ALEX BRUMMER: Vision thing disappears during the election campaign

At a time of budget constraints and broken public services, it is no great surprise that taxation has emerged as the key issue of the election campaign.

Whether Rishi Sunak was right to expose Labour’s alleged £2,000 tax bomb, he put the issue at the top of the election debate.

It is clear that Labour’s pledge not to increase personal tax on working Britons by increasing income tax, national insurance or VAT is pointless.

There is no shortage of other levies, such as restricting pension funds, increasing capital gains and closing loopholes – including those around VAT – that would help plug a black hole. That is, if there is one. There is a case to be made that public finances are not the standard model that conventional wisdom has become, and that there could be room to expand them even further.

The most frustrating aspect of all this is the parochial nature of the debate, much loved by BBC Verify but no one else.

So far, there has been no inspiration or optimism about the future of the country. There is a notable absence of the memorable phrase in the tradition of Harold Wilson’s ‘white heat of technology’, Ronald Reagan’s ‘shining city on the hill’ and Tony Blair’s ‘a new dawn has dawned’.

Or, as Boris Johnson noted: ‘The doubters, the doomsayers, the gloomy – they’re going to be wrong again.’

So far, Aviva CEO Amanda Blanc is the only important person to raise his eyes above the parapet without falling down a budgetary rabbit hole. In an opinion article in the FT, the insurance boss shows his vision.

It extends far beyond the vacuous letter signed by a second division of business leaders in support of Rachel Reeves.

Blanc argues for certainty about ‘infrastructure’. I have long been of the opinion that Rishi Sunak’s worst moment (and there have been several bad ones, including his early exit from the D-Day commemorations) was his decision at the 2023 party conference to abolish HS2.

With the right management and willpower, the northbound high-speed rail line was the real next-level answer.

You only have to look at the approximately £10 billion of new investment in or around Birmingham to know how transformative HS2 can be.

Aviva’s head also recognizes something that Reeves, Starmer and Angela Rayner appear to be completely unaware of.

Even if they managed to break existing planning rules and overcome ‘Nimbyism’, they would face obstacles.

Local authorities are generally great at cleaning up the waste (the deposed Green Council in Brighton was the exception), but don’t have the brilliant planning and design skills to get the job done.

Her third suggestion is to create matchmaking skills that pool investment funds into large projects.

It is possible that Labour’s Great British Energy could fill this gap around net zero projects. You fear a costly joke from politicians who do not know what the business community needs.

The focus on what is wrong – from potholes to NHS queues – has left no room for what is right, such as science, technology, creative industries and business services. Missing in action is what the late George HW Bush called ‘the vision thing’.

Lynch crew

I admit I was among the commentators who failed to defend Autonomy boss Mike Lynch when he was extradited to the US, despite questions about the treaty that led to his trial in California.

My thought was that Americans take financial justice more seriously than we do in Britain.

If, as alleged, Lynch had fudged the figures before the £11 billion sale of his company to Hewlett Packard, he was more likely to pay the price across the Atlantic than here. Undisguised capitalism requires stricter enforcement.

No one can give Lynch back the twelve years in which he was in a legal quagmire. But it’s great that American justice, in the form of a jury trial, saved the founder of Autonomy.

As a true tech pioneer, he can now hold his head high again.