Home What's New Speeches & Articles Newsletter - Apr 2008 Biography Diary Contact Information Photo Album Parliamentary Highlights Publications Links MEPs' Transparency   Conservative Party Latest News from Conservatives.com Conservative Party Website
		Gummer's plan: A Non-Conservative Manifesto Tuesday, 11th September 2007 I have just read the trailed highlights of John Gummer's "Quality of Life" report, and I am hopping mad. It reads like a joke caricature of a Non-Conservative Manifesto. With Zac Goldsmith on the team, the ritual genuflection at the altar of climate hysteria was predictable, but it gets worse. More taxes. More complex tax allowances. More regulation. More quangoes. More nanny-State. All the things which we as Conservatives oppose. New taxes: he wants a range of "green" taxes, on cars and on air transport. But tax increases are wrong in principle. Never mind the promises that total tax plans would be neutral. If we want Britain to regain competitiveness we have to cut taxes. Gummer threatens to undo all the good work of John Redwood's competitiveness report. More complex tax allowances: there are to be allowances for householders on council tax and/or stamp duty in exchange for energy-saving measures. This is a minefield: how do you reward the guy who double-glazes in 2008, without also rewarding the guy who did so in 2000? We are piling on bureaucracy and administration. But never mind the admin: it is wrong in principle. George Osborne should be moving to lower taxes and simpler taxes; eliminating Gordon Brown's complex, interventionist tax breaks; cutting tax allowances in favour of universal lower rates. Gummer proposes a move in the wrong direction. We Conservatives have to decide whether we're supply-side tax-cutters, or socio-environmental tinkerers. Then there's what the Daily Telegraph calls "a blitz of new regulations", aimed not only at domestic electrical appliances but also at supermarkets. Of course the chattering classes love to vilify Tesco, but the fact is that most of us choose to shop there. I'm in favour of small shops. I'm delighted that specialist high-street retailers seem to be making a comeback, and that farmers' markets are thriving. I make a point of using my local high-street butcher as much as I can. One of my neighbours is a dairy farmer, and I'm especially delighted that after years when he's been selling milk below cost, the farm-gate price now seems to be heading north very smartly. But Conservatives believe that the market should deliver these developments, not a whole new government regulatory framework. We need a "Bonfire of the Regulations", not John Gummer's raft of new ones. And a wholly new quango: a National Dietary Institution tasked with improving the nation's nutrition, (as though a Food Standards Agency were not enough). If the answer's a new quango, we're asking the wrong question. A recent news story alleged, amazingly, that we are now paying £130 billion a year for quangoes. Set against that background, it is bizarre that a Conservative Policy Group is calling for a new one. We should be dismantling them, saving tens of billions, and applying it to tax cuts. As a letter-writer to the press asked only today, surely if we want smaller government, it should cost less? Yes it should. This idea is the Nanny State run mad. Gummer also wants to freeze airport development. This will have a trivial effect on carbon emissions (the whole aviation industry accounts for only 2% of man-made emissions). But the ensuing airport chaos will undermine the City of London's position as a pre-eminent global financial centre, and indeed the competitiveness of our economy generally. We expect Bob Crow of the railwaymen to undermine the City's transport infrastructure. We do not expect the Conservative Party to do so as well. On top of this toxic witches' brew of policy prescriptions, Gummer proposes a series of pinprick initiatives which will have virtually no impact in the real world, but will certainly infuriate the Essex-girl/Mondeo-man C1/C2 voters whom we desperately need to get on-side. Parking charges at supermarkets, with the proceeds to public transport (hang on there -- that's not a charge, it's a new tax!). A ban on plasma screen TVs. Higher taxes on the holiday flight to Benidorm. £2000 extra tax on a 4x4. If this is bad policy, it's even worse politics, with an election in the offing. Amidst all the dross, though, Gummer has one good idea. He is concerned about food security in a dangerous and unpredictable world, and believes we should promote something closer to self-sufficiency in British agriculture. That's not a bad idea. But he seems to have missed the point that our agriculture policy is determined in Brussels, not Westminster, so all the good intentions in the world will not allow an in-coming Conservative government to do much about it. I became a Conservative, joined the Party, stood as a Conservative candidate, and sit as a Conservative MEP because I believe in lower taxes, simpler taxes, less regulation, fewer quangoes, the ending of the Nanny-State (and regaining control of our own agriculture, as it happens). I'm afraid that Gummer is wrong, wrong, wrong.