tend to buy cheaper versions. It is the middle-earners, the people who can afford a new wardrobe every year or a new three piece suite when it takes their fancy who will suffer the most if VAT goes up.

That’s not an argument to say it should, of course. Because the biggest myth of all in this election is one I’ve alluded to already – that public sector jobs should be sacrosanct and that the workers should consider it unfair that their jobs be at risk in the crunch. Look at those figures for our low earner again and you’ll see that he’s losing £2,700 a year in direct taxation. If that tax were really all going to schools, hospitals and police, then that would be fair enough.  The truth, however, is that a great many public sector roles are either surplus bureaucracy or pointless quangoes. It can hardly be considered fair that the poor are expected to cover the cost of either of those.

There’s a certain irony in the role immigration is playing in this election. In 2005, the Conservatives politicked heavily on the subject, confirming the public opinion that they were still ‘the nasty party’ and losing the election as a result. This time, when Cameron’s new Conservatism is playing the subject down, it seems to be second only to the fiscal crisis on people’s priorities. And with the bigot-gate scandal spilling across the web this afternoon, clearly it’s an issue that will continue to garner headlines across the next week.

Interestingly, immigration is also an issue where the parties’ positions are recognisably distinct. Labour has gone for an Australian-style points system which, they claim, has already paid dividends in lowering migration. The Conservatives, whilst accepting this system, want to go further and impose an overall cap on numbers each year. The Lib Dems, seemingly trying to come up with a policy they can announce nationally and yet still play differently from seat to seat, have proposed a strange system of internal immigration barriers. Which one of these will work? Let’s take a look.

We’ll start with the existing problem. Nobody, with the exception of UKIP and the BNP, is against immigration per se. We all recognise our nation’s historic role as a destination for the world’s oppressed and the role this has played in attracting and exploiting talented individuals whose light could otherwise have been hidden under some foreign bushel. However, nobody except for knee-jerk liberals believes that the numbers should be completely unchecked. Had we kept the post-war policy of an automatic right to settlement for all citizens of the Commonwealth, our population density could now be higher than Hong Kong’s, we could be having to import any food that couldn’t be grown on a window ledge and people wouldn’t be talking about concreting over the green belt so much as concreting over the concrete. Unlimited migration is not sustainable. The perception is that immigration in recent years has been too much. There is a debate over how much of this was avoidable (or even intentional), whether we should have staged the admission of EU accession countries, whether migration from outside the EU constitutes a greater or smaller proportion of the total, but that people feel the current levels are unsustainable is an absolute fact, no matter if you do call them bigots when you think the microphone is off.

There is, therefore, a question of how much migration is sustainable. This isn’t an easy number to quantify, but it depends on what the immigrants can offer us, what we can offer them and – and it isn’t racist to feel this – how much immigration the existing population can comfortably accept. This last does matter, not simply because of feelings of racial or cultural tension, but because crowded residential areas lead to social tension. It’s why the high-density housing of the 1960’s failed; it’s why there were race riots in the 1980’s and it’s why the BNP are gaining seats in areas where people feel crowded out by an endless stream of new arrivals. Unfortunately, as I say, it’s very difficult to ascertain how much immigration is politically acceptable, but since tensions were lower in the past, it is theoretically possible to crunch the numbers and come up with a rough estimate. It’s not a good way to do it – which is why the Conservatives won’t answer the direct question on how much their cap should be – but taken with an objective analysis of the benefits and costs of immigration it can produce a figure.

Looking to the easily quantifiable issues, what the immigrants can offer us is the one most often addressed. Immigrants, we are told, take jobs that our people will not fill, whether because they are considered demeaning or demanding. Apart from roles in the NHS, this often implies unskilled work such as cleaning, waiting tables or hotel work. Two problems arise with this: the first is that the jobs being unskilled makes a mockery of any kind of points system. Clearly, if we say that anyone who can operate a squeegee will have enough points to enter the country we end up with a system where nobody is rejected. The second problem is that we have a great many people of working age who are wilfully economically inactive. Some of these people are hidden in the statistics by reclassifying them as disabled – about half of the disabled have been written off because of stress, for example – but even ignoring the reclassified there are still a great many people choosing to live on benefits rather than work. Welfare reform is therefore a key part of immigration reform: remove the luxury of choice from those capable but not desirous of work and you don’t need immigrants to fill unskilled roles; the points system begins to work.

But the points system also fails to address another problem. Some degree of our immigration comes not from those who come here to work, but from those who come with them. Our current immigration policy does not discriminate against people with dependents, which means that we can easily take in a whole family for the price of one. A fairer system would mark dependents down against an immigrant’s total: most households in this country include two working adults, so it would not be unfair to expect an immigrant family to have the same in order to fund the extra burden on the state of any children they may bring with them. Since immigrant children present particular problems – multi-lingual schooling, culturally aware healthcare and suchlike – recognising their impact in the points system is both logical and reasonable. After all, what are the points for if not to establish whether someone is a net benefit to our society?

What we can offer immigrants falls into two distinct issues. The first is direct service provision. A one percent increase in population will, broadly speaking, require a one percent increase in public sector workforce to service it. This isn’t a problem if either some of these immigrants become public sector workers or at least generate enough tax revenue to pay for them. It is the second issue which leads to the sense of burden on services – capital provision.

To explain: if we have a one percent increase in children due to immigration this will leave us with a requirement to educate an extra one percent. Even if these children are already English-speaking and thus create no complications, that still means either an increase in class-sizes or an increase in the number of classes. If the former is undesirable or impractical, the latter is more expensive – because it requires the building of new schools. Clearly if a whole swathe of people suddenly turn up expecting a new school or hospital before having contributed a penny in tax money it presents a significant problem.

And this is where the issue of some kind of hard limit matters. If we say we will accept any people with skills or education above a certain level then, unless we are racist enough to assume the world outside is full of idiots, that still constitutes a great many potential immigrants. And, as long as our economic and political conditions look better than those at home, they will come. In fact, Labour’s much-trumpeted reduction in immigration is more likely due to the recession than to any deliberate government policy (unless Labour are now claiming the recession was deliberate). The Lib Dem idea of controlling where people go inside the country is an attempt to deal with areas suffering particular pressure, but because it controls where they work rather than where they live it does nothing to mitigate the impact on services – and that’s even if it could be made to work. The reason it works in countries like Canada or Australia is because these are highly nucleated societies, comprised mainly of large cities with great distances between them. If you tell someone they can only work in Quebec then they’re hardly going to commute from Vancouver.

And there is another problem with the Lib Dem policy, which is this: even if can ensure that people only live and work in areas that can sustain them it still leaves the question of how you determine where you want them to live and work. If we are saying that we don’t want people to keep coming to London, but send them to Liverpool then what we are – in effect – saying is that we are imposing a cap at a regional level. Since it stands to reason that Liverpool, Leeds or wherever else will not be able to absorb people ad infinitum this policy must, of necessity, be dynamic – it must be updated to restrict people in each area as they absorb what they can. Which means that what the Lib Dems are proposing is actually a cap. They aren’t giving figures, but then that’s what they say about the Conservatives. And given that the Lib Dem proposals have been condemned as unworkable what we are left with is a default position where the Conservative view – points, welfare reform and an adaptive immigration cap – is the only one that can possibly work.

Finally, beside immigration is the often conflated problem of illegal immigration and asylum. Much has been made of the prison-like centres in which failed asylum seekers are held. Much also has been made of the number of illegal immigrants in the country. It is not unreasonable to state, however, that if we didn’t hold failed asylum seekers prior to deportation the number of illegal immigrants at large would only increase as they disappeared into our society. The best we can do here is to make the system both fast and transparent. Fast, because we then wouldn’t need to hold people; transparent, because if people were aware of what grounds would lead to their rejection they’d be less likely to come here and fail in the first place. Finally, on illegal immigration, it’s tempting to accept Lib Dem policy as a humane and practical solution to a thorny problem. Unfortunately, the experience of other countries suggests that amnesties lead only to further increases in illegal immigration. Some countries have had many amnesties and the problem still remains. The Lib Dems point to their ten year criterion, but riddle me this: if someone has entered this country entirely illegally – and I mean smuggled in rather than failed to leave when their visa expired – how are you supposed to know whether they’ve been here for ten years or not? If someone tells you they’ve been here for ten years and can’t prove it, what then? Do you expect them to register and come back in another ten years? If you didn’t and you gave them the benefit of the doubt then you might as well dispose of the precondition in its entirety. It may not fit with the touchy-feely politics of the age and it may be the kind of thing that makes an unguarded politician mutter bigot, but the truth is that sometimes you do have to take a hard line to deal with a perceived problem – even if that does get you regarded as the nasty party.