🥃 What John Major taught me about Yeltsin, Brexit and taxes

Hey folks! Yesterday, I found myself listening to John Major talk about war in Ukraine, Brexit and taxes at the LSE. The former prime minister is now at the venerable-elder stage of his career, but he looks sharp, speaks clearly and still lands jokes. If this is what British politics does to you long term, maybe it’s not all bad.

The mood in the hall was sometimes closer to an after-dinner speech than a university lecture. The moderator opened by saying he favoured dissolving all political parties. Major didn’t miss a beat: “Don’t worry, they’re going there.”

On Ukraine, Major was unusually blunt for a former prime minister on the speaking circuit. He insisted that civilians killed by Russian missiles are not “collateral damage” but victims of mass murder, and that this needs to be remembered when the war eventually ends, however the negotiations are packaged.

It matches what investigators are saying. The UN’s Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine has documented indiscriminate attacks on civilians, torture, sexual violence and the deportation of children.

(If you want the legal side of this, I wrote earlier about a lecture by Howard Morrison, the former ICC judge, who knows everything about prosecuting war criminals.)

John Major also drew a careful line between Putin and the Russians. This, he said, is not a war against the Russian people but against Putin and his regime. If Russia loses, he expects a more pragmatic successor to emerge and, eventually, a return to some kind of partnership with the West.

On Brexit, Major dropped the after-dinner tone altogether. He called leaving the EU a “colossal mistake” and argued that Brexit will never rise from its deathbed, no matter what new branding politicians try to slap on it. That’s not a new position for him; he has spent years warning that Brexit would make the UK poorer and weaker.

The data backs him up. Recent economic studies suggest that by 2025, Brexit had cut the UK’s overall economy by roughly 6% to 8%. Business investment fell by as much as 18%, and both employment and productivity dropped by around 3% to 4%.

So, Major’s line that “the EU is far too important for Britain to opt out of its decision process” is not sentimental Europeanism: it’s a reminder of where future leaders will eventually have to steer the country.

Then we got to grumbling about high taxes on the wealthy. Major lamented that rich Britons are now paying far too much. In the late 1970s, he said, the top 1% paid about 11% of all income tax; today they pay around 29%. What is the world coming to!

But that’s only half the picture, Sir John (and you probably know it already)!

The rich now take a much bigger share of the pie. Today, the top 10% in the UK receive about 36% of all income, while back in 1970, they took only 26.5%. The bottom 50% still split roughly 20% between them, almost exactly the same as five decades ago. So yes, the top 1% pay a bigger share of income tax, but they also take a much larger share of income than they used to. In other words, inequality in the UK has soared since the 1970s, thanks in no small part to John Major and his predecessor.

He redeemed himself slightly in my eyes with an anecdote about Boris Yeltsin. Everyone loves a Yeltsin story. This one involved vodka at 8 am.

Sometime after Yeltsin left office, he flew to London. They had dinner; Major mentioned he needed to be in Moscow the next day. Yeltsin offered him a lift on the plane Putin had kindly put at his disposal: “already more than Blair ever gave me,” as Major put it.

They sat on the runway, waiting for clearance, when the steward appeared with a vodka.

“Boris, it’s eight in the morning,” Major protested.

Yeltsin explained there was a Russian tradition of drinking to a safe take-off. So Major drank. A few hours later, more vodka: a toast to a safe landing. Approaching Moscow, yet more vodka. Major finally complained, and Yeltsin hit him with the killer line: “John, how long have we known each other? We are such good friends. You’re not going to refuse one little shot with me?” Naturally, they drank.

Legends. They definitely don’t make them like that any more, which might be a good thing.

And that’s it for today! Thanks for reading! If you enjoy the newsletter, share it with a friend. And if you really enjoyed it, consider upgrading to a paid subscription: it helps support my work and means a lot.

Elia Kabanov is a science writer covering the past, present and future of technology (@metkere).

Cover art: Elia Kabanov feat. DALL-E.