Radical Redistribution – From The Right?

When I first read the following article by Charles Moore, I could hardly believe it was written by the Eton-educated, authorised biographer of Margaret Thatcher, and former editor of The Telegraph and Spectator. Maybe it is a spoof or some hackers have broken into the online Telegraph. Here’s the article link:

Might Sunak use his wealth to cut the national debt?
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/11/29/might-sunak-use-wealth-cut-national-debt/

Moore is essentially asking the rich to give some money back to the state! He bases this revolutionary and incendiary idea on Stanley Baldwin, three-time Conservative Prime Minister (1923-1924, 1924-29, 1935-37), who gave one fifth of his considerable fortune (from the steel business he developed with his father) to the nation in order to help pay down the war debt and, in a Times article under a nom de guerre, he asked other rich people to do the same. It’s not clear that many people followed his lead, but perhaps if they had, this country would have fared better and been a less unfair and less cruel place.

It is of course unimaginable that Sunak (or any other modern Tory or right-leaning rich British person) would give away a single penny of his own wealth or the vast wealth of his wife, not a cent or rupee of which was earned by her as far as I can tell. It is also not clear whether Moore is giving away any of his money, though his wealth, if it is only from his earnings as a newspaper writer, is unlikely to be as huge as that of the Sunaks.

There are two important points here, one overt and the other not.

Firstly, there should be a worldwide conversation about inequality and how damaging it is both to most humans and to nature, including its role in climate change; indeed, the question should be, is inequality sustainable?

Secondly we need to question the old bugbear of national debt: what is it and to whom do the people of Britain owe money? In the case of heavily indebted poor countries (how they got into debt is a horror story for another day), their debt is in US dollars and is owed to banks outside their shores, but Britain still controls its own currency (thank goodness – one of the few remaining rays of hope in this country) and therefore creates all its own money.

The reflex reaction from almost all political quarters is to say this sounds like a call to print more money, but that is what we do anyway. The big question is how much money to create and how to control where it gets spent. Obsessing over paying down the debt is a technique for avoiding analysing the real problems and possible solutions as well as a useful one for shrinking the state, creating cheap labour and hurting the poor, which makes them easier to control.