To balance Scotland’s books, tax cyclists and joggers

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/apr/26/scotland-balance-books-tax-cyclists-and-joggers

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I am not entirely sure if a number exists representing the annual cost to Scotland of multi-deprivation. I wouldn’t have thought, though, that the task of calculating this would tax the resources and expertise of your friendly, independent financial thinktank. First, perhaps, you might take the cost of policing, benefits and ill-health in Scotland’s five most affluent neighbourhoods and then set it beside the bill in the same categories for the nation’s five most socially disadvantaged communities. Then you would add the two figures together and divide by two to establish the average cost right across the country.

In this way, it would be possible to establish just how much above the average it costs each year to tackle crime, chronic ill health and disease, welfare dependency and lost tax and national insurance revenues in places such as Shettleston, Dalmarnock and Possilpark in Glasgow and the Pilton estate in Edinburgh. I’d hazard a qualified guess that the annual bill would eclipse £7.6bn.

This is the fabled number that the Institute for Fiscal Studies, the independent thinktank, has calculated would be Scotland’s annual deficit if we replaced the Barnett formula with full fiscal autonomy. The number was immediately embraced by the predictable and massed ranks of online quackery and the Labour party in Scotland to show that abandoning Barnett and raising our own taxes would leave us somewhere between Liberia and Eritrea in the index of the world’s poorest countries.

Yet you would have thought it made sense for a socially progressive party to devote most of its energies and resources to reducing the crime, health and benefits bill in our poorest communities to something approaching the average to the country. Not only would there be huge savings in the cost to Scotland but we would be helping our most vulnerable and excluded neighbours finally to share in the bountiful wealth of the nation.

Achieving this, though, requires a degree of political imagination and also runs the risk of alienating those who feel they have no social obligation to their fellow human beings. The political party that chose to pursue a long-term approach to stimulating the dormant economic muscles of those sprawling communities would be hoping that the majority of Scottish citizens would see the sense of unlocking their earning potential. Such a party would trust there are more of these Scots than those who would choose to avert their eyes and to pass by on the other side of the road muttering stuff about scroungers and getting up off their backsides to get jobs. There lies the risk, but do the long-term rewards not surely outweigh it?

The easy, short-term method of reducing a nation’s budget deficit is to impose swingeing cuts in public services and to make it more difficult to obtain benefits. Employers are discouraged from paying the sort of wages that are meaningful in terms of generating economic confidence and increasing tax revenues. Selling off profitable parts of the NHS to privateers would also be part of this plan.

Such a strategy, of course, punishes the most vulnerable in our society as more of them will have cause to rely on these services and benefits. This reduces their chances ever of contributing financially to the UK exchequer. It lacks imagination and betrays the sort of class-based reprisals of which the right in this country regularly accuse the left.

Rekindling our poorest neighbourhoods so that they can participate and contribute once more is a strategy that requires long-term planning and diligence. It will never reward a politician who wants a policy that will bear fruit quickly and thus allow him to claim the credit for it while people can still remember his name. Such a strategy may also require tax rises for a while, something that many of us would be happy to sustain if we were confident that these were specifically for the purpose of saving our poorest neighbours from cuts in their vital services. Perhaps the Institute for Fiscal Studies and all of our political parties could find a way of calculating the bill for social deprivation and thus the rewards for successfully addressing it.

In the meantime and in the absence of anything approaching a creative tax regime to stimulate growth in our most socially challenged districts I make no apologies for falling back on a bit of class warfare myself. Thus I would impose a radical but proportionate web of fiscal penalties on the affluent and complacent middle classes in their pursuit of some of their infernal, vapid and chi-chi pastimes.

First up for having over a barrel would be cyclists, of course. The numbers of people participating in this shallow pursuit is actually increasing. They clog the main arteries into town for those of us who work for a living and make us late for meetings. This collectively damages the economy and causes stress. Imposing a stiff road tax on all cyclists would raise a tidy sum.

I’d also be looking at the annual police bill and seek ways to reduce it. I would impose financial penalties on the plods each time their horses fouled the streets thus causing nearby children to contract Lyme disease and crippling allergies. We could also make a lot of money taxing the cops each time they made a wrongful arrest or beat up the wrong guy.

A prohibitive regime of spot fines could also be levied on many other middle-class activities that lead to angst and cause distress to the rest of us. People who use extendable leads to walk their dogs; members of real ale societies and people who choose to name their children after natural events such as Star and Sky. People who allow their houses to be photographed for property supplements should also be made to feel the full force of the state’s disapprobation with a reasonable levy. Joggers who insist on running in sweat-lashed and intimidating parties of 10 or more should also be made to hand over a supplement. We’d need to look at targeting the boxed sets brigade, too, and men over the age of 30 who insist on wearing baseball caps.

In no time at all the annual deficit would diminish, the right people would be getting targeted and the rest of us could live our lives in peace and tranquillity.