In their New Year newspaper advertisement in the Sunday Telegraph, the Conservatives say, ‘The right test for our policies is how they help the least well-off in society, not the rich.’ That is a good approach, but will it be invariably applied? For example, the clearest way that the rich are privileged in modern Britain is not through the tax system, which even now penalises them more than the poor, but through the planning acts. Because it is extremely hard to build new houses anywhere, particularly in beautiful places, the price of existing houses rises all the time, particularly the price of large and beautiful houses. This gives a vast advantage to those who bought their houses a long time ago, or who inherited them, or who are rich for other reasons, and it makes life extremely difficult for the least well-off. But there is nothing more sacred to Tory constituency associations, particularly in the south, than the idea that no new house-building should take place. David Cameron is pushing a green agenda, and we can all agree that we would like a cleaner, healthier, more beautiful environment. But most green policies — e.g., Prince Charles’s attacks on what he calls our ‘obsession with cheap food’ — hit the poor much harder than the rich. If David Cameron can find a way through this, he will be a great prime minister.
Max Egremont’s interesting new biography of Siegfried Sassoon (Picador), the first to have had full access to Sassoon’s private papers, brings one up against the strange fact that the impulse of poets who attack war is very similar to that of those who glorify it. Both are very excited by war, both see it as a heightened reality which inspires their imaginations; they differ only in the opinion that they finally give about it.
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