Brendan Ryan (Labour)

When one is trying to deal with the massive contradiction which is the Progressive Democrats, it is very difficult to be logical because of its aspirations to be the party of social justice, of low taxes and its determination to be the party which looks after the rich. It is very hard to reconcile the three aspirations sometimes and, therefore, one is tempted to be illogical and follow it down the illogical cul-de-sac into which it has got itself.

There are two ways to look at taxation. One can look at it through the eyes of an economist or at the political realities. The political realities are that I do not believe anybody in this country with a serious hope of being in Government can do other than say income tax rates will not be raised. Therefore, I have no problems with my party's position on that. Similarly, we have come to a political consensus on the nature and rate of corporation tax, and I accept that. However, I do not believe there is an overwhelming or, indeed, an economic argument that there is a level of income taxation and of corporation tax below which one gets enterprise and above which one does not.

I am intrigued by two things which show up as huge deficits in our society. The first, incidentally, is the absence within the Roman Catholic Church of an educated laity. One of the scourges of the present problem is that there is no lay intellectual movement within the Catholic Church to challenge everything that has happened. The second is the absence of any real original thinking in our academic economics departments. We will not produce Nobel prize winners in economics because every academic economist of whom I am aware is a replicator of other people's thinking.

There are no universal laws of economics. There are things which work and things which do not. The things which work differ from country to country and society to society. The Swedish consensus on taxation would never work in the United States where well-off middle-class areas do not have public lighting because the public has decided it does not want to pay taxes to provide it. One cannot produce a single model. The naivety and the manifestation of the ideological rigidity of the Progressive Democrats is that it goes from particular successes to try to produce some general arguments. It is a logical flaw. In my first year of two years of a novitiate I was taught that moving from the particular to the general in an attempt to prove some universal law is nonsense. It continues to be nonsense.