Charles MooreCharles Moore
result of Nigel Lawson’s famous Budget
in 1988 in which he reduced the top rate
of income tax — and all other tax rates
on anything — to 40 per cent. The top
income tax rate later went up to 50 per
cent as Gordon Brown began to get
everything wrong and fell back only to
45 per cent under David Cameron and
George Osborne, but no one has dared
destroy the Lawson settlement and
return to the days of the 1970s, when
top rates were over 80 per cent. This
is for the good reason that lower rates
produce more money for the Exchequer
than do higher ones.T
o see the disincentive power of tax,
you have only to look at the current
row over doctors refusing to do extra
work once they earn £110,000 a year.
Because of harsher tax rules about
pension contributions at that level, they
find that if they work more they have
to pay so much extra tax that it isn’t
worth it. If you want the poor to pay no
income tax, then you must have huge
revenues coming from the better-off.
Those revenues can stay huge only if the
rate is not punitive. As someone who has
paid the top rate since, I think, the year
after the Lawson Budget, I can testify
that one’s psychological maximum
is 40 per cent. From Brown onwards,
we have strayed dangerously over that
maximum (and the current tax burden is
higher than it looks because of National
Insurance and pension changes). Once
you know that almost half of what you
earn will be taken from you, your animal
spirits droop. So eventually, does the
entire economy.‘P
atient and disabled toilet’ it said
on a door as I wheeled my mother
down a hospital corridor this week
for a minor check-up. For a moment, I
mistakenly read the notice adjectively, so
that the toilet was patient and disabled,
just as the golf club in St Andrews is
royal and ancient or the attorney-general
is right honourable and learned. I felt a
stab of pity for the toilet — so patient, so
disabled, doomed to end its days in that
condition in a provincial general hospital.
If I were John Betjeman, I would write
a poem in its honour.W
ho wrote ‘Our lifestyle is
destroying the environment of
our country ... creating a massive burden
for future generations. Corporations
are heading the destruction of our
environment by shamelessly over-
harvesting resources ... the next logical
step is to decrease the number of people
in America using resources. If we can get
rid of enough people, then our way of
life can become more sustainable’? The
answer, if media reports are accurate,
is Patrick Crusius, the man accused
of the El Paso massacre. The words
appeared in his testament, entitled (in
homage to Al Gore?) The Inconvenient
Truth, which he seems to have put
online before decreasing the number
of people in America by 22. Who said,
on Twitter, ‘I want socialism, and I’ll
not wait for the idiots to finally come
round to understanding’? Connor
Betts, the man accused of shooting nine
people, including his sister, in Dayton,
Ohio. This week’s reporting of the two
atrocities has painted Crusius as a white
supremacist. This does not seem to be
accurate. In his manifesto, he is against
ethnic mingling and mass immigration,
but his view that immigrants should be
killed is based not on racial superiority
theory, but on his sense that too many
people pollute the environment of
America. He despairs of persuading
his fellow Americans to change their
consumerist lifestyles, so he decides
to attack the ‘invaders’ instead. As for
Betts, the self-styled ‘leftist’, coverage has
tended to slide past his political views.
It is seriously bad that both cases have
been so partially reported. If we are to
work out the motivations of unhappy/
trigger-happy young men such as these,
shouldn’t we carefully expose all the
preposterous justifications they make for
their evil acts? Some of them — mostly
to do with race — come from the right.
Some — mostly to do with saving the
planet from human beings — come from
the left. Betts sounds like a potential
Bernie Sanders recruit. Crusius seems
closer to Extinction Rebellion than to
Donald Trump.
I
t feels natural to blame the internet
for all this wickedness, but it cannotbe as simple as that. An article in last
week’s New Scientist reported a recent
study of when governments shut down the
internet, either by disconnecting the entire
network or by ‘packet filtering’, which
blocks requests to access certain websites.
India seems to lead the world in internet
shutdowns — 134 of them in 2018. An
analysis of nearly 23,000 protests in India
in the previous year showed that internet
bans were more commonly followed
by protests than preceded by them. If
people cannot get information, they are
more easily stirred to violence than if the
net keeps them informed. The study, of
course, came out before the latest from
Kashmir, now totally cut off from the net.
It would be a rash person who claimed that
Kashmir, blacked-out, is less subject to
fake news than it was before.I
t is a good tactic of Dominic Cummings
to make fearful but off-the-record noises
about how a Johnson government might
handle parliament in the next few weeks.
He smokes out the ever more extreme
notions of the other side without actually
committing the government to any course
other than leaving on 31 October. A
tendency to drag the Queen into these
conversations is a well-known sign of
madness. Poor Dominic Grieve is clearly in
a Cummings-induced state of delirium.H
ow striking that 43 per cent of adults,
according to the latest IFS report, pay
no income tax at all, up from 38 per cent
in 2010. Even more striking is the fact that
1 per cent of earning adults — those on
more than £160,000 a year — contribute
27 per cent of total income tax revenue.
It is surely a one-statistic refutation of
the claim that we are becoming a more
unequal society. This benign effect is the