With all of the misguided meddling in the economy by Liz Truss and her Chancellor side kick Kwasi Kwateng, I thought I might like to say how I would play things and how I’d rescue the UK using my ‘back of an envelope’ approach and tell you about my own Dougonomics. Whether Kwasi’s successor (currently Jeremy Hunt) would agree is another matter!
Taxation
Ms Trust reckoned you could stimulate the economy by giving tax breaks to the very rich and this would somehow [eventually] trickle down to benefit the rest of us. I think that was a hugely risky experiment which, as we all know, has rightly backfired, failed and seen her off.
Instead, I would do the opposite and tax rich people more, i.e. taxing second homes, luxury goods, flashy cars such as Bentleys, Range Rovers (especially black ones) by very significant amounts. Alcohol, cigarettes, sugar, vaping stuff and so on would all go up.
Government borrowing
We should pay our way, for day to day spending on public services and the cost of running the country through taxation.
By all means, borrow money but only for large infrastructure costs and emergencies.
By spending money on large infrastructure projects (like HS2) it isn’t wasted money. You not only get a new railway, hospital etc out of it but the money eventually goes full-circle and comes back in taxation such as VAT, income tax, corporation tax and so on.
Never borrow money to repay a previous loan.
Nationalisation
While Thatcher’s privatisation of public services might have had some merit at the time, such as making shareholders out of ordinary people, it has now run its course. Things are out of control with gas and electricity with petrol not far behind.
So while I’m nationalising these industries, over a steady period of time, I would establish another publicly owned industry. I would borrow money to set up a nationalised industry for renewable energy – solar panels, wind farms, harnessing wave power etc. People can either have their own kit to generate electricity themselves or buy into cheaper, greener electricity.
Now that’s all very easy to say but it would probably take years to set up, not to mention unpicking the muddle of the foreign owned power stations we seem to have in the UK. So many other things need sorting including where do you get the workforce from? The most obvious example would be lowering our borders to EU neighbours and possibly taking a different approach to the poor immigrants that make it here from those leaky boats in the English Channel.
Overseas aid
I would immediately restore our overseas aid to the levels it was a few years ago. As a relatively rich country, we have a real moral duty to assist less fortunate countries around the world.
Gift Aid, I would maintain this generous measure which seems to have all-party support. For overseas readers, this is where charities can claim the income tax that the donor would have paid on the donation.
Secretaries of State and their Ministers
I have observed a little of how they behave. They all like to leave their mark and get a good name for themselves, to bring in some form of efficiencies or reorganise their departments because something has gone wrong. They are often adept at creating a new agency (a.k.a. quangos) as a smoke screen for not really solving the problem.
The main problem, as I see it, is that they never stay long enough to see the reforms through before they find they are reshuffled off somewhere else. Therefore, a Secretary of State, or their Ministers, should expect to remain in their job for the lifetime of the Government. Then they will be far more accountable than they are at the moment!
The EU
I knew Brexit wouldn’t work and I have blogged about that, admittedly some time ago. We have isolated ourselves from the EU and Putin has taken advantage of an increasingly fragmented Europe by invading the Ukraine.
I feel a referendum coming on, except this time an honest one. None of those lies about an extra £350M a week for the NHS or other deceitful utterances.
Have I just lurched somewhere?
I always thought of myself as being fairly balanced, in a political sense. Proudly thinking I was in the political centre ground, neither too left nor too right wing. Now as I read this post, I am left thinking I have lurched to the left i.e. towards socialism.