And, in the early Sixties, the city was building as fast as the contractors could finish the works. And there were 10,000 condemned properties waiting to be demolished. But whatever its future, Parkhill – and the almost identical Hyde Park, which once stood higher up the same hill – were, in their day, glorious. Not a glorious failure but a glorious success.
Parkhill was built in a city which, at the time when the foundations were laid, had 13,000 families on a housing waiting list which offered no prospect of a tenancy for 10 years. My name is engraved on the slab of granite which commemorates the opening by Hugh Gaitskell. That does not make me believe that Parkhill must be preserved at all costs. Then, as chairman of the housing committee, I was responsible for collecting the rents, maintaining the lifts and ensuring that the galleries – “streets in the sky” as they were called – were kept clean and tidy.
Or at least I was chairman of the Sheffield City Council public works committee which won the contract by competitive tender and finished the job at an earlier date and a lower price than it originally promised. Parkhill Flats – now simultaneously excoriated by tenants and awarded listed building status by English Heritage – fulfilled a specific and practical purpose I am biased about Parkhill I built it. But how would Labour pay? If they will not raise the standard or higher tax rates, do Messrs Blair and Brown endorse the Chancellor’s views on the future of taxation? Or the Tory right’s views on the future of the welfare state? They should come clean.. It seemed a good idea at the time And I have no doubt that it was. The Tories have long waxed eloquent on the disincentive effects of high marginal tax rates (80 per cent upwards) in the 1970s. They are strangely blind to the continuing disincentives for poor people (mainly married wage-earners with children) who can lose 97 per cent of a pay rise, even as much as 120 per cent, through the combined effects of paying income tax and losing benefit. We know that Gordon Brown, quite rightly, favours a lower starting rate of income tax.
By increasing VAT to 20 per cent? Or by widening its scope to include food and children’s clothes, thereby hitting the poor even harder? It is precisely because they don’t want to face these questions that so many in his party are prepared to countenance dismantling the welfare state.But Labour? Here, we have not the faintest idea. Kenneth Clarke has said that, “in principle it is right to move … from direct to indirect taxation” because reducing taxes on what people earn “has an incentive effect”. What he will not say is how his party would raise further indirect tax. Higher and standard rates of income tax have been cut and a ceiling placed on national insurance payments; a whole series of schemes (Tessas, PEPs and so on) relieve tax on savings and investment income. The burden has been shifted to VAT, which hits the poor harder.
It is not “how much can you cut my taxes?” but “who will pay?” We already have some idea of the Tory answer. For the past 17 years, the Tories have manipulated the tax system to help the well-off at the expense of the poor. But these are all one-off benefits which cannot be repeated, and Labour’s windfall tax on the utilities is just another example. Getting the private sector to build schools and hospitals is worse: the charge on the Exchequer is simply delayed for another generation.
Only one question is worth putting to our political leaders because, barring unlikely economic miracles, they will all have to answer it sooner or later. Privatisation proceeds, oil revenues, savings from civil service cuts – all these have been used to help finance tax cuts while also paying for unprecedented levels of unemployment.
