EDITORIAL : THE GUARDIAN, UK

         

 

North Sea taxes: The fight turns nasty

Sudden lurches in tax policy just make life harder for businesses and deprive measures of vital oversight and consultation.

 
Six weeks ago, George Osborne picked a fight with gas companies. Yesterday, it escalated several notches – and is likely to turn really nasty before the end of summer. The chancellor will not emerge unscathed from this battle.

Ever since his March budget, Mr Osborne has come under attack from energy businesses furious at his imposition of a £2bn windfall tax on North Sea profits. Shell has estimated that the hike will cost it about $600m; Chevron and BP have complained too. Representatives from the oil and gas industry have been assiduously lobbying ministers and the press. But yesterday, things moved beyond whining and whispers. The company that owns British Gas, Centrica, announced it would close down Britain's biggest gas field, in Morecambe Bay, for routine maintenance – and that production might not be restarted. Centrica claims that the rise in tax on North Sea profits, to 32% from 12%, means that reopening the field may be uneconomical. It estimates that its older South Morecambe field is taxed at 81p for every pound brought in. Hostilities are unlikely to stop there: representatives from the oil and gas industry give evidence to the energy select committee this Wednesday and will in all probability attack both the tax rise and energy secretary, Chris Huhne – just before he turns up to speak to the panel of MPs. And over the longer run, industry observers forecast that other offshore explorers will also mothball their facilities.

Chancellors should generally avoid launching big tax changes overnight. Sudden lurches in tax policy just make life harder for businesses and deprive measures of vital oversight and consultation. This isn't just this paper's view, but apparently also that of Mr Osborne, who in 2007 blasted Gordon Brown for a "short-term focus on squeezing the maximum amount of revenue" out of the North Sea and so chasing away private investment. Now in No 11, the Conservative chancellor has learned what his predecessors also knew: that taxes on "profiteering" energy companies and highly paid bankers are the most politically acceptable revenue raisers. While it may be good politics, it also looks hypocritical. Nor does the government's appointment last December of Centrica boss Sam Laidlaw to a non-executive directorship in Whitehall look so clever.

On North Sea tax, Mr Osborne and other ministers do not have a totally watertight case. That said, companies are obliged to pay their tax bills even when they are sharply higher. After all, if a family decided to send back its gas bill because it was far higher than the last one, British Gas has the option to come down on them like a ton of bricks. Exactly the same principle applies here.

Women in politics: Progressive decline

What seemed signed and sealed 10 years ago now appears to be a chimera that fractured a progressive coalition.

This week could and should have marked a transformation in the politics of the United Kingdom. The elections to English councils, to the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish assemblies, and above all the AV vote, taken together, add up to a Super Thursday. It should also have been the moment when it became clear that women belonged at the heart of devolved politics. It could have been a truly progressive moment. The souring of the promise of electoral reform, and the probable demolition of a new politics, have many different sources – but both warn of the daunting conservatism of British political culture and its institutions.

Hope is not entirely dead. If everyone who wants political change turns out to support AV on Thursday, the bookies now raking in the cash for a no vote could yet have an expensive night. There is no such prospect for gender balance in Wales and Scotland. What seemed signed and sealed 10 years ago now appears to be a chimera that, with the premature belief that it was won, fractured the progressive coalition which had fought for the cause. Last month research for the Guardian confirmed what the Hansard Society had already anticipated, that less than a third of candidates were female. In Scotland, all five of the Labour women constituency MSPs who are retiring have been replaced by men, and if the very male SNP does as well as the polls suggest then the number of women in Edinburgh's parliament will tumble to a new low. As in Scotland, so in Wales, even though in 2003 half of its assembly members were women – setting a world record. So much for the idea that with critical mass comes change that cannot be undone.

Experience in Scotland and Wales has revealed an ineluctable reassertion of the values of the old politics, where conflict and confrontation are scored above compromise and conciliation, and reporting is too often about style and not often enough about substance. And then there is the relentless day-and-night news agenda, the morale-sapping personal scrutiny and the basic level of political debate in which, at Westminster, "calm down, dear" can be hailed as a side-splitting example of Commons repartee.

Into this traditional political culture, in the words of the Edinburgh academic Fiona Mackay, the new politics was temporarily "nested" – and found to be more or less defenceless. For this is a culture so robust that not even the glorious new buildings , with their non-confrontational, hemispheric debating chambers, nor their soft architecture of family-friendly working and gender-balanced electoral systems, have been able to survive its corrosive embrace. Worse, the effort to institutionalise reform – through, for example, all-women shortlists – merely set up a headline-grabbing backlash that in 2005 cost Labour Blaenau Gwent for the parliament.

Electoral politics merely reflects the wider world. The apparent triumph of education that sees slightly more girls than boys go to university, train as doctors and qualify as lawyers is immediately undermined at work, where the culture into which they graduate can be reflected in the sentiments of Simon Murray, the Glencore chairman, who claimed last week that women just don't try hard enough to get to the top.

But constitutional and cultural conservatism does not only hold back women. Black and minority ethnic groups are at least as disadvantaged by it. It excludes difference, whether of class or creed or colour. This is the big lesson from the reverse in electoral politics' gender wars: advance was achieved not by women alone but by a progressive coalition, and it is undermined the moment that progressive coalition fades. Meanwhile, electoral reform has not even had a clear run at building a progressive coalition. The decline of women in the political heartlands is the miner's canary: a symptom of an even graver failure of progressive politics.

In praise of … the Irish Writers' Centre

Among the locations the Queen will visit during her tour of the Irish Republic will be the Dublin's Garden of Remembrance

Among the various locations the Queen will visit during her historic tour of the Irish Republic this month will be the Garden of Remembrance just north of Dublin's O'Connell Street. Amid the pomp and ceremony, and the inevitable tight security, she might care to glance to the right of the memorial dedicated to Irish republicanism's fallen. Directly overlooking the gardens is a four-storey Georgian building that has become a powerhouse of literary creativity. Next door to the Dublin Writers Museum, which commemorates the dead scribes of the country's literary pantheon, is the Irish Writers' Centre, a place that concerns itself with encouraging the living. Founded in 1991 and staffed entirely by volunteers, it stages readings by Nobel laureates such as Seamus Heaney and workshops for would-be poets and novelists. Six days out of seven its doors remain open to readers and writers who are offered free tea, coffee and Wi-Fi as well as a vast range of books. The centre just survived Ireland's recent bouts of brutal spending cuts – apposite given that Dublin recently (and rather belatedly) became a Unesco City of Literature. It also embodies that sense of voluntary public service which long preceded David Cameron's "big society". The Irish Writers' Centre should now become a must-stop part of any culture tour around Dublin. Perhaps Queen Elizabeth could start the tourist trend with a quick nip over to 19 Parnell Square to see a real live literary hothouse in action.