An article in one of our ‘serious’ newspapers, the Daily Telegraph, in the past few days has apparently proposed that voting in national elections here should be restricted to those who pay a minimum level of income tax. In that way voting would be confined to those who actually ‘make a contribution’ to society. How, other than financially, could anyone contribute to society?
Progressive though this suggestion is as a welcome partial re-introduction of the property qualification which we somehow lost in the nineteenth century, I have a much better one. Voting eligibility should be maintained as it now is, but all votes should be weighted according to the positive or negative contribution by the voter to the national exchequer. So the vote of someone who paid, for example, £50,000 income tax in the preceding year, would count as fifty positive votes, whilst that of someone who received £2000 in state benefits would count as two negative votes.
This idea has many advantages. It preserves the strangely hallowed twentieth-century shibboleth of ‘universal suffrage’. It reflects precisely the voter’s contribution to society across the entire range. It penalises tax exiles. It gives an incentive to governments both to increase marginal rates of taxation and to maintain state benefits for the poor: that would make mine truly a ‘one nation’ proposal, very likely to appeal to a Daily Mail readership, let alone the Daily Telegraph.
(I should explain for my North American readers that ‘one nation’, though always without the suffix ‘under god’, is a term that historically resonates in my country also, usually attached to our ‘natural party of government’ as ‘one-nation conservatism’, as embraced originally by Benjamin Disraeli, novelist and Queen Victoria’s favourite prime minister 1868 and 1874-1880, as opposed to that dreadfully hectoring Liberal, William Gladstone. Could this nation today choose so conspicuously Jewish a figure as Disraeli as Prime Minister, or indeed so stern a moralist as Gladstone?)Finally, my proposal has also the indirect advantage of surely bringing about a massive boost in tax receipts in the year preceding an election, to be emphatically utilised by the incumbent party to dispense largesse to the voters, and vice versa.
I rest my case.
For the avoidance of doubt, as they say, I should perhaps point out that this post takes its title from Jonathan Swift's 'Modest Proposal...' and the whole thing is intended ironically. Except, that is, for the reflections on prime ministers, where I do think that the Victorians, whom we tend to regard as somewhat hidebound and prejudiced, were perhaps more tolerant and publicly adventurous than we are today. Or maybe they were just tolerant of different things.
