Prospect
Should I marry just for the tax breaks?
Dear Wilhemina
My partner and I have been cohabiting for 15 years and we have a five-year-old daughter. I’ve always supported him through the quiet times in his business, but now, with the promise of tax breaks from David Cameron, he wants us to get married, saying that we could pop down to the council, pay £200 and save thousands. How romantic! We vote Lib Dem or Green and frankly I’d rather be a few quid worse off than be swayed by Tory policy. Should I just bite the bullet and go with it, or stick to my guns?
Pissed off from Croxley Green
Dear Pissed Off from Croxley Green
This sort of argument has been taking place in more than one household recently. Political sentiment aside, ask yourself whether you’d like to get married. If not, then don’t. The Cameron deal, even in the wildest Tory dreams, isn’t designed to push people into marriage who don’t want to be there. It’s a “nudge”—not a shove.
Whether this nudge is a good idea is beyond the scope of this column. But I will say this: while I’m not sure taxpayers’ money should be used to privilege social institutions like marriage, accusations of social engineering are a bit rich coming from a Labour government that has made social engineering policy an art form—albeit often with good reason. This is what the left does: engineer change rather than just holding its breath.
No one wants to say “we got married for cash” or “because David Cameron told us to.” But saying “we got married because life would be easier and better for our family as a result” isn’t nearly so nuts. After all, getting married can be about improving on life together, making it more comfortable, sweeter, safer. In fact, it’s estimated that only about 6 per cent of couples would be better off married under the Cameron plan (and mainly those with a single wage-earner, which isn’t your case). Of those, the majority have children under three. The “thousands” that your partner refers to are unlikely to materialise. As these paltry gains have been covered widely in the media, I wonder whether marriage is just something he wants, and doesn’t know how else to bring it up?
Wilhemina
My colleague is a fraud
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Alex Crossman
Above: Adair Turner’s interview in the September issue of Prospect hit the headlines and caused a furore in the City
The City takes too big a share of our economy and is bloated by doubtful profits from dubious activities. Not the allegations of placard-wielding demonstrators but of Adair Turner, chairman of the Financial Services Authority (Prospect, September), and of Lloyd Blankfein, chief executive of Goldman Sachs (to a German banking conference in September), respectively. Suspicion inevitably accrues both to an embattled regulator talking tough and an emollient investment banker. And neither Turner nor Blankfein seems comfortable in their role as Jeremiah. But is either right? Is the City too big?
Britain faces an estimated bill of £130bn for shoring up its banking system, a higher proportion of GDP than any other country. This alone should put the issue of the “right” size of the finance sector on the agenda. Unfortunately, the question yields no easy answer. There is no consensus on a relevant measurement, or even on whether the statistics—especially those in Britain’s national accounts—are reliable. Britain has a historic comparative advantage in finance, so one would expect it to have a relatively larger finance sector than some other countries. No one thinks it odd that Germany has a big car industry.
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James Crabtree
Goldsmith: more wise words
In my piece in the current Prospect, I raised the question of whether Zac Goldsmith would rise or fall as an MP. It’s been an intriguing week for those watching his fortunes. As heavily hinted in a previous profile in the Times in January, it was revealed his marriage was ending. And now, first in the Telegraph and today in the Mail on Sunday, you have new claims.
The least interesting is that he says he will speak out if David Cameron U-turns on green Tory promises, most likely those which preclude new nuclear and coal power stations. More interesting, and not in a good way, is his intervention on post-expenses politics:
“Politics mustn’t become a place where you have to be wealthy to be independent,” Mr Goldsmith told the Mail on Sunday Live magazine. “The flip side, for me at least, is that I was born into a position of privilege and am therefore not corruptible.” He also claimed that he would be a more effective politician than the less well off, who waste time trying to make the most of the expenses system.
“Mr Goldsmith said he does not need to claim the second home allowance…But he said he would take an MP’s salary, currently £64,766, and suggested it should be even higher. ‘I do think MPs should be given a decent salary. Even the ones I dislike enormously still work very hard.’ He added that he would donate much of what he earns to good causes, however.”
It might be that Goldsmith was misquoted, or quoted out of context. But, if not, his remarks do him few favours. The idea of a wealthy MP doling out his or her own salary to favoured causes (rather than not claiming it) seems heavy with the possibility of backfiring. Which charities? On what basis? Then, even without pointing out that wealthy MPs (admittedly none quite so rich as Goldsmith) seemed just a likely to work the system during the expenses debacle, the tone of this interview seems less than well judged.
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Tom Chatfield
Out now: our August edition
As our online readers will already have noticed, today marks the first day of Prospect’s new-look website, which integrates our blog and magazine content, and generally offers hugely improved performance (and a better reading experience all round) to both our online visitors and regular readers. To those of you who found this via our old blog url, simply click on “home” on the menu above—or click the link if you’re reading this via RSS—to browse the magazine’s new main page online. And click on “blog,” naturally enough, to get the whole blog page, including our new sidebars and other delights.
A number of features will become available over the next week as we work to bring the whole archive up-to-date online. Existing subscribers, and blog readers, can log in as normal with their email addresses and passwords. Those with magazine or online subscriptions can of course read our entire archive and current issue as normal: others will find content being released regularly through the month.
We hope you enjoy the new look—and that you’ll feel free to share your thoughts and comments as we bring it up to full functionality. And we hope, of course, that you’ll continue to enjoy and comment on our current issue online.
James Crabtree
Friday afternoon in the Prospect office, all is quiet. We put the next edition of the magazine to bed earlier this week. But its an extra exciting month: we are giving the magazine a bit of a new look, with more pages, new columns, more essays, and a new style.
The edition itself is great—we think so at least—with essays on the new experimental philosophy (or “x-phi”) movement, the previously unknown story of the British Colonel who rescued Basra, and a brilliant piece of writing by Julian Evans about driving fast cars in the Ukraine. I’ll post details on our Facebook group next week, so do join that if you use Facebook. We’ve also got a new science and technology section, with pieces from steven johnson on software for book writing, and Jaron Lanier reporting from the TED conference. More on this in due course.
But i thought you might like to see a bit of the new design itself. The links here — which also link to the Facebook page— are two examples of the new spreads, one a profile (of Michael Ignatieff), the other the story about Basra. We also have a new slogan — “good writing about the things that matter.” The magazine is in shops next thursday, let us know what you think.
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