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Which laws should we scrap? - by John Redwood MP
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Just when each family is feeling the pinch thanks to Gordon Brown’s £1300 of extra tax compared to 1997, up pops the Chancellor apparently offering a tax cut. He seeks Middle England’s forgiveness for all those stealth taxes.
The man without spin assures us he is now a taxcutter. It is only when we read the small print we find we have to pay for our own tax cut with higher National Insurance and the abolition of the 10p band. No wonder people have a low view of politics, and are fed up with this government. People want some honesty, and tax cuts that mean they will be better off after receiving them. They want some relief from tax and waste, from bulging legislation and the dictates of the bloated quangocracy. Telegraph bloggers want Inheritance Tax to go. There certainly need to be further sizeable increases in the threshold, as it should not be a tax on inheriting a very small flat in central London. I would like to see Capital Gains Tax as a candidate for abolition, to be replaced by taxing short term gains as income. If Labour has enacted more misery for Council taxpayers that too should be repealed, as should Labour’s putative tax on development gains when planning permission is granted. The tax codes need simplifying. There’s plenty of waste to remove to make it possible to give some money back. A new government should slim the civil service through natural wastage, whilst restoring its proper position. We need Cabinet government serviced by professionals. It should abolish all the unelected regional assemblies and regional offices. Regional government has been forced on England despite the electors of the North-east rejecting this in a referendum. They discovered it was a typical European style referendum – there was a right answer and as the people got it wrong they were simply ignored. Please someone abolish the South East England Development Agency and ask SERPLAN to pack its bags. We do not need them! Just to show the political classes will make their own contribution, we should announce a reduction in the number of MPs in future Parliaments and reduce the number of political and special advisers on the public payroll. We can organise a good quango cull. We do not need so many advisory and regulatory bodies in health and education. We could perform the last rites for the Learning and Skills Council, the regional housing boards, regional transport strategies and regional transport boards amongst others. People feel they are living in Labour’s open prison of a country which spies on the innocent. All of us who try to behave ourselves face an ever increasing barrage of new rules, and ever bigger bills to pay for the antics of the warders. Meanwhile the real villains abscond, cock a snoop, break the law, hire lawyers on the taxpayer, refuse to comply and claim the benefits. Ministers ride round in large cars at our expense, favouring the M4 bus lane if they are in a hurry, whilst lecturing the rest of us to stay at home or take the train. They don’t seem to notice the growing gap between the majority who try to keep up with the burgeoning pages of new legislation, and the minority who play the system and take the taxpayer for a ride. The frustration comes out in the words of many writing on the Telegraph’s readers’ website. “Stop all nonsensical political correctness”; “I would like to see democracy brought back to this country” and “Restore without delay liberty, privacy and free speech” are amongst the more polite explosions of feeling. The favourite targets for repeal amongst readers are the Human Rights Act and Identity cards. ID cards, and the national database that goes with them will cost billions, check up on the law abiding, and fail to intercept violent criminals and illegal entrants to the UK. A Conservative government must stop the project, however far it has reached. The government’s inability to issue passports properly or to keep control of our borders by inspecting documents effectively shows there is a management problem which is not going to solved by new cards. We should repeal the Human Rights Act. Our human rights are protected by living in a Parliamentary democracy. They are reinforced by specific legislation, defined by Parliamentary debate and votes. There is no need to have an additional layer of judge driven law which may produce rulings that fly in the face of commonsense. The third unpopular law for repeal is the Hunting with Dogs Act. This piece of legislation has ended up angering people on both sides of the argument. Those of us who hate cruelty to animals fear this law has made it more likely foxes will suffer, whilst all those who love the hunt resent the way the Act interferes with the sport. The Act has failed in its own terms, as it has succeeded in boosting the numbers of people who follow the hunts. This will remain free vote territory, but a Conservative government should give time to allow repeal. Many readers dislike the European Communities Act 1972. This is a very unusual piece of legislation for all sorts of reasons, not least because it is the only law we have that was explicitly endorsed by the British people in a referendum held in 1975. As one of the minority who voted No in 1975 (as a very young man!) I recognise that many who voted Yes felt misled by the then Labour government, who claimed a Yes vote was a vote just for a common market. What should a new government do about the ever growing power of the EU? As one blogger said “EU membership – costs us a fortune and threatens the very basis of democracy, liberty and freedom of speech”. The Conservative party has voted in recent years against the transfer of powers under the Nice and Amsterdam Treaties, has called for a referendum on the Constitution and has voted for an amendment to the 1972 Act to allow the UK to remove undesirable regulations from our Statute book. Of course we need to take powers back, and will need to confirm this in legislation. Our public services are damaged by “huge and unaffordable sums invested in target setting and auditing/monitoring”. We should sweep away many of these centralised targets, giving powers to head teachers and medical professionals to run their organisations as they see fit. We need to attack the overbearing burden of regulation. The list we need to repeal will be long. It could include the Data Protection regime and the Working Time Directive (the ban on overtime directive), which have emerged as the most expensive of the new burdens from the Chambers of Commerce survey. The Money laundering regulations are still over the top and need reform. The threat of over regulation to the health foods and alternative medicines businesses should be lifted. As someone who looks forward to a government that will legislate much less I do look forward to some good repeal Bills. We have more law than we need, more law than we can afford, more law than we want. People would like a break from the spy camera society, from the dishonest use of legislation as part of the spin plan, and from so much government that it trips over itself as well as over the rest of us. We need a slimmer government machine, more efficient public services, and lower taxes that we do not have to pay for with a tax rise. 23/07/03 Appeared first in The Daily Telegraph
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