It seems as if the established conservative parties of Europe and the United Kingdom have lost their north andlleft the field open for more militant parties of the Right. Underlying this phenomenon is the disappearance of a coherent conservative philosophy. In Britain, the Conservative Party has been living from hand to mouth, holding on to power only because the alternative appeared to be worse. Well, to use a phrase which has now become the name of a disaffected and suddenly successful party in Spain, the party’s over.
After the inevitable victory of Labour this summer, there is a need for the various conservative parties to think very hard about what they really stand for, and whether they can formulate some goals for a better society, beyond merely reacting to the wokism of the left. A late-in-the-day reaction to the immigration crisis, riding on the coat-tails of a furious white working class, is not a philosophy.
Is there, somewhere in the history of conservative thinking, a unifying idea or principle which could be put forward as a convincing alternative to social democracy with an ugly face?
It was G.K. Chesterton and his friend Hilaire Belloc who developed the idea of Distributism. It was never adopted by any major party as an official policy but it was influential on both the soft Left and the Right in gaining support for the idea that small businesses and small co-operative enterprises could underpin the economy and the fabric of society.
Distributism began from the premise that property ownership was a good thing and therefore the more people owned property the better. Two obstacles stand in the way of the widest possible distribution of ownership, namely state ownership and big business. The Thatcher revolution dealt with the first obstacle, famously “rolling back the frontiers of the state” with a broad but sometimes undiscriminating denationalisation programme, but left the second untouched. This has become an urgent problem as big business, especially big tech and big pharma has now paired up with the state. What was astonishing about the Trump victory was not that he won, but that in the absence of a credible candidate or any coherent policies, the Democrats were still able to command nearly half the vote. This can only be explained by the presence of a well-co-ordinated cartel of social media magnates, backed by a tidal wave of unmonitored money.
There has always been a recognition that monopolies and cartels were not good for a free market economy and the US has long established anti-trust legislation which is supposed to address this problem. In the UK, successive bodies had been created and, ironically, merged, into the present day Competition and Markets Authority. The principle is understood. However, bodies like this seem to be powerless in the face of multinational, globally mobile conglomerates, and are especially weak when it comes to monopolies of internet traffic. At a certain point these vast enterprises, some of which act like landless sovereign states, will have to be broken up, something which can only be done by international treaty. But in the mean time the ground work must be done at national level.
Within nation-states it is still feasible to deal with the problem of Big Business through the compulsory break-up of large businesses. Such a policy, if pursued on a grand scale, would have to address the consequent loss of the synergetic provision of services whichj would have to be replaced by a stimulus to small and especially micro enterprise.
Behind all revolutions lies a fight over taxation, and what is proposed here is no exception. What we propose is a change in the philosophy of taxation, based on the following principle, which should become not merely a law but a constitutional principle: Any activity which relieves the Exchequer of a burden, must be tax deductible.
In other words, any subject or citizen who can demonstrate that his activity is a relief to the public purse, should be entitled to a reduction in his own contribution to it. This “contributionism” represents an equitable approach to both taxation and social development.
The immediate mechanical effects of this policy would necessarily be an improvement in the fiscal balance, since on this principle the sum of tax deductibles is always less than the sum of government expenditure saved. But the most important consequences would be the long term changes in underlying social attitudes. Ordinary people, small businesses and bigger businesses would all have to ask themselves, not only what the Exchequer can do for them, but what they can do for the Exchequer.
Furthermore, since much of the qualifying activity would involve people providing services to their proximate neighbours, the socially disadhesive Thatcherite “on yer bike” mentality, whereby the unemployed were expected to desert their family infrastructure and seek work in a new, rootless life, would be finished at a stroke.
Here are some examples:
- Reduction of Unemployment: An unemployed person (including a household help) drawing benefits is hired. The employer can claim an amount equal to the benefits as tax deductible.
- Affordable Private Education: parents educate their children privately. This relieves the state of the cost of schooling them. Therefore, the school fees are tax deductible.
- Affordable Private Health Care: a person opts out of the National Health in favour of private medical insurance. The cost is tax deductible
- Social Cohesion: a person takes in an elderly parent to look after during the parent’s last years. A reasonable part of household costs could be set against tax.
- Family Life: Parents could claim a tax rebate for each of their offspring living at home (no age limit).
It will be seen that the introduction of this system would have the following effects:
- It would benefit taxpayers, who are precisely the people who need to be encouraged
- It would encourage the unemployed to get work, while discouraging black-economy employment, because the employer can only obtain a tax rebate if the employee is declared.
- It would favour families sticking together, since this is how families can obtain rebates in return for caring for their own
- It would, in the time-honoured phrase, roll back the frontiers of the state (especially in education and health care) without leaving an opening for big business to step in.
I do not believe that the British people have ever ceased to believe that small is beautiful; I do not believe that anyone who chooses Britain as a home is looking for a country run by big government and big business. Here, then, is a way forward for all those who seek to live in a collaborative Britain where family and neighbours come first.
