The Grand Unified Theory of Pork

Lola and I inadvertently made some progress on this elusive theory in the comments on an earlier thread on proportional representation:

He kicked off with the standard objection to PR, that having coalitions with smaller parties leads to more pork barrel spending - the example given is the DUP who were infamously a thorn in the side of Sir John Major's Tory government and who did not, repeat not demand any special favours in return for supporting the very unpopular 42-day detention bill pushed through by the current Labour government.

I countered that if the standard argument using the DUP were valid, then logic says that in the USA, with a two-party, first-past-the-post electoral system there would be very little pork, which is quite clearly not true, as evidenced by the 480 pages and $150 billion's worth of pork that was tacked on the George W Bush's bank bail-out bill, that was originally supposed to cost $700 billion.

Hmm.

Lola cut the Gordian knot by mentioning Belgium, which also has a huge amount of redistribution and which is basically two quite distinct regions welded together into one country. Which makes me think that we can narrow down 'pork' in the widest sense into a few distinct categories:

1. Vertical distribution by income - i.e. higher and average earners pay for welfare and universal benefits (NHS, State education) 'enjoyed' by lower and average earners; but by the same token, lower earners subsidise the tax breaks for pensions and so on on 'enjoyed' by higher earners.

2. Pensions tax-breaks are the prototype for 'righteous' pork whereby an industry (windmills, smoking withdrawal products, asbestos removal etc) justifies its subsidies by referring to some wider public benefit - if the pensions industry can get away with The Big Lie that 'we have to encourage people to save' (social engineering at its worst) then it is but a small step to saying 'we have to encourage people to go green' or 'we have to encourage people to stop smoking' or 'we should pay to keep our children's schools asbestos-free' (despite white asbestos behind a layer of plaster and a few coats of paint is totally harmless and best left alone).

3. Industry-specific subsidies (which overlap with regional subsidies) - if you were an MP in an area with manufacturing, you'd call for subsidies for manufacturing; if you were an MP in a rural area, you'd call for more agricultural land subsidies; if you were an MP in central or west London, you'd call for tax-breaks for film-making and so on.

4. Regional subsidies (which in turn overlap with 'nationalist' subsidies), i.e. if you were a Scottish MP you'd oppose higher taxes on whisky; if you were a Welsh MP you'd call for less regulation of sheep farming or subsidies for mountain climbing; and if you were a Northern Irish MP you'd basically hold the UK government to ransom and point out that unless the rouble keeps rolling, The Troubles will start again (one of Tony Blair's great insights - the price of 'peace' in Northern Ireland is, er, a very high price in £-s-d).

5. Nationalist subsidies (which overlaps with the West Lothian Question), Scottish MPs of whatever party will always demand more cash for Scotland and so on.

6. The crassest subsidy of all - that of home-ownership, whereby the average earner pays vast amounts of tax merely to prop up the value of 'his main asset', and then has to pay more tax to cover the deadweight costs of the tax (i.e. welfare for those made unemployed by the taxes on production; or Housing Benefit for people who can't afford the resulting high rents, which only serves to push rents up even higher) - is not usually mentioned in polite company, but there are huge figures involved.

7. Then there are all the extra layers for every extra layer of government or bureaucracy, like Regional Assemblies, the EU (or in the case of the USA, State and Federal government).

Now ask yourself, how can we tweak the electoral system to reduce pork?

Like most great theories, this'll never be perfect, but having full devolution for England would be a good start (that gets rid of nationalist subsidies), as would getting the UK out of the EU.

Although the idea of having one MP per constituency has its appeal, the drawback is that they will dump any sort of basic principles if they sniff an electoral advantage from having regional/industry specific subsidies to benefit their own voters, so this must be borne in mind when considering the idea of national party lists (it's also a bad idea, but for different reasons) - at least a truly national party could concentrate on the interest of the nation as a whole (i.e. a national party would have no qualms in approving a Heathrow expansion - the gains outweigh the losses in economic terms and the winners far outweigh the losers in numerical terms).

Vertical redistribution (in either direction) is a question of education - surely it makes more sense to net off the upward and downward flows as far as possible, so that there is a bare minimum of redistribution in one direction only?

'Righteous' subsidies are also a question of basic economics - if it is accepted that smoking and using petrol are Bad Things (done simultanously they can be disastrous) then let's just tax them rather than subsidising whatever is perceived to be the opposite thereof, and cut taxes elsewhere.

Finally, the cartel of the home-owners' party (that's LibLabCon) can only be nibbled at if there were a party who could capture the votes of the significant minority of young people, tenants, entrepreneurs, higher earners, people looking to trade-up or who'd like their children to be able to buy a house etc. who would always vote to shift taxation from incomes and production to land ownership. Given where we're starting from, such a party only has a chance under proportional representation. The party would face a staunch opposition of older home-owners with lower incomes, landlords and pensioners (to whom some of their voters would desert later on...), but such is life.