What if we barred public sector employees and benefits recipients from voting?

When it comes to the right to vote, I’ve always taken the view that it should be universal. But looking at how many miserably awful governments this country – and that other great democracy, the United States - have lumbered themselves with over the past 50 years, I’m beginning to wonder whether we might not look at changing the rules (if only as a mildly diverting intellectual exercise).

 The central problem is a familiar one. When we vote, the most important factor in our choice is what portion of our earnings each party is going to take from us, and whether we approve of how it proposes spending it. There’s a whole bunch of other stuff, of course – but those are overwhelmingly the main factors.

Apart from the hard-core of left-wingers in our society – twenty percent? – you’d expect the vast majority of the rest of us to vote for whichever party was more likely to confiscate less of our money, and which would spend it on the kind of things we actually care about (defence, policing, decent roads, effective border controls etc.).

The UK workforce is around 29 million strong, of which 20% (six million) work in the public sector (and, of those, around 10% are civil servants).

So, that’s six million people who are net recipients – i.e. they get more money from the state than they pay back in taxes.

In addition – and almost unbelievably – 5,400,000 people are in receipt of unemployment benefits. (Included in this grotesque figure are 2.6m sick or disabled and 700,000 lone parents.)

That means 11,400,000 people are net recipients of public money. Essentially, 17.6m people in Britain are paying for themselves and 11.4m other people (and, obviously, getting some essential services in return - I'm not that blind to the need for centralised public spending).

The question is, wouldn’t it make sense for the ones doing all the paying to have a far greater say in who decides how much of their income is to be confiscated and how that money is to be spent?

The temptation must be intense for public sector workers and the close to 40% of adult Britons deriving their income from the public purse to vote for whichever party is promising to confiscate a greater percentage of private sector workers’ income and then spend it on public sector workers or benefits (when they aren’t in effect the same thing). Obviously, this temptation must be offset in many cases by genuine political beliefs, a genuine interest in what’s good for the country, and how much more tax those in the public sector are likely to pay if a left-wing government comes to power.

But for the overwhelming majority of those benefits recipients who can be bothered to vote, asking them to vote Conservative must be like asking turkeys to give Christmas the thumbs-up.

Of course, these figures don’t account for the huge number of private sector workers engaged in public sector projects – construction, IT etc. Again, the temptation to vote for big spending governments must be strong (though, to be fair, all the major UK political parties seem to be addicted to big spending these days).

So, what would the political map of Britain look like if anyone earning the majority of their income from the state – and non-working spouses living in households dependent on public sector money - was denied the vote?

First, I presume the Tory Party would shift to the right. And it would win the next election outright. And it would go on winning until the economy was back in good shape.

I realise that this sort of scheme means I wouldn’t have been able to vote during  the 18 years I was a BBC employee – and a further three years when I was employed by the Corporation as a consultant. Fine by me – I would imagine that at least 90% of the people I worked with at the BBC voted for left-wing parties.

There might be a waiver for those whose work requires them to risk their lives – the military, the police (well, the tiny percentage who actually leave their desks) and fire brigade employees.

If someone moved from the public to the private sector, their right to vote would depend on whether they had been a net contributor to the public purse since the last election.

The same rules would apply to local elections.

As for pensioners, I suppose we could do a quick tally of whether or not they were net contributors over the course of their working lives.

Of course, it’s never going to happen – but we can dream.