Editorial: What are we voting for?
The public is entitled to know precisely what it is voting for in the case of each of the political parties.
This election, far from being unnecessary and unwanted, could be cathartic in Irish political terms - it just might result in a mandate to one party or another to deal decisively and equitably with our economic problems, which threaten to overwhelm us. Alternatively, it might be just another blob on our political history, fought out on personality issues, with none of the issues debated adequately, no mandate obtained for any action whatsoever and leading us towards social and economic collapse.
Both of the main parties are resolutely committed as of now to ensuring that the election will be another non-event, that it will not result in any democratic judgement on the part of the electorate on how our crucial problems are going to be solved. They plan on doing this by ensuring that we the electorate know as little as possible about their plans for how they are going to cope with the daunting problems that will have to be faced, first in the budget of next January and then over the next two to three years.
They avoid this disclosure, partly because they have fecklessly devoted themselves to other considerations over the past several months and have no answers to these issues (e.g. the two by-election campaigns, 13 weeks "holidays" during the summer, silly point-scoring in Dail Eireann, staving off crisis after crisis, as in the case of Fianna Fail, etc.), partly because they fear that if the voters got to know what they had in mind, or indeed what precisely was necessary to be done, they would recoil in horror and vote for opposing parties.
Either way, it is not good enough. The electoral system is supposed to operate in the interests of the electorate, not in the interests of the political parties. The public is entitled to know precisely what it is voting for in the case of each of the parties.
But there is another and even more persuasive reason why the parties should come up front and tell us exactly what is in store for us over the next few years. Experience has shown us that if the political parties do not have a clear mandate to take hard decisions, they will funk taking them. This has happened repeatedly over the last few years. Haughey baulked on several occasions about taking hard decisions - in 1980, when he first of all promised tough action and then backed off, in the 1981 budget when instead of taking the necessary action he fiddled the books and in the March 1982 budget when he again ran scared and brought forward revenue from next year to this year, thereby postponing the hard decisions to 1983.
Fine Gael will self-righteously claim that it hasn't baulked at hard decisions, but its cheating on its election programme for the 1981 election, by ignoring the problem of how the budget deficit was going to be solved, meant that it just didn't have the mandate it required to deal with the problem when It got into office - this was the reason why it fell from power in January of this year.
Enough is enough and the country just cannot afford another cop-out election. The politicians are just going to have to tell us what they plan to do to deal with the economic and social problems over the next four years, at whatever cost in terms of votes to them. In the next issue of Magill we will be dealing with some of the basic issues of the election in some depth, but, in the interim here are some of the critical questions that have to be answered.
THE CURRENT BUDGET DEFICIT
This has now almost become a cliché obsession in Irish politics but there are absolutely crucial issues of equity involved, apart from the management of the country's finances and therefore the issue has just got to be faced. Fianna Fail now acknowledge that there is a major problem in this area and that the deficit must be got down to about £750m next year. For reasons, which we will explain in greater detail in the next edition of Magill, this means that approximately £500m has got to be found either in cuts in public expenditure or in additional taxation. Both of the main parties are agreed that additional taxation can have only a minimal impact and therefore almost all of the £500m must come by way of public expenditure cuts.
These cuts can be done either in an arbitrary and indiscriminate manner or selectively to ensure that only those aspects of public expenditure which are regressive (i.e. favour the rich) are pruned. Politicians very much prefer across-the-board cuts, for these avoid hard and unpopular decisions and therefore they will go instinctively for indiscriminate cuts. If they do that, the implications of these cuts must be spelled out in terms of how lower levels of
education will be hurt, how the poor will have to pay for medical services, how social welfare allowances are effectively reduced in real terms etc. If that is what the people as a whole want that is fine. But the people should be told that this is what is involved and it should be spelled out to them.
Alternatively, perhaps one or other or both of the parties favour selective cuts. Maybe instead of across the board cuts in health, they favour renegotiating the contracts with the doctors and cutting back drastically on the massive sums their fees are costing the exchequer. Maybe one or other of the parties wants to tackle seriously the cost of drugs in the medical service by insisting, in spite of the opposition of the medical profession, that generic drugs are used. Maybe one of the parties favours rationalising the hospital services at long last and just taking the political flak, some of it admittedly in marginal constituencies, that would ensue.
On public sector pay, perhaps one or other of the parties would be in favour of a freeze on incomes above say £10,000 and allowing generous increases for the lower paid. But we have to be told. And not alone that, if the parties do not face up to these decisions before the election they will back off after the election. The consequences of further back offs, dictated either by indecisiveness or cowardice or by a lack of political support, are truly calamitous.
CONTROL OF PUBLIC EXPENDITURE GENERALLY
Quite apart from the need to eliminate the current budget deficit there is an urgent need to bring public expenditure generally under control, if we are to make any headway in maximising the use of our resources to create sufficient wealth to generate jobs and deal with the issue of poverty. Perhaps the control of public expenditure relates more to the capital side than to the current. Over the years Fianna Fail has boasted again and again about how much capital expenditure it has undertaken, as though it was the amount that mattered, not the productivity of the investment - never mind the quality, feel the width. Thankfully, the volte face of last summer has corrected this madness for a while at least but there is a complete unwillingness on the part of Fianna Fail and Fine Gael to take the tough decisions in the public sector area which need to be taken.
These relate to NET, Irish Steel, Whitegate, Aer Lingus, CIE, the ESB etc. In the case of the first three the issue is whether they should be closed or not. Between them they are losing well over £10am a year and result in no benefit to the Irish economy. Altogether there must be some hundreds of millions of pounds wasted on crazy projects, which owe their origins and certainly their continued existence to purely party political considerations and not at all to the public good.
This is not a plea for "Thatcherism" or any other such regressive panacea. Rather it is a case for the maximisation of the use of our scarce resources, freeing resources from unproductive, wasteful areas for use in viable job creation and redistributive enterprises.
Again and again the politicians refuse to grasp any of these nettles and during the course of the campaign they will run for cover again and again on the issue. But they must be "flushed out" (to use a phrase popularised by Paddy Power) and if - or rather, when - they lapse into convulated defences for the white elephant herd, then this should be perceived for what it is: a commitment to go on abusing vast amounts of public money on enterprises solely for political reasons.
RADICAL REFORM OF THE DAIL AND THE PUBLIC SERVICE
At the very least our politicians should be forced to tell us how they propose to make themselves meaningful in terms of the management of the affairs of our country. The Dail is now almost a complete irrelevance. It has no control or jurisdiction over public expenditure, current or capital, it is entirely incapable of responding to the changing needs of society, it trivialises political debate and it operates effectively behind closed doors as far as the public is concerned by its refusal to allow radio and television coverage of its proceedings.
John Bruton, one of the Dail's few serious members, has proposed reforms which would have an enormous change on its operations, but Fianna Fail is entirely uninterested in it or any other proposals for reform and Fine Gael seems at best lukewarm to the Bruton plans.
As far as the public service is concerned, there is a real scandal resulting from the complete failure of successive Governments to do anything at all about the recommendations on public service reform outlined in the report of 1969. As a consequence, the public service is massively inefficient, it effectively stifles any overall consideration of policy options and it has contributed massively to the degeneration of our political system which has resulted in this present crisis. The politicians have been afraid to take on the public service and have gone for the soft option: do nothing. They should get away with it no longer.
THE ELIMINATION OF POVERTY
All parties express the pious commitment to do all they can to eliminate poverty as quickly as possible and by all available means. The commitment means precisely nothing. There is only one way of dealing with poverty, or indeed with the general problem of redistribution and equity and that is to seek and obtain a mandate from the electorate for precisely the policies and measures that are necessary to deal with it.
It involves, among other measures, the following:
- the immediate doubling of non-contributory old age pension and certain other long term social welfare benefits and the financing of the £250m cost through additional taxation (along the lines outlined below) plus cuts in those programmes of public expenditure which are regressive.
- the radical overhaul of the taxation system, embodying many of the proposals of the Commission on Taxation, including the indexation of income tax bands, the abolition of almost all tax allowances, notably those on mortgages, the imposition of capital taxation and a significant increase in corporation profits tax.
JOB CREATION
Immediately this involves reducing the cost of labour by doing away with PRSI and minimising the attractiveness of capital, which has over the last few years served to minimise job opportunities. Then the issues featured in the recent Telesis report have to be faced. Finally, the pretence that jobs can be created by improving cost competitiveness alone must be dispelled.
FINALLY, A WORD ABOUT THE LABOUR PARTY
This must be an upfront election and this applies to the Labour Party as much as to any other. Because Labour is not putting forward enough candidates to form a Government on its own, it alone of the three main parties, is faced with answering the question of what will happen after the election. More fundamentally, they must answer the query, exactly what is one voting for if one votes for Labour? Is one voting for Coalition or is one voting anti-Coalition? Is one voting for Labour policies to be implemented or is one voting for an absolutely unknown entity in terms of policy for one cannot know what would come out of negotiation with Fine Gael after an election?
Fine Gael has said that they would not compromise on the essentials of their policies. If this means anything, then it means that Labour will have to compromise on the essentials of its policies insofar as the policies differ. It is no good telling us to go and ask Charlie Haughey if he is going to deal again with Tony Gregory or ask Garret FitzGerald similar queries. Certainly we will ask Haughey and FitzGerald these questions, but they have a particular relevance for Labour because of its electoral position.
Really, the only honest answer Labour could have to these questions could be either that it will not go into coalition at all and will therefore not compromise its policies or that it is doing a pre-election pact with Fine Gael and we can all know about it in advance of the election and therefore can know exactly what we are voting for.
It is just too bad if Labour has got itself into a hole by its idiotic and "cop-out" (O'Leary was quite right) decision at the Galway conference. Nobody should be fool enough to vote for something they couldn't possibly know about (i.e precisely what policies will remain intact after the election). Either Dick Spring clears up this mess or he and his party deserve the oblivion that threatens them.