By: Elliot Keck, head of campaigns
We at the TaxPayers’ Alliance have no dog in the fight which is the Conservative leadership election, but we certainly take an interest. After all, the next leader of the opposition could be the prime minister one day, so their views on tax, spend and how to boost the sluggish economy that this country has endured for many years are worth keeping an eye on.
Unfortunately, while most of the contenders have found it easy to use the rhetoric of tax cuts and smaller government, we saw that while in government the Conservatives delivered the highest spending, highest taxing administration ever. The result was that we are now burdened with a £2.5 trillion plus national debt, which our debt clock launched this week shows is growing at £4,410 per second.
So, actions speak louder than words, but one action that was of note came in a story from The Guardian this week. In what was presented as a scandal, it was reported that leadership contender Kemi Badenoch had “asked officials to pay for a holiday flight with taxpayers’ money to the US while in government.” Sounds egregious, right? Unjustifiable? As the article notes, the request was denied.
Normally you’d hope the who, what, when, where and why would all be covered early on in the piece. In the case of the why - why on earth would a Secretary of State ask for something so obviously inappropriate? You have to trawl through four paragraphs and an advert to reach the answer. It turns out that Badenoch was travelling to Mexico on an official visit (she was the trade secretary) and that rather than paying for a return flight to London, she asked officials to pay for a flight to Texas, where she would holiday.
Now, it doesn’t take an aviation expert to work out that a flight from Mexico to Texas would be a fraction of the cost of a flight from Mexico to London.
So it turns out, the actual story was that a government minister made a concerted effort to save her department and taxpayers a fair bit of money. Unsurprisingly, given the way the British bureaucracy works, the computer said no.
In fairness, bureaucracies do often function like this. Rules and procedures are necessary in organisations of such scale - they exist for good reason. Those rules and procedures also won’t perfectly suit every situation, and it’s obviously a good rule, in general, that ministers shouldn’t be allowed to charge taxpayers for personal flights.
But while that rule may make sense on face value, surely we want ministers to take the attitude that rules should be tested if it means saving taxpayers money without any negative side-effects. That’s clearly the attitude Badenoch took: these rules exist to protect taxpayers from unscrupulous politicians, not to limit options whereby the more expensive one is the only one on the table.
This seems like an attitude we should encourage from politicians, not criticise. In the battle of Badenoch versus the bureaucrats it’s the bureaucrats that came out as the victors. But Badenoch was the more noble in defeat.