Michael Heseltine's scheme for local government finance has pleased his
party, which is hardly surprising. Just about anything that was not poll tax
and did not involve an explicit admission that Labour was right all along would
have done nicely for the desperate Tories. A tax that can be portrayed as a
means of ensuring smaller average bills must seem little less than a godsend.
The problem, however, as Bryan Gould
said immediately after the announcement of the new "council tax" on
Tuesday, is that, by refusing to admit that Labour was right all along – in
other words, by refusing to go back to the rates – the Tories have opted for a
scheme that is not only impossible to introduce for several years but is also
patently unfair. The "banding" system for Mr Heseltine's new tax and
the reintroduction of 100 per cent rebates mark a belated admission that
"ability to pay" has to be taken into account hi local taxation. But
the way the "banding" has been set up means that the very richest
will get off with disproportionately small bills.
Getting this message across in the last
week of the local election campaign will be quite a challenge amid the clouds
of sycophantic Tory hype in the newspapers. It is unlikely, however, that the
Tories will reap too many benefits from Mr Heseltine's announcement. His coup de theatre cannot obliterate the
popular sense that the poll tax fiasco has revealed the Tories as incompetent
and pig-headed; still less can it conceal the extent of the economic crisis in
which the Tories have landed us. Labour is still set to do well on May 2.
Germany moves Left
The extraordinary result in the Rhineland-Palatinate
Land elections at the weekend,
which saw the Social Democrats take 45 per cent of the vote, pushing Helmut
Kohl's Christian Democratic Union into a poor second place with 39 per cent, is
cause for rejoicing for the Left not just in Germany but throughout Europe.
If the SPD can win hi
Rhineland-Palatinate, it can sweep Germany. Its victory ends 44 years of CDU
hegemony in one of Germany's most prosperous states, just five months after
Chancellor Kohl won a dramatic general election victory on the back of his
success in securing unification of the two Germanies.
Mr Kohl has now lost his majority in the
Bundesrat, Germany's
upper house, and his grip on power, so recently seemingly unassailable,
suddenly looks tenuous. Put simply, the West Germans recognise that Mr Kohl
lied to them about the costs of unification, while the SPD told the truth. Mr
Kohl's party is worn out ideologically, charmless and vulnerable.
These are early days, but the prospects
for an SPD-dominated government hi Germany are now better than at any time
since 1983. And that, given the central role of Germany in Europe, means that
the prospects for a Europe dominated by social democracy are better than at any
time in living memory.
The last thing Labour needs right now is
to start working on the assumption that a future SPD general election victory
will sort out all its problems: there was too much of that attitude in the late
eighties, when Labour's belief in the inevitability of SPD victory took the
place that should have been occupied by serious thought about European security
policy. Nevertheless, the Rhineland-Palatinate election result gives real
cause for renewed hope. It is now up to the SPD to sustain it.
