Avoidance is an ideological choice by politicians

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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

Good morning. Thanks for the many interesting responses to yesterday’s note, some of which I wanted to talk about today, because it is the summer and frankly I think we can all do with things that aren’t me writing the same newsletter about small boats over and over again.

Sensation nation

I don’t know whether you can do any better than deciding, when the crunch comes, if you lean towards individual freedom or the common good.

For example, would you ban the veil for girls in school or allow them to wear it?

Nor do I see any better human ideology than the Golden Rule. Why can’t we all adhere to that?

In terms of politics and management we have to remember that we manage the short term and the long term at the same time. (And, as you point out, there is no ‘right’ answer. Different people make different answers ‘right’.)

The ‘ideology’ for both must be to create the best possible lives for all citizens; economic prosperity and a flourishing cultural environment. These have never been achieved throughout history without innovation, trade and openness to outside ideas.

I started with this one because it’s my newsletter so I can do high-handed things like “I started with this one because I agree completely that these are the best underlying principles we’ve yet devised to run society”. Of course, as anyone who reads this newsletter will know, these values are currently under different forms of threat from across the political spectrum in the UK.

The word ‘ideology’ is confusing. I find it more helpful to categorise opinions as being based on either evidence or belief. It is paradoxical that people seem to be much more motivated to act on the basis of belief rather than factual evidence. Thus politics tends to be driven much more by belief than by ‘facts’. It is the sharing of beliefs that brings people together in political parties or religions. 

There is always a strong reluctance among believers to test their beliefs. I was born into a Catholic family and it was a sin to deny that ‘miracles’ occur, when clearly we all know that events follow scientifically demonstrable laws and not the will of priests. Tories believe that taxation reduces economic growth and prosperity despite the evidence from Northern Europe. 

So this is for me part of why you can’t get away from ideology. We know that tax does have, at the very least, some implications for where economic activity takes place, whether by moving it from households and businesses to the state, or because households and businesses move to escape it. Some taxation really does drag down economic growth, indeed in some cases the aim of the policy is to reduce economic growth. We don’t have tobacco taxes because we want the rate of smoking to keep going up. We want that economic activity to shrink.

(On that note, Iain Mansfield, formerly a special adviser at the Department for Education and now at Policy Exchange, has expanded on his excellent rules of policy thumb to address his tax rule in greater detail.)

But unless you an anarcho-capitalist, you are in the business of working out what exactly you want the state to do and you are in the business therefore of balancing where that money comes from and how. And your ideology is the only way you can really do this, because as another reader noted:

This is a broader point, but I think something else to consider is that how we evaluate ‘what works’ itself requires some kind of values system, given that you need to know what it is that you want to work to even get to that point.

For example, you see this in some of the debates about housing policy. I think “what works” is a country in which many more people have mortgages, in part because to be blunt, I think people with mortgages are less inclined to go for risky political experiments, than people who own their homes outright or people who do not own their own homes at all. For others, what might “work” is one in which the vast majority of people rent, because renting is more economically dynamic. There is no right answer here, only a question about what trade-offs you want the most.

‘Ideology’ tends to be used to mean ‘values I don’t agree with’, especially when it comes to how those values are manifested in political agendas and policy choices. 

And the inability of many to distinguish between ‘someone with an ideological framework’ and ‘an ideologue’ reminds me a little of this classic scene.

Though my inner continental Marxist (with the signed Slavoj Žižek books to prove it!) thinks there’s something to be said for the use of the term to describe how people use ideas to mask the more material dynamics that are governing events. As you’ve pointed out yourself, the real story of British politics over the past 20 years isn’t ‘culture warriors’ vs ‘wokery’ or even ‘Leavers’ vs ‘Remainers: it’s the flatlining of productivity. 

Honesty compels me to admit that I am not a Marxist, but I think an underrated feature of many modern policy debates is that they are as much about what you are not willing to do as what you are willing to do. Essentially everyone who looks at the UK agrees that we have sluggish growth, poor public finances, poor public services, a rising tax burden, small boat crossings, and so on. So in part it becomes about what you are not willing to do — for example as it stands none of the major parties have a desire to explicitly argue for trying to get back into the EU. Some are open to putting aside the idea that the government should be constrained by universal human rights as laid out in the European convention, as it has been since 1950.

Those arguments about what you are not willing to do are going to become particularly sharp over the next few years I think, for reasons I will set out in tomorrow’s email, when I return to what is once again the big summer story in British politics: small boat crossings.

Now try this

I saw Materialists at the cinema. It’s all right, though in the end it is not a patch on the director’s last film, Past Lives. A good gauge, if you’ve read Sally Rooney’s Normal People, is to assume you’ll enjoy it about as much as that. If that’s no use as a guide, Danny Leigh’s review is here.

Top stories today

• Fears over IHT | Wealth managers say their clients are increasingly worried the Treasury could crack down on the UK’s “generous” inheritance tax rules in an attempt to plug the country’s gaping fiscal hole.

• Scottish spending swells | The gap between Scotland’s revenues and spending has widened to 11.7 per cent of GDP, more than twice the figure for the UK, reopening the debate about the nation’s economic future ahead of next year’s elections for the Scottish parliament.

• Don’t have a cow man | Most UK agricultural estates can shoulder the cost of higher death duties without being forced to sell the family farm, according to analysis of Labour reforms that campaigners fear will hammer rural communities. 

• GDP bump | The UK economy expanded 0.3 per cent in the second quarter, surpassing expectations but underlining the challenge facing chancellor Rachel Reeves as she attempts to boost growth and repair the public finances.

• Home pride | The UK’s top universities have boosted their intake of domestic students because of uncertainty over international recruitment and financial pressures, according to admissions data released as pupils receive their A-level results.

• Called out | The BBC has apologised and retrospectively edited a segment of Radio 4’s Thought for the Day after the head of a refugee foundation described comments by Robert Jenrick about asylum seekers as “xenophobia”. Theologian and author Krish Kandiah used the term about an article in which Jenrick said he wouldn’t want his daughters living near “men from backward countries who broke into Britain illegally and about whom you know next to nothing”. The Guardian writes it up here.