Oh dear! The New Statesman magazine is returning from its summer break with what it obviously hopes to be a major piece by Harry Lambert, its editor, to challenge Labour Party policy. Mr Lambert shows his credentials as a journalist with extensive reportage. But there is nothing here that anybody who wants to seriously understand tax and the economy to get their teeth into – it is the intellectual equivalent of ultra-processed food. Your taste buds might be excited but it is not nutritious fare. To be fair, it’s not immediately apparent that either the Labour leader, Sir Keir Starmer, or the Shadow Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, are seriously interested in economics – and these are the people the article sees to influence. But the pair are very much interested in hard politics, and the article fares no better in that department.
The article reinforces my suspicion of anything in a journal billed as a “long read”. I’ve noticed a propensity to do this both in The Guardian and the Financial Times. I take this as a warning to stay clear, to avoid articles that aren’t properly edited and waste a lot of reading time*. Mr Lambert’s article was not billed as a long read, but it should have been – there is a mass of verbiage, which you have to wade through before you come to his three policy proposals, and even these aren’t stated succinctly. These proposals are: to replace Council Tax with a 0.5% tax on property values (covering just domestic property, as far as I can see); applying National Insurance to property rental income; and raising the rate of Capital Gains Tax. These, he estimates would raise £28 billion a year (though the property tax reform would be revenue-neutral): not coincidentally the amount of Labour’s proposal for spending on the green energy transition, which they are now backtracking from. More sensibly he suggests that the extra revenue is used to reduce tax on work (income tax, or better still, National Insurance).
I will start by reflecting on the overview, which is summarised by this statement:
In order to spend money in government the party will need to raise it. There is a very good way to do that. It is to shift the tax burden away from labour and on to capital, away from work and on to wealth.
Harry Lambert, New Statesman 30 August 2023
There are two words of warning on this. The first is that the words “wealth” and “capital” are treated as synonyms (as are “labour” and “work” more justifiably). They can be, but when talking about economics they are different things. Capital refers to the assets tied up by businesses in order to be able to operate: premises, machinery, working capital and so on. By and large it isn’t a good idea to tax this directly, as it would reduce investment. Taxes on profits generated by the capital before it is distributed to owners – such as corporation tax – is another matter. This is in effect a tax on capital, but a very efficient one. It is one of the few things that the Prime Minister and Chancellor Rishi Sunak has insisted on raising, in contrast to his predecessor as Chancellor, George Osborne. Wealth, on the other hand, is owned by individuals for their disposal. The proposed property tax is a tax on wealth, not capital, unless it is applied to businesses too. That applies to Capital Gains Tax too (demonstrating that the word “capital” has yet another nuance when applied to taxes). Where the proposed extra tax on property rent sits is ambiguous.
The second word of caution comes from Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). This way of looking at things seems to be currently out of fashion, but I think that it captures many economic realties quite well. Supporters of MMT suggest that the main purpose of taxes is to manage demand in the economy, to prevent excess demand leading to inflation. It isn’t to manage the national debt, which can be paid off by creating money – if that is under national control, as it is in the UK. MMT was popular on the left once because it was suggested that the country could expand public spending without raising taxes, because inflation was dormant. Alas the excess spending across the Covid pandemic has led to inflation, showing that the inflation constraint is a real one, even if the national debt wasn’t – though to be fair that is also because the pandemic and other factors, such as the Ukraine war, constrained supply. The problem is that taxes on “work” (or spending, such as Value Added Tax) are much more effective at this demand management job than are taxes on wealth, as the wealthy spend a much lower proportion of their assets on consumption. So taxing more on wealth to tax less on incomes is in practice a much trickier exercise than it might first appear. Which is not to say that there aren’t good reasons to tax wealth, of course. It is good for managing the national debt (which is harder some supporters of MMT appear to think) , but much less so for funding increases in public spending.
But the main problem with Mr Lambert’s proposals is that they clearly haven’t been thought through. The country is surely sick of half-baked policies that turn out to be nightmares (Brexit, NHS reform – don’t even mention Liz Truss). The new property tax and the tax on rental income are radical changes which raise a lot of important questions of detail. Council Tax may be awful, but it contains a warning. There has not been a revaluation of the tax since it was introduced 30 years ago because of the political and logistical difficulties. How are property valuations to be determined and maintained? Then there are other questions: how would business assets be treated? Wouldn’t it be better to tax land values instead (there is a long history of advocacy of Land Value Tax)? And tax on rental income? What about properties owned by companies? And what would be the impact on rents and the availability of property to let? Mr Lambert can point to no major piece of research that tackles the details.
The fuzziness of such details would make the policies very easy to attack should Labour try to adopt them – and in fact they would take years to design and implement. The best way for the Labour leadership to take them forward is to propose them after they take power, as part of a comprehensive review of taxes to make the system fairer, and use the full resources of government to design them – and then put them to the country in the election after next. Meanwhile they wouldn’t need to even put the idea into their manifesto. Raising tax on capital gains is another matter – this has gone up and down periodically, and could be done relatively easily. And it would be not at all surprising if Labour did this in government. But there’s no need to highlight it now.
Which brings us to the high politics. Alas opinion polling on subjects like this that are not a matter of intense national debate are nearly useless. I can draw a parallel with electoral reform. In polls most people supported the idea: until a referendum in 2011 made it politically contested, when it was crushed. The political problems is as ever, is what people are now starting to once again call the petty bourgeoisie (or petit bourgeoisie if you prefer). These are self-employed people, or others who aren’t tied to major businesses or government agencies, who have the idea that they have made their own way in life with little help from government. They are electorally decisive but sceptical of big government and taxes of any sort. The political right are absolute masters of presenting taxes on the very wealthy as attacks on this group. This is why the Labour leadership are treading so carefully on tax. They think they are going far enough already by proposing changes to the taxation of private schools and non-domiciled taxpayers.
Harry Lambert’s ideas just aren’t ready to present to the electorate. That is the reason that the Labour leadership will ignore them – and wait until they have the resources of government to develop them.
*Readers might consider this cheeky as my own articles aren’t short by journalistic standards – but I don’t like things very short either!
The idea of the petit bourgeoisie that taxes are not needed is breathtakingly unrealistic. Who is to pay for the education of their young, for their hospital treatment as they grow older, for the roads along which they drive their white vans, for the Courts who are essential to their safety and the protection of their property, or indeed for defence where Europe is over-reliant on the USA as the Ukraine war illustrates (the USA used to account for 50% of NATO defence spend, and now accounts for 75%).
To my mind, there have been two secular trends governing the role of the state and the size of the tax burden in the post war period. One is the move from big government to smaller government in the transition from Atlee to Thatcher. The second is the tendency of the state to require more resources to fund the public services because these services are on average labour intensive, and because aging populations impose costs. The Conservatives see only the first trend, and think that taxation’s share of GDP should fall. But the fact is that, in my view, small state Thatcherism has run its course. ‘Light touch’ regulation is having to be partially reversed. The fiasco over unsafe school buildings illustrates that insufficient spend on maintenance is counter-productive in the medium term. And health service delays in treatment are racking up extra costs as patients condition deteriorates as they wait.
So do we not need to get taxes up? As this post recognises, the problem is the high politics. It is true that low taxation is important to floating voters as between Conservatives and Labour. But what about the professional middle classes, who these days float between Conservative, Labour and Lib Dems? Would they not support an increase in taxation to fund better schooling conditions for their kids and more timely medical treatment for those who are ill? And this is not to speak of the need for extra spend to counter global warming.
I’d naturally agree that tax policies do need to be correctly thought through. I’d recommend that politicians should do a bit more thinking about why we tax in the first place.
Most would agree with Harry Lambert’s comment:
“In order to spend money in government the party will need to raise it.”
I’m not quite sure why. It doesn’t explain where money comes from in the first place before it is available to be collected in tax or ‘borrowed back’ via the sale of Government bonds. The only possible explanation is that it has been created by Govt at some point. I’m including the BoE as a part of Govt incidentally.
This is not to say that the Government should just create money as it spends but it rather that it is a possibility should circumstances require it.
“MMT was popular on the left once because it was suggested that the country could expand public spending without raising taxes, because inflation was dormant.”
I think the problem has been that MMT, which does explain the need for taxation but in different terms, has been taken up by many who don’t really understand it!
“The problem is that taxes on “work” (or spending, such as Value Added Tax) are much more effective at this demand management job than are taxes on wealth, as the wealthy spend a much lower proportion of their assets on consumption. So taxing more on wealth to tax less on incomes is in practice a much trickier exercise than it might first appear.”
This is true. However it does present a political problem and creates a rift between MMT and the only political grouping which is likely to ever give it any credence. On the one side we have MMT evangelists claiming that “we don’t need the money of the rich to spend”. On the other there are those on the left who call for wealth and higher income taxes. The MMT side don’t do themselves any favours with accusations of neo-liberalism etc.
There is something in the call for wealth taxes IMO. It’s not as if the ultra-rich park all spare cash in buying up Government bonds. They spend lots of it in the property and land markets for example. This spreads out into the wider economy and does have very real effect on aggregate demand. So it might be “tricky” but it’s not something to be ruled out entirely.