The big squeeze is coming
Next April, Britons will face a significant squeeze on their personal finances. National Insurance contributions will rise. Council taxes are expected to jump. Ofgem, the energy regulator, is warning that the energy price cap will have to go up as well. Higher mortgage costs are likely, too, if the Bank of England increases interest rates in reaction to surging inflation. But just as the prevailing answer to the fuel queues has been “keep calm and wait for it to pass”, no party has yet articulated a solution to this cost of living crisis.
The Government seems to imagine that it is enough to rely on labour shortages pushing up wages. Yet that is not a strategy in and of itself. A labour squeeze will drive up costs and prices, too, in the absence of higher productivity, and some industries may even shut operations if they cannot pass higher prices on to their customers. The politics are an enormous gamble. The Tories are relying on Labour to continue its unbroken run of incompetence.
Sir Keir Starmer had ample opportunity in the past fortnight to hammer the Government: the polls, despite the party conferences, have barely shifted. The Labour leader did take on the Left of his party, but this only emphasised the war within – and he lacks the charisma or intellectual imagination to beat a rock star PM. There has been no Clause 4 moment. Sir Keir does not yet look like the next Tony Blair.
That said, Mr Blair’s success was not predicated solely on his own strengths but also on the recession of the early 1990s, when the Conservative Party decided to raise taxes, severing its sacred bond of trust with the taxpayer. (Mr Blair won a landslide in 1997 promising to cut VAT on heating.) Today, the economy is changing fast post-lockdown – Christmas could be particularly tough – and the autumn Budget, scheduled for the end of this month, has to offer a coherent vision for the future. Thus far, all we have had is talk of sunlit uplands. Where are the freeports? Where is the post-brexit bonfire of regulations? During the Conservative Party conference, several ministers said that they liked lower taxes, which was good to hear – but why are they only going up?
If Britain wants a high-wage economy, which is an admirable aspiration, we need a high-skilled, highproductivity one as well. This necessitates a major overhaul of tax – reducing, simplifying and encouraging investment in research and skills. If the deficit is to close, let it be done through spending restraint and reforms to the bloated public sector. Absent an ambitious plan for growth, the Government will start to try the patience of the electorate, which is historically when two-party competition returns with a vengeance. Free speech is a moral issue
In a hopeful sign that cancel culture has begun to turn, Sussex University has stepped in to defend Prof Kathleen Stock, a feminist philosopher who has been accused unfairly of being anti-transgender, against a campaign to get her sacked.
The gender debate has become alarmingly poisonous across the country. Selina Todd, a history professor at Oxford, was given protection last year after she received threats. In 2018, Prof Rosa Freedman at Reading said she found her office door covered in urine. More than 600 academics signed an open letter of complaint when Prof Stock was awarded an OBE, showing just how difficult it has become to speak one’s mind.
Yesterday, however, Prof Adam Tickell, vice-chancellor of Sussex University, gave an impressively robust response to what he described as “masked protesters putting up posters” calling for Prof Stock’s dismissal. We have “legal and moral duties,” he said, “to ensure people can speak freely”, and if those masked students can be identified, there will be an investigation and disciplinary action.
The Government’s Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill is setting a new tone before it has even cleared the final hurdles in Parliament, by putting the burden on university authorities to defend and promote free speech on campus.
But Prof Tickell’s phrase “moral duty” went beyond deference to the law. It is, as he implied, a matter of ethics, of treating one’s colleagues with respect and showing tolerance for dissent. These principles should be at the heart of higher education. Every inch a kingdom
More towns and boroughs in the North, it is suggested, should be accorded the honour of being called Royal to rebalance the unfair regal geography of Britain. The most southerly town granted the title Regis is Bognor. It is a proud town no doubt, where George V convalesced in 1929, but no one can forget what the king was said to have exclaimed on his deathbed on being promised another visit. Do Royal Tunbridge Wells and Royal Leamington Spa gain much from their existing epithets? Both carry a Betjemanesque air of genteel distress, as of ageing spinsters on dwindling pensions. In the North, Newcastle, say, already has a Theatre Royal and a crown steeple on its medieval church. So who needs a royal title when all of this sceptred isle is, as Shakespeare wrote, a royal throne of kings.