Britain has imported yet another American cultural norm. As of last week, our leading politicians are expected to publish their tax returns. The story of how this development came about is not an edifying one and, in retelling it, I hope to persuade at least some American politicians to reconsider the tradition.
It all started with the leak of the Panama Papers. Among the hidden slush funds was one company that was wholly innocuous, except for its chairman’s surname. It turned out that the late father of the British prime minister had run a fund based in the Bahamas.
Ian Cameron, a successful stockbroker, had done what many in his profession did in the pre-Thatcher years: He had operated offshore because Britain still applied exchange controls. There was absolutely no suggestion of impropriety, tax avoidance or secrecy. He had openly advertised for investors.
In politics, though, details rarely matter. What counts is the impression, the smell of a thing, what we might pretentiously call its gestalt. Cameron, Panama, offshore funds: It was too good a story to ignore. Leftist politicians were careful not to allege any wrongdoing. Instead, they kept repeating “Tories” and “tax havens” in a sarcastic tone.
In order to show that he had nothing to hide, David Cameron published his tax returns going back several years — which were as squaresville and uninteresting as could be. He had his prime ministerial salary, and some rental income from the house he had lived in before he moved to 10 Downing St. And that was it.
Except that, after his father died, his mother had given him ¢200,000, seemingly to balance things out because his elder brother got the family home.
Now you might think it laudable for a mother to support her son when he has a young family. If so, you’re evidently not a British journalist. The newspapers immediately decided that the sole purpose of her gift was to reduce death duties. They offered no evidence for this claim, nor, indeed, did they explain why it would have been wrong had it been true.
They didn’t need to. Their complaint, it soon became clear, was that David Cameron was richer than the rest of us, which was meant to make us all very angry.
One after another, opposition politicians started publishing their own tax returns, so as to show how much less they earned than the prime minister. The chancellor of the Exchequer was forced to follow suit — which led to a further round of outrage because it turned out that he makes more than ¢40,000 a year from shares in his father’s business.
Something is back to front here. We’re invited to become more agitated about the personal wealth of politicians — the part of their income that costs taxpayers nothing — than about their salaries. The implication is that public salaries are somehow more virtuous than private ones. Which is odd, if you think about it, because private enterprise generates the surpluses on which all public salaries ultimately rest.
Maybe you think that the politics of envy are an Old World phenomenon, that Americans are readier to celebrate affluence? Cast your mind back to the last presidential election. Mitt Romney’s wealth, acquired in the private sector, was held to make him aloof, cut-off, remote. Oddly, no one made such an argument about the wealth that the Obamas were accumulating while in office.
Our ideal should be the citizen-legislator — someone who has succeeded in life outside politics, and who pines to return to that life, as Cincinnatus to his plough. America has known several such leaders, from George Washington to Ronald Reagan.
More recently, though, something different has become the norm. Washington is now run by pols in the Clinton-Gore mould — full-timers who, without doing a recognizable private sector job, somehow manage to leave office much wealthier than they entered it.
The British MPs keenest to disclose their salaries are those who have no outside income. They boast that they “work for you full-time”, but are we truly best served by men and women who depend wholly on the state? How will such dependency influence their attitude to taxation and spending?
If Britain wants to copy American politics, we’d do better to look at how the Texas state legislature operates, meeting for only 80 days every two years, and paying its representatives what is effectively compensation for their time rather than a salary. I can’t help noticing that Texas is doing pretty well. Maybe the two things are connected.
Dan Hannan is a British Conservative MEP.
