U-turns and the truth

Sofas. How does the UK government make decisions? Under Tony Blair, we are assured, decisions were made on sofas. This move into soft furnishings worried Lord Butler, who preferred the older model of decision-making, based on Cabinet tables.

Whether made on sofas or around tables, there is a persistent hope that decisions are based on evidence and logic, guided by manifesto pledges. The picture is muddied by the rise of lobby groups, sumptuous entertainment and the promise of post-Cabinet jobs, but even that has a sort of rationality about it – self-interest.

What we avoid, like nature and vacuums, is the abhorrent thought that there is no rationality at all. We would rather there was a sinister conspiracy theory to explain our government’s often perverse initiatives than no explanation at all.

And so to the 10p issue. What could possibly explain the 2007 Budget’s abolition of the 10% income tax band? It had to be abolished to help pay for the reduction in the basic rate of income tax from 22% to 20%? Maybe.

And now, a year later, there has been a U-turn. Or at least, a U-turn has been outlined. Cue standard comments thereon, e.g. ’No harm in being wrong, sometimes‘ and ’There’s nothing wrong with U-turning when hurtling towards a brick wall‘.

We know about U-turns. We know that Denis Healey had to turn back from the airport when the IMF came on the phone. We know that Margaret Thatcher initially had to back down from confrontation with the NUM.

But there’s something different about this latest one, the 10p U-turn.

Martin Kettle, writing in the Guardian, has gone into the matter in some depth. Why, he asks, did Labour MPs make relatively little fuss about 10p last year? Answer:

… it is too easy to lump all the blame on backbenchers. Much of the real blame lies on Treasury ministers. They did not tell the truth within the Labour ranks about the 2007 budget. They pretended it said one thing when in fact it said another. But this was not a mistake. It was deliberate.

“did not tell the truth”? I.e. “lied”? Apparently that is, indeed, what he means, he names the Treasury ministers – Gordon Brown and Ed Balls – and he goes further.

Tony Blair, Mr Kettle says, asked Gordon Brown a few days before the 2007 Budget how many losers there would be from 10p:

My information is that Brown replied that there would be very few losers indeed – I am informed that he told Blair that the number would be about 25,000.

A few hours after the Budget, according to Mr Kettle, the Institute of Fiscal Studies estimated the number of losers at 3.5 million and we now commonly accept a figure of 5.3 million. That’s quite a difference. How to account for it? Mr Kettle attempts three explanations and then concludes:

The gap between what Brown said to Blair and what is now acknowledged is so great that it appears fairly clear that Brown gave Blair false information. My information is that Blair thinks this is the case.

And only last week, as he flew back from the US, Mr Brown was telling journalists that there would be no losers from 10p.

Is it prissy to demand that government decision-making should be based on truth-telling? Should we be more grown up, should we acknowledge the reality of Realpolitik?

Here’s a thought. From Professor Sir Michael Dummett. He is a Professor of philosophy and of theology and of mathematics, all three, at Oxford. And in his book on Frege’s philosophy of language he advances the following hypothesis. He can’t prove it, he would like to be able to, he suspects that it is true.

Meaning and truth, he suggests, are connected in the following way. Only if the vast majority of people intend to speak the truth the vast majority of the time can language have any meaning. Without that prevailing intention, language is meaningless.

Which could explain how some politicians can say that what is manifestly a Constitution is not a Constitution. And could explain how decision-making has got into its present parlous state.

Published by David Moss on 25/04/08 at 10:53am

Comments

An observation - that whatever the merits of of the U-turn, that the solution appears to be monumentally complex. I read of adjustments to child tax credits, winter fuel allowances and the minimum wage. This, no doubt will cause more bureaucracy, more IT and a greater need for data sharing. I seriously doubt whether anyone has attempted to evaluate the net benefit to the Treasury.
Surely the answer is to fix the problem at the core, as unpalatable as that might be. A series of small steps in the increase in tax rates creates small steps in “unfair” tax treatments. But large steps create places where people can’t get to the next step where that hurts them.
[[I declare self-interest of a sort. My wife works part-time and is in the 10% tax bracket. Instantly she’s had a 15% pay cut in that portion of her pay. To overcome this, she’d have to work another day a week (because that is the only unit of measurement for her employer). Sorry Darling Brown that’s a vote loser writ large.]]

Reply by on 04/25/08 at 12:36 pm
"And only last week, as he flew back from the US, Mr Brown was telling journalists that there would be no losers from 10p.”

There’s always the possibility—and, frankly, the evidence would tend to support this—that he doesn’t really understand the tax and benefits system (or, indeed, a great many other elements of the economy). After all, he wouldn’t have run up such as massive public sector deficit on purpose, would he?

Reply by Dave Birch on 04/25/08 at 4:49 pm
OK, so the Wibbi is....?

Reply by on 04/25/08 at 6:06 pm
WIBBI politicians told the truth, that way they would understand other people and other people would understand them and nonsensical decisions could more easily be avoided.

Reply by David Moss on 04/25/08 at 6:36 pm
Yes, that’s it. And with a Wibbi like that, that’s why we’re all Idealists

Reply by on 04/25/08 at 6:54 pm
In support of the cockup theory, John Kay suggests in his latest column that it all comes down to counter-intuitive confusion between marginal and average rates of tax, pointing out that the latter can go up even as the former goes down.

So I am not sure that “WIBBI politicians tell the truth” is quite to the point here (WIBBI though it would undoubtedly be).

WIBBI politicians and their electors were collectively brave enough to prune back the accretion of complexity in the tax and benefits system, so that people other than Frank Field could understand it.

WIBBI the budget process didn’t fetishise its own secretiveness - if the 10p rate had been presented as an option rather than a decision, its problems could have been identified, and its proponents could have stepped back without loss of face.

And in a post on the accuracy of information, it is perhaps worth pointing out that Michael Dummett is not now an Oxford professor (he is over 80 and retired more than ten years ago) and never was an Oxford professor of theology or mathematics - he was Wykeham Professor of Logic which, in Oxford at least, makes him unambiguously a philosopher.

Reply by marek on 04/26/08 at 12:12 am
In the car last night (Sunday 28 April 2008), conducting field research into the relation between truth and meaning, the 9 o’clock news came on, BBC Radio 4, and there was Jack Straw, defending Gordon Brown, saying: “… when we elected Gordon Brown last year – and we did elect him ...”.

Gordon Brown was not elected last year. Not in any sense of the word “elected” generally used in natural language.

The meaning of the word “elected” seems to have eluded Mr Straw. Which makes me wonder if he has the prevailing intention to speak the truth ...

Reply by David Moss on 04/28/08 at 8:22 am
Budgets are always completed at the last minute. I understand that last year’s Budget was monumentally last-minute - thus the 10p change was introduced at the very, very last minute (ie single figure hours before the CHX’s speech). I think the reality is that they simply hadn’t calculated properly what the impact would be.

Reply by on 04/28/08 at 1:02 pm
"And in a post on the accuracy of information, it is perhaps worth pointing out that Michael Dummett ...”

My thanks to marek for pointing out all these mistakes of mine.

Have just checked the Preface to my copy of his Frege book on language which reminded me that Professor Dummett once campaigned hard against racism in the UK (and was sorry to discover from his papers that Frege ended his life an anti-semite).

According to his Wikipedia entry, Professor Dummett has devised a proportional voting scheme, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quota_Borda_system which may be of interest to IdealGovernment adherents.

Reply by David Moss on 04/28/08 at 1:04 pm
an, I’m learning a lot from this thread. And I agree with all the Wibbies so far…

Reply by on 04/28/08 at 2:49 pm
"it all comes down to counter-intuitive confusion between marginal and average rates of tax,”

Yes, but the person being counter-intuitively confused is THE CHANCELLOR OF THE F---ING EXCHEQUER not some bloke down the pub. What a way to run a country.

Reply by Dave Birch on 04/28/08 at 5:51 pm
Ruth Kennedy: “Budgets are always completed at the last minute ...”

Daniel Finkelstein had an article in The Times last December, ‘We’re too busy to run the country’, http://tinyurl.com/675lho

He says himself that the point (the WIBBI) is “plonking”. None the worse for that, it chimes in with Ms Kennedy’s point.

“The head of Tony Blair’s delivery unit, Sir Michael Barber”, says Mr Finkelstein, had to narrow the scope of his remit in order simply to have a hope of achieving anything. He ended up with 10 objectives, and:

“Even then, he struggled to find time in the Prime Minister’s diary to review progress on these targets — just an hour for an entire department every three months. Sometimes, when the moment came, Mr Blair was too busy to attend. He was off fighting a war, or meeting the Chinese Prime Minister, or negotiating a new European constitution, or whatever. On other occasions he was too tired to pay proper attention or read the documents. Sir Michael reports that often his briefing to Mr Blair had to be restricted to whatever he was able to say while the two were walking down the corridor to the Cabinet Room. And remember — this expenditure of time represented an improvement on the first term.

Mr Blair was not unique. My experience of meetings with John Major and senior ministers to consider his programme of legislation was of a constant stream of notes being passed into the Cabinet Room, requiring decisions while the discussion continued.”

WIBBI it was the case that:

“Government ministers shouldn’t have a reach greater than their grasp. They shouldn’t seek to do more than they have hours in the day to do properly. That’s my case. Plinkety plonk.”

Reply by David Moss on 04/28/08 at 5:51 pm
WIBBI there was more decentralisation. The CEO of Barclays doesn’t have to spend his day deciding where to put a new branch or what the interest rate on a particular savings account should be.

Reply by Dave Birch on 04/29/08 at 9:56 pm

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