"Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice" - Adam Smith
Yesterday saw our inaugural Liberty Lectures event at Cass Business School. The speakers were as follows:
Videos of all the speeches will be uploaded onto our YouTube channel soon.
According to Sir Paul Ennals, chief executive of the National Children's Bureau, England's education system is in danger of making pupils unhappy by pursuing exam success at all costs. His gripe is with the potential of certain schemes, such as school breakfast clubs and initiatives to make school meals healthier, being dropped as part of the package of cuts to public spending.
His criticism does make sense. If school budgets are cut, there will be less room around the edges to do the warm and fluffy things that could indeed making students happier. However, Sir Paul Ennals’ conclusion is largely inadequate. Rather than calling on government not to cut various schemes, this issue has to be seen in the larger perspectives of deficit and reform.
All sectors of public sector activity need to be cut. Although some items of spending have better claims to being saved than others (arts vs. cancer sufferers is a no-brainer), there should be no sacred cows. Education has areas in which savings can be made. In tough times most parents prioritise reading and counting over breakfast clubs and healthy meals.
Beyond the unpleasantness of cuts, reforms should continue to be the focus of Gove and all that he surveys. To put it bluntly, state schools need to function as any service industry, responding to the will of its customers. In the case of schooling, the customers are the parents. Despite the extension of academies and the hesitant free schools agenda, their local supermarket is still more accountable than their local state school.
The more government steps back from education, the more room there will be for the side orders that lead to a more balanced education. This could be along the lines of Anthony Seldon’s happiness philosophy or something else entirely. On the whole Independent schools manage to have a more balanced approach to educating children than state schools, so there is no reason why a voucher-based deregulated state system couldn’t compete, if that’s what parents want.
Noel Edmonds may be as mad as box of frogs, but his recent stand against the BBC licence fee should be supported. He is not against the BBC per se, but against the harassment surrounding their way of extracting the licence fee. Speaking on a BCC breakfast show at the weekend, he stated:
I worked for the BBC for 30 years. When I was there it promoted the licence fee by saying how wonderful it was. But now Auntie’s put boxing gloves on. I am not going to have the BBC or any other organisation threatening me. I’ve cancelled my TV licence and they haven’t found me. Nobody’s coming knocking on my door. There are too many organisations that seem to think it is OK to badger, hector and threaten people.
Our Director, Dr Eamonn Butler was one of the first to point out the Gestapo tactics the BBC’s latest Orwellian drive to strike fear into homes around the country. A campaign that those in the BBC should be thoroughly ashamed of.
Of course Edmonds should not break the law, but the license fee really should not be enshrined in law in the first place. If the BBC has any value at all, it should be able to survive in a competitive market, if it cannot, it should go to the wall like any other service provider. Without doubt it now fails to fulfil even that most patronizing ideal, 'public service' broadcasting. After all, they put Noel Edmonds' House Party on the television every Saturday night for eight years... What kind of public service was that?
Flicking through a copy of Dr Madsen Pirie's Freedom 101, I found a prescient paragraph [p.66] on capitalism and the business cycle:
In recent years independent central banks have tried to smooth the business cycle's severities by combining the pursuit of sound money with making credit easier when economic downturn loomed. It has been a precarious act which cannot necessarily be sustained, but this is not a crisis of capitalism either. It may just be problems arising from one type of financial management.
This was written well before most commentators even realised there was a financial crisis.
A recent publication by the Vancouver-based Fraser Institute argues for the introduction of flat tax in Canada, convincingly showing that the move would make the tax system both simpler and more lucrative. They call for a 15-per-cent flat tax, which would save a significant amount of time, energy and money, estimating that the current multi-rate progressive federal and provincial tax system costs the country around $30 billion per year.
The report argues that the current system is impeding Canada’s economy, constructing strong disincentives for working hard, saving, investing and engaging in entrepreneurial activities. These findings chime with those of the Adam Smith Institute: we have made similar arguments in both Flat Tax – The British Case by Andrei Grecu and in A Flat Tax for the UK – A Practical Reality by Richard Teather. Of the latter, Allister Health, the editor of The Business, wrote the following:
Rarely has a think-tank publication been this influential so quickly. Its arguments have been dissected by the UK Treasury, are well known among the Shadow Treasury team, have had an influence on some parts of the Liberal Democrats and were even adopted by several minor political parties.
Yet despite the press and political interest the research has engendered, there remain obstacles to its implementation. The much discussed Huckabee FairTax, while superficially attractive, is not the answer and may be distracting from the sounder proposals that could be implemented by governments on both sides of the Atlantic. In the UK, as in many other countries, the research is there and politicians are engaging in debate; the next stage is for them to stick their necks out and argue the case.
It has been revealed that women with ID cards who change their name after marriage could face fines of up to £1000 if they fail to inform the government. Fines will also be forced upon those who fail to report a change of address to the relevant authorities. The world has turned upside down. It will soon be you who has to prove you are the person in the government’s database, not the other way around. Welcome to Britain, the year is 2008.
As the subtly titled "ID cards for foreigners" are instituted, more facts are revealed about this Gestapo inspired project. We are on a very slippery slope. The 21st century offers many new challenges. Not from terrorism, but from those employed to protect us. Terrorism has long existed, but the quest for absolute security is now being used as a pretext for absolute control of the people.
This loss doesn’t come cheap. As public debt reaches astronomical levels, the government is committing us to shelling out in excess of £5 billion over the next ten years. As John Stepek makes clear, ignoring the civil liberties argument, the practical arguments in favour of an ID cards just don’t add up.
As the wheels of bureaucracy grind ever onwards, the freedom that we once knew is turning to dust. It is impossible to say if and when the people of this country will stand up to the political class. The French recently stood up to Sarkozy’s vision of a police state, why cannot the people of this country round on this Blair-Brown dystopia? Legislation needs to be introduced to protect the individual. Certainly this should cover the threat posed by other private individuals and companies; but the real threat to liberty comes from that most traditional enemy: the politicians.
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I’m not sure how this story passed me by, but it is a rather fascinating development in how children are taught. For £12 per hour, Ashmount Primary in Islington is now outsourcing some of its teaching to the university town of Ludhiana in the Punjab.
The school is clearly happy with the service from BrightSpark, which allows for one-on-one tuition via videocalling over the internet. Assistant headteacher Rebecca Stacey said: “We were approached to do the pilot, and started very small with just a few pupils, but we quickly realised it was having a positive impact and so increased it so half of our Year 6 pupils are using it.” It just goes to show that, despite the lack of market incentives, some teaching professionals in the state sector are still willing to put children ahead of the teachers – something that should be commended.
Some of the comments from teachers on the TES website show how misguided the objections to this practice are:
Objection 1: “This idea stinks. It is all about a private sector company making money out of UK education.”
Answer: No – it is all about a private company offering a superior service at a cheaper cost. What matters is the result for children.
Objection 2: “I’m a fully qualified primary school teacher, with years of experience, who has specialised in Maths support and who was made redundant. I'm now considering relocating to New Zealand so I think you can imagine how I feel about this.”
Answer: The fact that people lose their jobs is never something to celebrate (politicians excepted), but the children, schools and parents should be free to improve their lot and not be sacrificed for the benefit of less efficient teachers and methods.
Objection 3: “The ethical issue is whether one can hire teachers for salaries and working conditions which would under no circumstances be unacceptable in UK. Ask yourself why you would have different standards for people in these two countries!”
Answer: This is profoundly naïve. These employees are freely choosing to work in what are in fact very good conditions relative to the majority of the population. To take it away and make their lives worse would be wrong.
The subversion of the power of vested interests that this move represents could, if it takes off, have a profound influence on quality of teaching in this country. When it comes to education, we have a lot learn from the rest of the world. India already has many private schools for the poor, while the cultural value that the people place in education could inspire a society disillusioned on the transformative power of education.
I have been reading a lot about how successive governments undermined the then dynamic private education sector that was galloping apace in nineteenth century England. The state’s usurpations were incremental, but devastating in their consequence.
Making education free destroyed private education for all but the very richest. In order to make it free, money had to come from somewhere, and on this occasion it was largely through regressive taxes on alcohol and cigarettes. In effect, the poor lost all their previous power as consumers. This story is repeated across many current functions of government throughout the world.
It was therefore highly disappointing to read Policy Exchange’s report calling for “tobacco duty to be progressively increased”. Incredibly, they claim: “every single cigarette smoked costs the country 6.5 pence”. By incredible, I of course mean it is literally not credible, as Matthew Sinclair’s broadside on ConservativeHome makes abundantly clear (NB. It is also worth watching the excellent Simon Clark of FOREST take a representative of ASH to pieces here on a related subject).
Which leads to the question that every freedom-loving individual in the UK is asking themselves – and others – in these uncertain times: can this awful state of affairs be turned around? Only time will tell, but clearly the principal ingredient missing at present are the politicians and political party with the pedigree to stand athwart history, yelling stop!
Despite encouraging Conservative policy positions on cutting regulation, its stance on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is rather less impressive.
Speaking at the launch of the Conservative Report, A Light But Effective Touch, David Cameron claimed: "We will only get tax and regulation down... if business plays its role in being responsible... I want low taxes and a low regulation economy, but we won't get that unless we reduce the demands on the state." However, the answer is not to transfer responsibility from the state to business, but from the state to individuals.
The proposal in A Light But Effective Touch is for the introduction of Responsibility Deals: "a mechanism that enables companies to collaborate more effectively with other groups in society to address issues of common concern in a coherent and focussed way." Although the report claims that much regulation is already in place, it admits that new regulation will be necessary.
In his foreword, David Cameron states that: "The Conservative Party has always been the party of business: we instinctively understand and appreciate the vital role that businesses play in creating the jobs, wealth and opportunity on which all else depends" and writes of a "post-bureaucratic age in which the state does less, but does it better." Yet when it comes to business regulation, "less" and "better" are more or less the same thing. The report claims to favour the free-market, but also demands that it be "shaped to provide not just products and services, but social and environmental goods as well." Regulation by another name.
Clearly this is a response to a societal trend. But if businesses want to push in this direction it should be an entirely voluntary matter, one that the government takes no part in. In reality much social and environmental policy that goes under the name of CSR does little to help society or the environment. However, if businesses see it as expedient to engage in projects to increase prices, attract more customers and the best workers, then it is entirely their "business". Ultimately, they don’t owe responsibility to society or government, but to their shareholders.
There is a lot to be said for the wisdom that can come with age. Looking back at how little I knew just three years ago - before I joined the ASI - it is shocking to think how little I knew. Go back a bit further and the trite nonsense that I was spouting at university makes me shudder. At least I was not alone; the place was choc-a-bloc with students, whose grasp of the real world was limited in many weird and wonderful respects. This was not helped by the fact that the majority of academics were living in Never Land. Ignorance ruled.
It therefore does not surprise me that Opinionpanel Research have found that after the first two leaders’ debates, half of students were planning to vote Lib Dem. This is not a criticism of the Lib Dem policies overall (which are not markedly worse than the Conservative ones), but on the specific Lib Dem policy that many students like: vowing to scrap university fees over six years. In effect, a policy to redistribute money from those that will never benefit from higher education to those will.
The fact that most students are of the left, and so should be opposed to regressive taxation, makes the issue perverse, and worryingly I ‘d suggest it goes beyond ‘turkeys not voting for Christmas’. After all, they have already paid (or not). Despite the easy access students have to credit, somehow 'free' higher education has come to be seen as a right. It is time for the debate against subsidised higher education to enter the popular debate. The question is: Are any politicians brave enough to face down the historically riotous students? Perhaps they should, most are too lazy to vote.
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