Latest news with #AnthonyCrosland
Mint
12-07-2025
- Business
- Mint
A Wealth Tax Would Signal Britain Is Closed for Business
(Bloomberg Opinion) -- As the UK teetered on the edge of an economic precipice 50 years ago, Environment Secretary Anthony Crosland, Labour's leading public intellectual, warned improvident local councils that 'the party is over.' The author of the optimistic tract The Future of Socialism was sounding the death knell of an era of seemingly limitless public spending. Crosland's speech, written by my former Times colleague David Lipsey who passed away last weekend, detonated like a bomb. Many Labour party officials, however, responded by sticking their fingers in their ears — the left opposed fiscal restraint even when Britain had to turn to the International Monetary Fund for a bailout. Margaret Thatcher, the newly elected Conservative opposition leader, however, took Crosland's words to heart and waited for her moment. This week, the Office for Budget Responsibility published a statement on the UK's fiscal risks that could have been lifted straight from Crosland: Britain is living beyond its means and must face up to reality. Publication of the OBR report has come 12 months too late to do Crosland's Labour successors much good. Had Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves detailed an honest analysis of the country's predicament from the outset — and blamed her Tory predecessors for it — she would have more political buy-in for spending restraint. That moment has now passed; and, as in the 1970s, many Labour Members of Parliament are refusing to acknowledge the dire reality of the economy. The watchdog of the public finances usually wags a friendly tail at chancellors, but this time the OBR bared its teeth, saying the government 'cannot afford the array of promises it has made to the public.' Nothing new here: The country's public finances have been left in a 'relatively vulnerable position' by successive governments. But instead of making the 'hard choices' called for by the OBR, Keir Starmer's government has abandoned a number of public spending cuts after backbench rebellions. The party's well and truly over and now the hangover begins. The UK has the sixth-highest debt, the fifth-highest deficit and the third-highest borrowing costs among 36 advanced economies. Worse, the UK has failed to reduce public debt after it soared during the pandemic and energy crisis, leaving the country increasingly vulnerable to external shocks. Wiser heads in Cabinet are trying to knock sense into their colleagues. Pat McFadden, the cabinet office minister who still bears the scars of Tony Blair's attempts to impose public-service reform on an unwilling Labour party, says with quiet menace that 'you can't spend money twice.' The government may have to delay scrapping the hated two-child benefit limit imposed by the Tories. The measure would cost £3.5 billion ($4.7 billion), but the rebels have forced ministers to drop £5 billion worth of disability entitlement savings. Having tasted blood, Labour's left-wing has also set its sights on reforms to the rules that allow hundreds of thousands of children to be designated with costly 'special needs,' the annual bill to local councils for which is £12 billion and rising. This bodes ill for the chancellor. As it is, Reeves is barely meeting her fiscal rules. Money is so tight that a government headed by a former human rights lawyer is seriously considering limiting the ancient right to trial by jury just to save cash. And where Labour leads, the trade unions follow. Some 53,000 doctors represented by the British Medical Association (BMA) have voted on a low turnout for six months of strike action to back up their demands for a wholly unrealistic 29% pay rise. Last year, the doctors were awarded a whopping 22% pay deal without any corresponding changes to their working practices. The government's logic was pragmatic — voters thought medics had a reasonable case in making up arrears in lost pay, and ministers were anxious to buy off a prolonged strike which had led to the cancellation of 1.5 million medical appointments. This time, opinion polls suggest voters are unpersuaded by the strikers. The reform-minded Health Secretary Wes Streeting's response has therefore been robust. 'The public will not forgive strike action in these circumstances, and nor will I,' he told the Times. Fighting talk — but these days, who can be certain that a wobbly government won't cave? Other public-sector unions are watching closely. The chancellor's naivety is coming back to haunt her. In her first budget, Reeves made a rash promise: 'I'm not coming back with more borrowing and more taxes' — and then spent all the money she'd raised from business on the health service and generous public sector wage settlements. Reeves must now look to higher taxes in the autumn to balance her books. That doesn't seem to bother Labour MPs, who've set their hearts on soaking the rich — yet taxes on wealthy foreigners have already driven away thousands to Milan, Dubai and other tax-friendlier regimes. A wealth tax, floated by former Labour leader Neil Kinnock last weekend, would truly bring us back to the 1970s, when eye-wateringly high levies drove entrepreneurs, artists and pop stars into exile. If she travels down this road, Reeves will send out a message to the world that Britain is closed for business. More from Bloomberg Opinion: This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners. Martin Ivens is the editor of the Times Literary Supplement. Previously, he was editor of the Sunday Times of London and its chief political commentator. More stories like this are available on
Bloomberg
12-07-2025
- Politics
- Bloomberg
A Wealth Tax Would Signal Britain Is Closed for Business
As the UK teetered on the edge of an economic precipice 50 years ago, Environment Secretary Anthony Crosland, Labour's leading public intellectual, warned improvident local councils that 'the party is over.' The author of the optimistic tract The Future of Socialism was sounding the death knell of an era of seemingly limitless public spending. Crosland's speech, written by my former Times colleague David Lipsey who passed away last weekend, detonated like a bomb. Many Labour party officials, however, responded by sticking their fingers in their ears — the left opposed fiscal restraint even when Britain had to turn to the International Monetary Fund for a bailout. Margaret Thatcher, the newly elected Conservative opposition leader, however, took Crosland's words to heart and waited for her moment.
The Guardian
06-07-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Lord Lipsey obituary
David Lipsey, who has died aged 77, was a significant and influential Labour party adviser, a political journalist and then a member of the House of Lords for 25 years. Early in his professional life he recognised that despite a passionate interest in politics and public affairs, he had no wish to become an MP. He was thus that rare creature who wanted to improve the lives of others without being necessarily bothered about advancing his own career. He became nevertheless one of the best connected Labour figures of his generation, and gravitated from being a speechwriter in Whitehall and Downing Street – where he wrote the party's manifesto for the 1979 general election – to a hugely successful career in old Fleet Street, before then being appointed to the Lords, as one of 'Tony's cronies', by Blair in 1999. Like his first mentor, the former foreign secretary, Anthony Crosland, he was a radical egalitarian, and always tried to put what he believed to be the best thing to do above any ideological consideration. He was clever, clear thinking, serious-minded and the most enormous fun. His centrist political stance was constant throughout his life: he once observed, somewhat dolefully, that he was at one time regarded in Labour circles as a proto-fascist for his rightwing views and then was subsequently held to be 'a dangerous lefty', yet without ever having changed his mind on much. As a 'jobbing peer' – his phrase – he was remorselessly busy and at one point calculated that he had a total of 22 different professional and unpaid posts. His many friends teased him about not having enough fingers for the pies with which he was involved. As a young government policy wonk he had set about ensuring that more Labour names were added to the civil service list of the so-called 'great and the good', people who were awarded exactly the sort of public appointments with which his own later years would be garlanded. In the Lords he listed his interests as including culture, media, sport, parliament, government, politics, health, medicine and social services. He served on three public inquiries: on the long term care of elderly people (1997-99), on the voting system (1997-98) and on the future funding of the BBC (1999). His minority report on social care would later bear a striking resemblance to the findings of Andrew Dilnot's review in 2011, accepted by the then government but never implemented. He regarded his work on voting reform as 'the greatest failure among a number of failures in my political life', blaming the decision to retain the current 'indefensible' system after the 2011 alternative vote referendum – resulting from the inquiry – on the ineptitude of the then deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg. As well as being a prolific essayist, he published a number of books including The Secret Treasury (2000), on how the British economy is run; In the Corridors of Power (2012), a highly entertaining memoir; and Counter Coup (2014), a Dick Francis pastiche on horse racing. He also jointly owned and raced horses and greyhounds, played a deceptively excellent game of golf and for four years in his 60s drove a sulky, the lightweight cart used in harness-racing in Wales, triumphantly winning on seven occasions. He was introduced to horse racing at Cheltenham by his godmother (who was less successful with her appointed spiritual task) and fell for it when Bolshoi emerged from fog to gallop home at 20-1. When he arrived in Westminster in 1972 – a 'callow, gauche, thin, neurotic geek of 24' as he described himself – he was among the first 'chocolate soldiers', political advisers then financed by the Joseph Rowntree Trust, who were the trailblazers for today's professional political class. With a first in philosophy, politics and economics from Magdalen College, Oxford, to which he had won a scholarship, and with two years' experience in the research department of the General and Municipal Workers Union (now the General, Municipal and Boilermakers), he was appointed to work for Crosland, then shadow environment secretary and one of the leading Labour intellectuals of his day. He became Crosland's eyes and ears, as well as his speechwriter and spokesman, in opposition and in government from 1974, winning the exceptional status of being trusted by the civil service and the media as well as by his minister, with whom he was wholly in accord. He ran Crosland's unsuccessful campaign for the Labour leadership on Harold Wilson's resignation in 1976, and when his candidate came bottom in the poll sought distraction at Wimbledon greyhound stadium, acquiring his subsequent lifetime's devotion to both the dogs and the sport. He accompanied Crosland to the Foreign Office, and on his unexpected death in 1977 joined James Callaghan's Downing Street team. He regarded this as an honour, if less of a pleasure than his previous post, since 'Uncle Jim' Callaghan had what Lipsey called an ambiguous relationship with academic intelligence, which others saw as a tendency to bully. He was known affectionately as 'the Man from Uncle'. In the aftermath of Labour's loss of the 1979 election, Lipsey became industrial correspondent of New Society, before joining the Sunday Times in 1980, first on the political staff and then as economics editor. He returned to New Society as editor and chief executive in 1988, seeking unsuccessfully to save the magazine's independence before it merged with the New Statesman. He then helped found the Sunday Correspondent, of which he was one of the joint deputy editors during its brief life from 1988 to 1990, winning plaudits for the clout, contacts and classy staff he brought to the new publication. From 1990 to 1992 he was associate editor and acting deputy editor of the Times, a post he found difficult because of a clash of temperament with the then editor, Simon Jenkins, but thereafter he thought he had 'died and gone to heaven' during seven years on the Economist. As the political editor for four years from 1994 he wrote the Bagehot column, for which he won an Orwell prize in 1997; until joining the Lords he was public policy editor. Lipsey was a visiting professor at the universities of Ulster (1993-98), and Salford (2008-12), a visiting fellow at London School of Economics (2002-04) and at Harvard (2011). Among a wide range of other financial, media, artistic and sporting organisations reflecting his many interests, he was on the council of the Advertising Standards Authority (1999-2005), chaired Make Votes Count (1999-2008), the Social Market Foundation (2001-10), the British Greyhound Racing Board (2004-08) and the Campaign for Straight Statistics (2009–12). Born in Stroud, David was the elder of two sons of Penelope (nee Rawson) and Lawrence Lipsey. His father was a Canadian non-practising Jew who came to the UK to join the forces in the second world war, fought at Monte Cassino, and settled in Gloucestershire, having met his future wife. He made a comfortable living from a business recycling kapok stuffing and later manufacturing furniture, and David went to Wycliffe preparatory school before becoming a boarder at Bryanston school. His parents were thoughtful and interested in politics, and introduced their sons to the subject by taking them both to Labour and Conservative party meetings in the 1959 election. The family were escorted from the hall at the Conservative meeting when Lipsey senior heckled the candidate about the cost of the controversial Blue Streak ballistic missile project. David subsequently stood for Labour in the 1964 and 1966 elections at school and joined the party aged 17. He was head boy at Bryanston and before going to Oxford spent a year teaching English as a second language in Bradford. He went to the city as a party member and left as a fully fledged socialist. Lipsey founded a newspaper, the Federalist, while at school and in a curious coincidence interviewed Crosland, then education secretary and committed to abolishing public schools. Asked if his policy extended to prep schools, the minister replied that it did, and his young interviewer reported him as responding that they were 'stinking breeding grounds of sodomy'. Years later Lipsey, the political adviser, would come across a Crosland speech and realise that he had misheard the last word; it should have been 'snobbery'. He married his second wife, Margaret (formerly Robson, nee Fazakerley), whom he met through Streatham Labour party, of which he was the secretary from 1970 to 1972, in 1982; he was married previously to Elizabeth, his girlfriend from Gloucestershire and at Oxford. He is survived by Margaret, their daughter, Becky, and two stepsons. David Lawrence Lipsey, Lord Lipsey, journalist, political adviser and parliamentarian, born 21 April 1948; died 1 July 2025
The Guardian
07-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Gang of Three review – inside an old boys' club of Labour intrigue
D enis Healey, Roy Jenkins and Anthony Crosland were all born between 1917 and 1920, then educated at Oxford before serving in Labour governments. This homogenous gang of three, as this play's title identifies them, fail to claim the highest political prizes because they believe the inevitable winner is one of them. Written by political faction specialists Robert Khan and Tom Salinsky – whose earlier works Coalition, Kingmaker and Brexit examined aspects of the Cameron and Johnson years – the play shows the self-chosen big three of the Labour centre-right debating which of them should become deputy party leader in 1972 and 1976, prime minister in 1976 and leader of the opposition in 1980. As with events in Rome, there's a sense of Labour conclaves, with the added problem that not all of the contenders were in the room; in each case, a pope of socialism was crowned elsewhere (Ted Short, Michael Foot, James Callaghan, Foot again). Still more daringly, another party, across Westminster, chose a female leader. The Tories having picked three more women (quality aside), while all Labour's non-interim leaders have been male, is one of the play's many subtle subtexts, alongside divisions between the trio including European membership and spending cuts. Subtle subtexts … Morgan, Tierney and Cox in The Gang of Three. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/the Guardian Just as the play seems to be following conventional bio-drama chronology, there's a flashback to Oxford in 1940 in an intriguing scene dramatising a more intimate relationship between Crosland and Jenkins that, in John Campbell's biography of Jenkins, is attributed only to 'private information'. Finally, the play becomes an unofficial prequel to Steve Waters' Limehouse, in which Jenkins, as part of the 'gang of four' (with David Owen, Shirley Williams and Bill Rodgers), founded the SDP, with the aim of supplanting Labour – although, like Jenkins' previous gambles, that failed, with Healey refusing to become the gang's fifth member. Eschewing a bald cap (as used by Roger Allam in Limehouse), Hywel Morgan captures Jenkins' delivery, rolling words around his mouth like the fine claret he carries in (a good in-joke about a political hero, this) a Gladstone bag. Colin Tierney as Healey nails the sudden French quotations and the habit, regardless of emotion, of speaking through gritted teeth. With the advantage or disadvantage of being the only character not impersonated by peak-time TV impressionists of the era, Alan Cox plays Crosland as a charmingly louche political chameleon – though, as the play shows, that wasn't enough. At the King's Head theatre, London, until 1 June
