Liberal Vision

Does Cameron’s “favourite think tank” give us a glimpse of Tory Britain?

I dont know if many of you have heard about the delightfully mental report “Cough Up” by Policy Exchange. The report concludes British government have got tobacco tax pretty much spot on – well, they don’t tax tax cigarettes quite enough – citing a whole list of “costs” to society including litter collection, house fires and employee absenteeism, as well as, of course, the cost of treating tobacco related diseases etc….

Well if  Policy Exchange truly is “David Cameron’s favourite Think Tank” then heaven help the sovietised state we can all look forward to come May 7th, should he get into power. So much for liberal Tories – looks like central planning mentalism will be the order of the day if this lot have any influence….

“Cough up”? Throw up more like.

I started to write a suitable repost to this ridiculously poor report (you usually only get such ill-thought through documents from the Government rushing to get some cock up off the front pages),  then was alerted to Mark Littlewood’s excellent post over on the IEA blog.

He makes a number of excellent points – not least the following…

 “… The question isn’t how much smokers cost the NHS – but how much less would they cost the NHS if they didn’t smoke. The Policy Exchange research assumes they would cost nothing. But dying of Alzheimer’s as an ex-smoker (or non smoker) in your 80s is going to cost much more than dying as a chainsmoker of heart disease in your 50s. And that doesn’t start to factor in the saving made on state pensions by smokers having the courtesy of dying many years younger..“

Click on the above to read the full IEA article in all its glory.

Let’s see the Tory response……

UPDATE: There is another truly marvelous piece written  by Dick Puddlecote – delightful title to his post “That Policy Exchange Nonsense”. A must read!

Robin Hood: A Libertarian Hero Defamed (!)

Amidst all this discussion of a “Robin Hood Tax” it occurred to me that collectively we seem to have seemed to have forgotten the story of Robin Hood.

Robin Hood famously “stole from the rich and gave to the poor”. But before socialists claim him I’d just like to point out one little detail. The poor were poor because of hugely punitive taxes. They were imposed by Prince John to fund the statesman’s extravagant lifestyle. A factor in turn augmented by an already heightened level of taxation due to his brother’s (King Richard’s) costly middle eastern conflict (the Crusades). You could say the fable holds some parallels with modern day Britain…

Far from being a socialist, Robin Hood took money off the wealthy elite and gave it back to those who had generated it in the first place, redressing problematic redistribution. Sounds like a libertarian to me.

Naming a tax after a man who is, by all means, a libertarian hero must surely be defamation!

Strange Bedfellows… (Again!)

Thanks to the marvelous Michael Meadowcroft this delightful article found its way into my inbox [click to enlarge]:

This article was written by Arthur Seldon, a member of the Liberal Party and Co-founder of the IEA,  in 1949. It completely corroborates the ideas I floated October last year and in the November 2009 Issue of The Liberator. That, in essence, is “why the f*ck is the Co-operative Party in a coalition with the Labour Party???!!!”

Now, to all the bright young things in Nick Clegg office (who I know read this blog) please wake up to the fact that if Clegg isn’t at least trying to provoke a serious discussion of mutual solutions then he’s not doing his job. He is also not a proponent of economic liberalism and our party is a sorry Labour-lite. And that’s before the desolate state of Cowely St. and the ludicrous way we make policy is factored into the equation.

Complete economic liberalism is the answer. The free market in all its manifestations helps the poor.  The reason the Conservative Party is so objectionable is not because state socialism is right (because it is, in fact, very wrong and very bad) but because Tories pick and choose the bits of the free market they like according to unacceptable prejudices and vested interests. The freer the market the freer the people.

I am aware that Co-op hacks do largely consider themselves Labour first and Co-ops on the side. However, that attitude could be defeated with strong and clear national proponents of the mutualist cause who recognise that it is a cause that can only exist in a climate of economic liberalism. The fact that this man is considered to be on the fringes of our party rather than an example of a typical member is a travesty. If we as Libdems ever seize this issue as our own, I think the results would truly surprise us all.