Interesting competition. My top idea would be the legalisation of as many so-called recreational drugs as possible, as it is illegal drugs that cause so many people from poorer and some ethnic minority backgrounds to end up unnecessarily inside the criminal justice system, drastically reducing their chances of employment and living a normal life. Yet many of the problems just come down to cost: middle class people can live perfectly fine lives despite taking in drugs occasionally (sometimes even regularly). Among other things, it seems they can rise to high political office so long as they were born in the right class. Nowhere else do I see the treatment of different classes of people so stark.

On the other hand, I would also consider replacing the income tax (a tax on talent and effort) with a land value tax (a tax on property but property that has in most cases been acquired by expropriation at some point).

As we head into recession and thanks to burglar Brown; debt , there is no scope for more silly tax and spend projects so this competition should be about what expensive state peccadilloes can be cut thus allowing those who earn the money to keep it an inherently fair and efficient state of affairs .
The clearest source of waste is the endless quangos that have proliferated under Labour usually under EU sponsorship.
. Leaving the EU would mean an immediate and painless saving of £12 billion a year – not counting much larger indirect savings that would follow from being outside EU regulatory structures and escaping the Common Agricultural and Fisheries Policies.
It would also re-democratise the country renationalising 84% of our laws and the total saving has been estimated at £4/£5000 per household per year. Put it to the vote. Fair ?
One teeny example , Welsh Language road signs , why the fuck are we paying for that bourgeois exercise in futility. You guessed it , the EU ,. always keen to foster regional discord and break up the country .

Nick, I have to say I like both your ideas. And I bet you’d find lots of support too for them. Good luck convincing the Daily Mail brigade though…

Nick, I like your first idea. In addition, my wish would be for a decent living wage to be instigated across the board, for any job, so that a job of work allows people to live and support their families in comfort.

Fairness is a vey basic virtue. Scientist’s seem to have demonstrated that it matters to apes and to dogs as well as to humans But it is not a simple virtue. The Poll Tax was
intended to be magnificently fair (provided that any redistribution wanted was arranged through benefits and other taxes). It was soon seen as manifestly and hatefully unfair because it was easy to opt out of paying it.

Nowadays our benefit and tax credit system is intended to be elaborately fair. But it is so elaborate that it produces very unfair results. One set of peeople ask for benefits and credits, and receive too little. Further millions of our neighbours ask and receive too much; until they are called on to repay that ‘too much’ out of too little. And it is no defence against being made to pay back that you told the authorities that you thought they had made a mistake when they made it, and they went ahead regerdless. Millions more do not ask for what they are entitled to, largely because it is so complicated to do so. Other thousands play the complexity of the system, to get what they may be technically entitled to but in their neighbours eyes, they do not deserve.

So what I ask that our Government should stop being so very ingeneously elaborate, and simply – much more simply please – be less grossly unfair in the outcomes for individuals of the system of taxes and benefits. Just think it possible that conscientious citizens will be frightened of, and stumble, in doing complicated sums; that the likelihood and likely seriousness of error by conscientious officials will rise as a power of the number of possibilities for error;and that the scope for gaming a system to achieve unintended outcomes also rises as a power of the the number of interacting elements. Just observe the reality that their complicated good intentions have not only been the road to such recodite and expensive unfairnesses as the current mispayment of public service pensions. They have also cruelly and completly unfairly pushed millions of our neighbours towards and into financial purgatory. I ask that they see the utter unfairness of the results for so many individual people, and change their system.

the income tax (a tax on talent and effort)

“not”

Who, I wonder, are these people who just can’t be arsed to make money because of income tax? They look at the lifestyles of the wealthy and successful and think “nah – not with income tax. It’s just not worth it. I’ll sign on instead”.

Ending the war on drugs would be mine as well, but until the political class running the US comes around to the idea it just isn’t going to happen.

I’d say electoral reform towards a more proportional system, because everything else flows from that.

Uhh… EJH, actually at the margins, yes, that is exactly what happens, but because it is a systematic problem with our taxation scheme, those marginal cases can add up to a significant amount of disadvantage. But I think it is also wrong to take people’s income away from people when it is justly earned. I think it is unfair and the fact that it disproportionately effects those that are not wealthy make it all the more so. Hence my positive suggestion. What have you got?

Laurie, I think your suggestion is a lovely aspiration but it doesn’t really seem to be an actual policy. Rather like passing a law that there shall be no child poverty, how can you pass a law that tells people exactly what a job is worth? What if the value of the job simply doesn’t add up to whatever you term a living wage? Will offering those jobs simply be made illegal? Will you hunt down grey market employers and those that seek them out? Does that really help anyone?

Nick;

It is true that at the very border between work and unemployment and you have children or persistent health problems then the advantages of working can be marginal, I grant you that. However if you think it’s a major reason for not working in the UK today then I think you’re grossly over-stating your case. As soon as you depart the very bottom rungs of the employment ladder then people really do feel an advantage by virtue of being employed. The reality of the situation is that the re-distribution of wealth via (amongst other things) income tax is precisely what makes it feasible to work and live to a halfway reasonable standard under our current system: people do not have to pay school fees, health insurace, etc, because these are covered by central government.

That isn’t to say that people who exist at the boundary you mention, do not need real help. They clearly do – but their situation can only be humanely alleviated by government’s action, not by its absence.

Laurie Penny, I share Nick’s concerns. I think there should be a national minimum wage & the amount that exists is about right. But above that level it’s better for people to be more productive, & the government may well have a role to play in education/training, than for the state to mandate that they be paid more than they are actually worth.

You can’t be paid £30,000 a year for working 40 hours in a warehouse as it’s a shite job. But there are people in those jobs who could be earning more, & the best policy is to attract decent employers & encourage self-employment so this can happen, rather than interfering in the market or fucking around with shite like the Speenhamland system (oh, sorry, “tax credits”).

I don’t tarry with the libertarian fringe, but I am still an economic liberal, & talking about “fair wages” & so on makes me a bit uncomfortable…

This is my shopping list.

1. Stop the futile, counterproductive war on drugs.
2. Allow the unemployed & incapacitated to be exempted from looking for low-paid, unsuitable jobs if they do voluntary work.
3. Abolish VAT & raise the threshold.
4. (Possibly) CBI.
5. Adopt a much more Eurosceptic position, considering outright withdrawal (not going to make me many friends here, but is it really a liberal organisation???)
6. Promote secularism & no backing away from it for fear of causing offence. It offends me that the abuses of religion go unchallenged, & more importantly it “offends” women, homosexuals & all the vulnerable people whose side we are meant to be on.
7. Actually take the environment seriously.

Oh by the way Sunny, my one idea would be for governments to change every necessary enticement, law and regulation to encourage councils to use the revenue from council house sales for the building of new stock.

I don’t tarry with the libertarian fringe, but I am still an economic liberal, & talking about “fair wages” & so on makes me a bit uncomfortable…

Really? I thought everyone was in favour of “fair wages”, the real question being what one means by the phrase…

I was talking about the advocacy of the following:

“a decent living wage to be instigated across the board, for any job, so that a job of work allows people to live and support their families in comfort”

However you want to interpret this, & it is indeed fairly hard to decipher, you’re going to get a bucketload of unintended consequences. I’ve heard people vaguely talk along these lines before.

As I said, better to promote decent employment than to use the state to somehow ensure high wages for shite jobs that aren’t much use to the economy.

There again, there’s no point in people being paid such crap wages that they enable people to run non-viable businesses as though they were going concerns. I myself distinctly remember the Federation of Small Businesses bleating on in 1997 about the impending collapse in the economy that would be brought about by Red Blair’s introduction of the minimum wage. Of course it was nothing more than BS from a lobby group who essentially wanted to carry on paying hotel and shop workers tuppence ha’penny an hour without the staff in question having recourse either to collective bargaining via the unions or the law. In the event, nothing happened except that there was now a floor below which people could not be legally paid, and mass unemployment did not happen.

Yes, I said that I aupport the NMW as it is. It makes work pay with minimal state involvement, & is better than idiocy like the tax credit system. As you have identified, the naysayers were wrong to assert that it qould cause mass unemployment.

I merely said that we’ve now gone far enough in that direction, & if we want higher wages & better standards of living then more state action along the same lines is not the best policy.

I love the way everyone wants drugs all over the place when they failed to defend smoking in pubs , it is the besetting problem of the bourgeois Liberal that freedoms he claims for himself impact badly on working class people he rarely meets .A glut of drugs , like a glut of guns , seems likely to me to provoke a national catastrophe along the same lines as Gin in the 19th century so on balance I say no .The disadvantaged who will pay the cost of what is anyway a small price for the dopey Liberal to pay.

The problem with income tax is the combined effect with welfare and housing making the marginal taxation 90% up to surprisingly high levels . The only answer is to start removing the safety net. In order to do this you have fund help on a large scale and this is (now )too expensive

With LVT I have the greatest difficulty understanding how this would interact with planning permission and development . It seems likely that no-one actually knows and we can safely predict it aint never gonna happen why not forget it and concentrate on reducing income tax , a laudable aim , by reducing state pending . There are many things that can go before we get into painful areas and each a triumph for fairness within our grasp .

it is the besetting problem of the bourgeois Liberal that freedoms he claims for himself impact badly on working class people he rarely meets

There’s an element of truth in that.

Supporting liberalisation of the drugs laws doesn’t mean that people want more drugs to be taken, or take drugs, or even like/approve of drug-taking. It simply involves recognition that prohibition is a costly failure & that it’s silly to be banging people up left, right & centre, thus spending an absolute fortune.

If prohibition is that fucking good, why do the experts who have been in charge of enforcing it admit that their own policies aren’t working, & they’re only being “tough” to appease the Daily Mail rather than because they think they’re creating a ldecent, low-crime society?

As someone who lives on a council estate in Stoke, who works (in the private sector before you start) for under £20,000 a year, I can’t help but laugh at the idea that I am “bourgeois”. You can say my attitudes are typical of the bourgeoisie, but I think that section of society plumps for the Daily Mail more often.

Britain’s policy of being tough on drugs is “pointless”, says a former civil servant who once ran the Cabinet’s anti-drugs unit.

Julian Critchley now believes the best way to reduce the harm to society from drugs would be to legalise them.

Mr Critchley, who worked with ex-Labour drug tsar Keith Hellawell, said many he had worked alongside felt the same.

They publicly backed government policy but privately believed it was not doing any good, he said.

I don’t think he was speaking about you personally, in fairness. I’ve used terms like “middle class” and “liberal” here too about various political attitudes – with similar electric effects on the crowd…

Yes, I see that. I doubt whether you & I will be standing on the same platform any time soon. These comments, & your recent post “Let them eat solar panels”, show up what I dislike about much of the left, especially the section you seem to belong to. Sure you’re a decent sort of bloke though

Some of these ideas seem actively harmful (e.g. scrapping tax credits = taking away thousands of pounds from lower income people, particularly those with kids).

How’s about making child care and social care for elderly and disabled people free for all those who need it, together with a ‘living wage’ for all care workers. No one can argue that care workers are doing a job which isn’t socially useful, and we’ve got a system at the moment which obviously needs to be changed where the workers are paid too little to live on, while at the same time services are too pricey for many people who need them to afford.

All sorts of additional benefits including reducing poverty (particularly amongst women), greater economic productivity and more people being able to get jobs, as well as removing one of the greatest sources of upset and stress which affect many people.

“I love the way everyone wants drugs all over the place when they failed to defend smoking in pubs , it is the besetting problem of the bourgeois Liberal that freedoms he claims for himself impact badly on working class people he rarely meets .A glut of drugs , like a glut of guns , seems likely to me to provoke a national catastrophe along the same lines as Gin in the 19th century so on balance I say no”

Smoking in pubs was banned – Boo hoo! baby wants to smoke in comfort!

As for the War in Drugs, we have absolutely no idea what would happen if it were ended. It’s never been tried in a post-industrial society. it might be brilliant. It might be a disaster. No-one knows – not you, Newmania (Gin Lane indeed…) and not anyone else.

The best way to make society fairer would be to institute a mandatory National Service-style / New Deal style program of public works focussing on environmental work e.g. building wind farms. Everyone gets treated the same way = fair, makes work = less unemployment, builds conciousness of environmental issues and reduces carbon emissions. It would cut crime too (fewer young males on the streets).

I’d legislate that 2% of every company payroll be set aside to purchase voting shares in the said company until 50% +1 shares were held in trust. The trust would be managed by the workforce of the company, with each employee having a single vote. Simple and democratic.

[26] Yes, wish I’d thought of that.

As for legalising drgus… forget it. As Woobegone says we have absolutely no idea what the consequences would be – is there are any other area of policy where a change would be advocated when people have no idea whatsoever what it would lead to? FWIW, I think very little would change. The government would slap (heavy) “sin taxes” on them and the dealers would continue as they do now, offering drugs at lower prices than the legal outlets. What we want is a drugs policy that will curb addiction. Neither side in the argument has anything to say about the addiction rate, for the good reason that it’s a function of demand, not supply.

A)Quick and simple one: aboloish the whip system in parliament. A system which undermines democracy and an MP’s connection to constituents ahead of party .(It could be neutered by parties being even more controlling in the selection procedure for candidates though, picking only drones, who wouldn’t need whipping…)

B) a 10/1 (or 20/1, the ratio’s debatable) rule whereby the highest paid person in a company or organisation (so both private and public sector are covered) gtes a maximum of 10 or 20 times the remuneration (in total, including bonuses…) of the lowest paid person working in that company or organisation

C) No individual can sit simultaneously on the board of more than one national quango, FTSE 100 company, hospital FT,Royal commission, etc, thus stopping the merry-go-round of the usual suspects drawn from such a small pool that in ideas and perspectives terms, inbreeding and deformities result…

oh, and a D) Net neutrality. Especially after Burnham says that nowhere on the net ought to be beyond [his] Govt’s reach.

Not one but a number of ideas. Abolish the welfare state and replace it with a citizen’s basic income. Land value taxation to replace Council tax. A flat income tax with a high personal allowance would actually be more progressive than the current income tax system. Legalise drugs (or at least decriminalise and treat as the medical problem they are for addicts). Out of the EU of course. Abolish the NMW (with a CBI there is no need for one). Unilateral free trade (tariffs protect producers at the expense of consumers, not what we’re meant to be doing at all). Abolish corporation tax, it’s paid by the workers in hte form of lower wages and investors in he form of lower returns anyway. If you want to tax capital and returns to capital do it directly. The most obvious way of which is to make capital gains tax and income tax the same rate (which is part of the flat tax idea anyway).

Localise as much as possible: schools run themselves with vouchers to pay for them slapped to the back of every child in the country (weighted to some measure of deprivation would be a good idea). Taxes to pay for the health service raised and spent locally (say, by county, as is done in Denmark and Sweden). All local council expenditure to come from funds raised by that local council, no central redistribution of funds.

Kill the ID card system, the national identity register etc. Rip out the gross distortions of criminal law intorduced in recent years (for example, they’ve just taken the power to confiscate your assets upon your arrest on drug distribution charges. Yes, before even a trial, let alone a conviction).

I’m sure I could think up a few more.

It is totally unfair that people buying drugs pay no VAT, and drug dealers pay no income tax. The only way to stop this is to legalise all drugs and tax them at the same levels as drink and tobacco. This will not increase consumption as anyone who wants to take drugs in Britain is already doing so – tax free.

It is also very unfair that someone who earns 100 pounds an hour pays the same price for everything as someone who only earns 10 pounds an hour. This means that everything is much more expensive for poorer people. A ‘ price banding’ system needs to be developed that allows the profit part of a product price to be varied according to how much the customer earns per hour. If you are in the lowest earnings per hour band you will pay the least. This would make all pricing fair for the first time.

These comments, & your recent post “Let them eat solar panels”, show up what I dislike about much of the left, especially the section you seem to belong to.

Wossat, genuine concern for the disenfranchised and a willingness to speak truth to power?