Take back control parliament hands control to the White House

This is the weekly newsletter from editor Iain Martin for Reaction members.

One of the best explanations I’ve heard recently for the continued Tory lead in the opinion polls is that most voters do not like to think about politics much between elections. They, we, were forced to think about it too much during the Brexit civil war. At the peak, Brexit was forever on the television and radio, proving by turns annoying, exciting, boring and sometimes traumatic. Voters may have resented the perpetual intrusion, a pollster suggested to me the other day. When a Brexit deal and a general election settled it in late 2019, this was a chance for non-obsessive voters to tune out or turn off until about 2023. Boris Johnson had won his election, so let him get on with it. Then the guy had a pandemic to deal with.

This weird becalming of politics – with Tories unable to believe their luck that nothing for the moment is putting Labour in the lead – has had a curious effect on the Conservative party. Having landed up owning Brexit, a policy much of the party at Westminster opposed in 2016, it seems uncertain how to approach life outside the European Union.

One of the weirdest policies that demonstrates Tory confusion is the decision to back a global minimum corporation tax rate. The policy is the baby of the Biden White House. It is co-designed by the OECD, the globalist Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, a body described variously by ministers as “worse than the EU” and “as bad as the EU.” 

The idea is that Britain, and other countries, will abandon their new digital services taxes that they have introduced aimed at capturing more revenue from the tech giants who are skilled at moving money around.

In return, the US will agree to enforce a minimum global corporation tax, theoretically giving the tech giants nowhere to hide. This is big government, on a global scale.

The Chancellor and the Treasury agreed to go along with the proposal, although members of the cabinet are concerned that it gives away control over taxation policy and excludes parliament. The Treasury position, as best as it can be established with so much double bluff and diplomacy involved, is that HMG is agreeing on the assumption that it might not happen in the end. If the Democrats lose control of Congress in the midterms, or they lose to a Republican in the Presidential election on 2024, it may in time be abandoned.

Yet the globalised taxation policy is advancing, pretty speedily. G20 finance ministers agreed last week to push forward on a global minimum corporation tax. A figure of 15% is envisaged. When leaders meet in Rome next weekend it is likely to feature and be highlighted as a rare area of agreement, especially because there are such stark differences elsewhere on climate change goals.

Now, this may or may not be a sensible policy. There is a clamour for tech giants to be taxed and regulated more heavily. Broadly, I’m keen on it. They’re too powerful. As a fan of Teddy Roosevelt, the early 20th century Progressive Republican president, I’m for some trustbusting, that is breaking up concentrations of interest to improve competition. The tech experts and analysts who tell me this is a bad idea, because it’s complex and may not create perfect markets, seem to miss the brute politics of the situation. The tech takeover we’re living through is like the 1990s financialisation of the economy times ten when banks became too big and powerful, until they later blew up the economy. With AI accelerating, democratic legitimacy in the next few decades may rest on the question some of us posed after 2008: do these tech companies work for us or do we work them? Do they exist to serve us, or do we exist to serve them?

Higher taxation on tech, and minimum corporation tax rates, may be the right policy or the wrong policy. Either way, Parliament should debate it thoroughly on its own merits and decide by voting on it. To put this in American Revolutionary terms: this is taxation, where is the parliamentary representation?

So far, the government’s parliamentary answers on how this will be slipped through are worryingly opaque. It looks as though the government’s plan is to make any necessary changes via international agreement rather than a specific parliamentary vote. There may be some lines in a vast finance bill primarily concerned with other matters.

In effect, the UK’s digital services tax on big tech will “fall away” from the statute book, if the US Congress makes the necessary changes agreed at OECD and inter-governmental level. And other governments, including the UK, will then abide by the minimum corporation tax level agreed with the US.

In this way, a significant constitutional shift is taking place, almost unnoticed, with authority over British taxation rates ceded to an international body above parliament. It has had virtually no debate in Britain and will get none, if the government gets its way. If the EU had attempted something similar pre-2016, Eurosceptics would have howled in outrage.

This manoeuvre is surely entirely contrary to the first principle of Brexit that fundamental parliamentary sovereignty was being asserted. A handful of MPs and think tanks are grumpy about the policy, but no more than that. In this way, a take back control Tory party and a parliament now supposedly more sovereign after Brexit is taking back control and handing it to the OECD and the White House.

When I called you last night from Glasgow

That’s life, said the wealthy actor Brian Cox breezily when asked on BBC Question Time this week about rats in the street and rubbish piling up in SNP-run Glasgow. Sure, that’s life, under the SNP in Glasgow, I wanted someone to respond.

SNP-controlled Glasgow is about to host the COP26 jamboree and the badly-run city is in the most terrible mess, with a bin strike on top of all the disruption about to be caused by the climate conference. As someone who regards the place lovingly as my home city, even though I’m from neighbouring Paisley, the level of political mismanagement and neglect becomes ever more flabbergasting with every visit. In the 1980s and 1990s, post-industrial Glasgow staged an extraordinary recovery. That has gone into reverse and the fabric of the place seems to be disintegrating, in contrast to confident, booming Edinburgh, or a comparable city such as Manchester in England. You only have to walk through the increasingly hollowed out centre of Glasgow to see that it is lost and falling apart.

Next month, some 30,000 delegates are to be flown into Glasgow from pretty much every country. It would be funny if it wasn’t such a dangerous idea. The super spreader gathering to save the planet means the city is about to be turned into a giant Covid variant laboratory.

There’s good news though, for Unionists. It is becoming more widely understood in Scotland and London that there isn’t going to be a second referendum on Scottish independence any time soon. In that vacuum, with only obsessives talking about the constitution, there’s a great opportunity to improve lives. Perhaps a more normal politics can reassert itself, if voters are prompted to become curious. How can it possibly be in an era of high public spending and activist government that the SNP after fourteen years in charge of Scotland has engineered a situation in which Glasgow and its people are being so appallingly let down? From somewhere, please, in Labour and the Tories, might there emerge a new approach that encourages growth, reconstruction and improvement?

Incidentally, Brian Cox, star of Succession, has succeeded Sean Connery. Cox is now the actor who best personifies the adage that he will do anything for Scotland’s independence, apart from live there.

What I’m reading

Why isn’t Isabel Colegate a household name? Perhaps she is in your household, but the 90 year-old novelist was largely new to me. I had heard of the Shooting Party, her novel that was turned into a film released in 1985, but that was all until one of my very favourite booksellers, at the Open Book in Richmond, pressed a Colegate book on me a few weeks ago. Thank goodness she did. The Orlando King novels are collected in one volume by Bloomsbury. They fit alongside Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy or Simon Raven’s novels, as family and friendship dramas with the War at the centre, although Colegate’s tone is different, the effect more dreamlike. Male vanity and the delusions of 1930s, 1940s and 1950s politics are exposed, layer upon layer. Orlando King is a boy raised in a mysterious French wilderness. He turns up in England and by a combination of guile, charm and luck of connection rises rapidly in business and politics, reaching the Commons. The descriptions of drunken parties in London, the pastoral English countryside and the Tuscan heat, are as good as anything Waugh managed. It’s a while since a work of fiction made me stay up way too late, reading at speed and greedily, wanting to find out what happens to the characters. “We’ve got everything wrong, Jess, everything wrong,” says pompous Uncle Conrad the disillusioned cabinet minister at the end, undone by his sanctimony, petty morals and lack of empathy, only realising it too late. Today, more Colegate for me.

Have a good weekend.

Iain Martin,
Editor and Publisher,
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