Politics used to be a game played by the rich and powerful in society. The voting club in fact was so small that those running for office could know each of their voters personally by holding a slightly larger than normal tea party. The result was that when considering the ‘public response’ to a certain action, politicians just needed to wonder what the chaps down the Club would think of their decisions. And knowing that most of those chaps went to school with them and were from the same class, it was quite obvious that they’d be more or less happy without ever the top dog came up with. Hence those that got elected could do what they thought was best and more or less just get on with it.

Now however, the town of Grimsby has the right to vote and politicians have to weigh up every decision with that beast known as ‘public opinion’ that crosses lines of race, religion and class. Unfortunately if there is anything we know about the public at large it is that we are fairly stupid. For a third of the time we’re asleep, quite often we are drunk, very often we close doors on our hands and at least once a day we’ll use the phrase ‘I reckon’.

On top of this trifle of ineptitude there is also the sledgehammer that is the public’s lack of education as regards economics, political theory, notions of justice and seemingly the ability to think more than two steps into a puzzle.

Let us take an example of the last of these – the Robin Hood tax. If you are unaware of this proposal – it is that on every speculative financial transaction, a 0.05% tax must be paid. The result, it is claimed, is that hundreds of billions of pounds would be raked in by the government, allowing us to not cut back the NHS, build more schools and pave the roads with gold. Fucking excellent. They even have Bill Nighy on the video. And he’s playing the role of a bloody banker. Those wankers who fucked it up in that way we can’t understand and stole all of our money somehow. Yeah tax them. Yeah. This isn’t revolution it’s equality! Yeah. Oh and did you see what they did, using that Robin Hood thing – so clever. And wasn’t Jonas Armstrong great.

But let’s break this down a little bit. What is being proposed is taking ‘hundreds of billions of pounds’ out of the banking system through a direct tax. Now the banks won’t want their profit margins to fall and so what they will do is simply increase their charges for these transactions.

Now it isn’t just people like Goldman Sachs who make these transactions. Wetherspoons, for example, make a hedge (essentially a bet) every year that it will rain in the summer – the logic being that if it rains less people will go to their pubs and so they are ‘hedging’ against the weather. If the cost of this hedge goes up due to the tax, how will Wetherspoons respond? Well they can increase prices at the beer pump, cut employment or take a hit in profits.

The last is obviously a no-go and hence the tax will simply find its way back to the consumer. This might be acceptable in some way if the companies absorb some of the tax and so we get a bit of blood out of the bankers’ stone hearts (oh god that was Marxist).

Personally, I see this as unlikely – these companies exist to make profit and would seek to maintain their margins by ‘passing on the tax’ to their customers.

That withstanding, there exists a whole group of companies who don’t have a real customer they can pass the cost onto. These bigger players in the investment game, such as Sachs, can only pass on the cost to other companies which has the obvious effect of making them far less attractive to potential clients than say a bank based in Dubai where there is no such tax.

So what would Sachs do? They’d move to Dubai taking all the tax they and their employees pay to the UK with them. And they’d also load up the jobs given to cleaners, support staff and landlords that house their employees onto that plane and go to prettier pastures.

In short the tax would make beer more expensive and reduce tax revenue. Yeah, you didn’t see that coming did you…

So – what do I suggest? That we go back to Eton, Harrow and Radley deciding policy for the nation? No, of course not but what we do need to do is chuck a whole load of stuff out of front line politics. The prison service, economic reform (of a technical type) and the prescription of certain healthcare drugs being examples. And with our minds cleared of issues that people spend literally decades of their lives researching, we can look at the party’s core principles – do they support free trade? Are they for the working man? Do they like America?

Those core issues which drove political debate and upheaval in the early part of the last century. Those debates which caused the Labour Party to emerge, got people so fired up about politics they’d march from Harrow. Those debates which we ignore completely in our modern political world because politicians are so caught up in the narrow debates such as “can the public tolerate druggies getting a year less in prison even though evidence shows it would cut crime rates by X percent…”.

In short – let’s fucking make politics politics and not a slanging match where Gordon Brown has to pitch up and look like a muppet in front of the most objectionable man on Britain’s Got Talent…

That, or get a cuppa on. Because tea time’s important.

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