by David Weber
The other circumstance which permitted the postponement of a general election was the existence of a state of war. The Constitution didn't require that elections be postponed in either case; it merely provided that they could be, at the discretion of the current government. Unlike High Ridge, the Duke of Cromarty's primary base of support had been found in the Commons, and despite occasional sags in the public's morale, it had remained essentially firm. Cromarty had timed the elections carefully, but he'd also called two of them during the course of the war, and his majority in the lower house had increased after each.
High Ridge's primary support base, however, lay in the Lords, which meant that the last thing he wanted, for many reasons, was to call a general election. And since sustaining a state of emergency required a majority in both houses—not to mention the concurrence of the Crown, which he was most unlikely to get—only the official state of war against Haven allowed him to hold off the election which, under current conditions, would almost certainly have proved a disaster.
But that state of war was useful in other ways, as well. High Ridge had not only managed to postpone confirmation of the San Martino peers and an almost certain embarrassing electoral defeat for both the Liberals and Progressives (his own Conservative Association's representation in the lower house was already so tiny that no conceivable popular vote could have had much impact upon it), but also to maintain the "wartime only" tax measures which had been instigated by the Cromarty Government. Those taxes were unpopular, to say the very least, but their passage was firmly associated in the public mind with Cromarty—and thus with the Centrist Party.
The Star Kingdom's Constitution had been drafted by people determined to restrict the power of the state by restricting the power to tax, and the Founders had crafted a fiscal system in which the government's income was intended to depend primarily on import and export duties and property and sales taxes. The Constitution specifically required that any income tax be flat-rated and limited to a maximum of eight percent of gross income except in time of emergency. To make their position crystal clear, the Founders had also specified that even in emergency conditions, any graduated income tax could be enacted only with the approval of a super-majority in both houses and automatically lapsed (unless confirmed by the same super-majority) in five T-years or at the next general election.
Those restrictions had made it very difficult for the Cromarty Government to pass the income tax (with a top rate of almost forty percent in the uppermost brackets) and special import duties required to finance the war. The public had accepted the immense financial burden of that tax structure with glum resignation only because Cromarty had successfully made the case for its necessity . . . and because the voters had expected it to lapse as soon as the war ended. Unfortunately for their expectations, the war hadn't ended (not officially, at any rate), and so the taxes remained in effect.
Naturally, High Ridge and his allies deeply (and publicly) regretted the fact that the Havenite refusal to conclude a formal peace required them to maintain the tax burden the Centrists had enacted. But their duty to ensure the Star Kingdom's security would not allow them in good conscience to reduce taxes until they could be positive the military theat had been ended once and for all in a formal treaty. In the meantime, that same tax structure provided an enormous influx of funds they could divert to other programs now that the shooting had stopped. Which was, of course, a simple, unanticipated consequence of the unsettled international situation.
Quite a bit of that largess had gone very quietly to certain political action organizations, union leaders, industrialists, and financiers. Siphoning those funds discreetly into the intended hands had been relatively easy, although it had been necessary to dress up the transfers with justifications like "research grants," "employment conditions studies," "educational subsidies," or "industrial expansion incentives." The new Royal Manticoran Astrophysics Investigation Agency had been one of the most successful of those sorts of ploys. No doubt some practical good would come of it, but its real value was that it had engaged the public imagination. It was the poster child for the "Building the Peace" campaign New Kiev had devised, and with excellent reason. After all, something like three quarters of the Star Kingdom's prosperity rested on its carrying trade and the mammoth through traffic the Manticoran Wormhole Junction serviced. Discovering additional destinations the Junction could serve could only enhance that wealth.
Of course, it was also a hideously expensive undertaking . . . rather more so than its administrators fully realized, High Ridge devoutly hoped. Almost ten full percent of its budget could be neatly skimmed off the top and passed directly to various ship builders and consulting firms without ever being wasted on something useful, and it had become such a popular icon no one dared question its expenditures.
Here and there, a few more odd forty or fifty million-dollar transfers had disappeared completely even without benefit of the RMAIA's cloak of respectability. Most of them had gone through discretionary funds or payments whose recipients could be concealed under a claim of national security endorsed by obliging members of the intelligence community, but very little of that sort of thing had actually been required.
By far the largest expenditures, however, had gone into long-cherished Progressive and Liberal social programs. High Ridge himself regarded them as nothing more than vote-buying boondoggles, and he was certain Descroix shared his view, whatever she might say for public consumption. But New Kiev was another matter. She truly believed that the "poor" of the Star Kingdom were destitute . . . despite the fact that the poorest of them enjoyed an effective income at least four times that of the average citizen of their Grayson allies, and somewhere around seven or eight times that of the average Havenite living in the financially ravaged Republic. She and her fellow Liberals were determined to build a new "fairer and more equitable Star Kingdom" in which the "indecent wealth of the monied classes" would be redistributed by government fiat, since the normal operation of the marketplace seemed incapable of doing so.
If pressed, High Ridge would have admitted that, as a matter of principle, he ought to have found the Liberals far more threatening than he ever could the Centrists. The impassioned rhetoric of New Kiev's more vociferous cohorts carried an ugly echo of the thinking which had led to the collapse of the original Republic of Haven and the creation of the People's Republic, after all. Fortunately, there was very little chance of their ever achieving their proclaimed goals in the Star Kingdom. And in the meantime, by giving both the Exchequer and the Home Office to the Liberals and strongly and publicly supporting New Kiev's domestic programs, he was able to blunt at least the sharper edges of the electorate's traditional view of the Conservative Association as the purely reactionary defender of aristocratic privilege at the expense of all other classes.
That had taken on additional importance following that damned Montaigne woman's hysterical slavery charges and the scandal they'd spawned. For that matter, the reorganization which had given the Liberals such a disproportionate share of ministerial power had been dictated by the same scandal. Support for the Government's handling of the resultant witch hunt had been reasonably solid in the Lords, although it had proven unfortunately necessary to sacrifice a few individuals to the moral outrage of the proles. The Commons had been a different matter, however, and Alexander's efforts to initiate a special inquiry—separate from and in addition to the official Government investigation—had been dangerous. In fact, it had been extremely dangerous, because although there'd been one or two names from the Centrists and a single Crown Loyalist in the files Montaigne and her common-born lover had turned over, there'd been many more Conservatives and Progressives.
And Liberals.
That had been the most dangerous aspect of the entire scandal, given the size of the Liberal Party's representation in the lower house. Not so much because of the convictions Alexander and his cronies might have secured, though those would have been bad enough, as because of the Liberals' intern
al revulsion at the mere possibility that any of their own could have been involved in something like genetic slave trading. That was the problem with people who insisted on defining themselves in terms of their principles and holier-than-thou morality. When something offended those principles (or at least threatened to draw the public's eye to their public violation), they tended to attack the offenders without any consideration at all of pragmatic strategy. High Ridge himself deplored the very existence of something like genetic slavery, of course, although he frankly doubted it was carried on on anything like the scale that hysterics like Montaigne insisted it was. But much as he deplored it, there were other matters to be considered, and he could scarcely be expected to throw away his one opportunity to prevent the Crown from destroying the fundamental balance of power mandated by the Constitution over a single issue, however much public agitation that issue might generate.
Unfortunately, it was impossible to explain that to a Liberal. Or, at least, to a Liberal member of the House of Commons who thought his constituents or the press might be listening in on the explanation. There'd been a dangerous groundswell of Liberal support for Alexander's demand for a separate inquiry, and High Ridge had managed to defuse it only by shifting things around to give New Kiev the Cabinet's second-ranking position and make Sir Harrison MacIntosh Home Secretary. In his new post, MacIntosh had been the member of the Government responsible for overseeing the investigation, and he had a well established reputation as a jurist. He was also a member of the Commons, not a peer, which had allowed the Liberal MPs to argue that he would never be a party to any "aristocratic coverup." And just as importantly, certain indiscretions in his past, coupled with a personality that was far more pragmatic in private than his public persona might have suggested, had helped provide the Prime Minister with a certain additional leverage even New Kiev wasn't aware existed.
The existence of that leverage had been another excellent reason to shuffle New Kiev from the Home Office to the Exchequer, as well. There was absolutely no way of predicting what she might have done if she'd been running the slavery investigation and it had taken her to places she didn't want to know existed. It was entirely possible, however, that such a journey would have led her to publicly break with the Government's handling of the case as a matter of principle, which would have been disastrous. As it was, with her good friend MacIntosh in charge of the affair, she'd been able to look the other way, confident he would get to the bottom of things . . . and safely insulated from confronting such ugly possibilities (and hard political decisions) herself.
All in all, High Ridge was rather pleased with how neatly he'd managed to turn a potential liability into an advantage and, at the same time, cover himself and his own party against charges of collusion with the accused. If it became necessary, he could always point out that it was his coalition partners, the Liberals, who'd dropped the ball. And the fact that the Liberal Party enjoyed such a towering reputation for moral rectitude, at least among its own voters and a certain segment of the news media, also provided an additional layer of cover. After all, if anything had been allowed to slip past during the course of the investigation, it had to have been an honest mistake on the part of such upright investigators.
Nor, for that matter, did it hurt to have New Kiev and her coeterie of Liberal advisers—like the Housemans—to hide behind if any awkward questions were asked about fiscal and monetary policy, ether.
That point might become particularly critical in the next few months, since the time limit on the graduated income tax was rapidly running out. The other tax increases could be legally maintained until the next general election, but not the income tax, and the disappearance of that huge fiscal surplus (which the Centrist-controlled House of Commons would never vote to renew) was the real reason Janacek and Houseman had been instructed to cut naval spending still further. Without those cuts, non-military spending would have to be reduced, instead, which was tactically unacceptable to any of the Government's parties. High Ridge devoutly hoped they could finesse the cuts through without having to admit their true motives, but if they couldn't, he firmly intended to lay the blame off on New Kiev. After all, everyone knew Liberals were the "tax and spend" party, and it was remotely possible that he could hang onto enough Independents in the Lords to sustain his majority there even if he was forced to cut New Kiev adrift. Possible, but highly unlikely, which was the reason it was so vital to get the cuts and new budget approved as quietly and expeditiously as possible.
Assuming all went well and they got away with that, it would still be useful to have New Kiev at the head of the Exchequer. If nothing else, the fact that she held such a powerful post in the Cabinet was a potent argument to bolster the claim that the current Government was, in fact, a broad-based coalition which embraced all political viewpoints and perspectives.
Perhaps even more importantly, High Ridge knew that when it came down to it, he and New Kiev agreed absolutely on one principle which was anathema to the Centrists: both of them believed in using the power of the state to accomplish their ideological goals. They differed intensely on what those goals should be, but both were perfectly prepared to embrace a degree of intrusiveness into public policy and private lives (or, at least, other people's private lives) which Alexander's Centrists would bitterly have opposed . . . and to make tactical compromises with one another along the way. And the Prime Minister had to admit that New Kiev's plethora of spending initiatives and government programs was having an effect. Quite a few of them provided funding for projects and services—like RMAIA—which even a Centrist had to admit were beneficial, however much he might have disputed the notion that it was appropriate for government to provide them. Others were less universally regarded as beneficial, but created a strong sense of loyalty among those who actually benefitted from them. And all of them capitalized on the very natural and human desire to turn from the sacrifices, death, and destruction of war and embrace something positive and life affirming.
Which was why the polls showed a slow but steady erosion of electoral support for the Centrists. Conditions were still far from ripe for the carefully timed election he intended to call, and it was unlikely anything could cut deeply enough into their support to deprive the Centrists of their position as the single largest party in the Commons. Especially not since any general election would also transform the San Martin "observers" into full-fledged members of Parliament. But if the projected trend lines continued, they would almost certainly lose their position as the majority party, even with the San Martinos. The Liberals, in particular, were gaining ground steadily, and that was another reason New Kiev was hardly likely to rock the boat. Not to mention yet another reason it was so crucial to sneak the new cuts past the Opposition.
Nonetheless, High Ridge reminded himself—again—not to underestimate the countess' distaste for the tactics pragmatic expediency forced upon her. Nor could he afford to forget that anything which smacked of imperialism and territorial expansion was complete heresy to any good Liberal, whatever a Progressive might think. It was time to smooth the waters a bit, he decided, and gave Descroix a quelling glance before he turned to face New Kiev squarely.
"None of us have any imperial ambitions, Marisa," he told her earnestly. "Despite that, however, and especially in light of the security problems the Cromarty Government committed us to in the annexation of Trevor's Star, we're going to have to insist on some Havenite concessions. And it's about time they were the ones who gave a little ground, too. We already made a major gesture towards meeting them more than half way by agreeing to the general repatriation of POWs when we didn't have anything but a truce agreement, you know."
New Kiev gazed at the Prime Minister for several seconds, then nodded thoughtfully. Descroix, on the other hand, confident that New Kiev was looking elsewhere, rolled her eyes cynically. "Repatriating prisoners of war" sounded very generous, but New Kiev ought to realize as well as she did that the Star Kingdom hadn't proposed it out of the goodness of High Ri
dge's heart or to demonstrate its willingness to be accommodating. Just getting out from under the expense of feeding and caring for the far more numerous Peep prisoners held by the Manticoran Alliance would have been worthwhile in its own right, and as for the enormous PR advantages in being the Government which had "brought our men and women home" . . .
"Surely they know as well as we do that the next major concession has to come from their side," High Ridge continued earnestly. "And they must be aware that territorial adjustments to address our new security issues are inevitable. Yet every proposal Secretary Giancola has so far put forward has been based on the return of all occupied systems as a very first step. There's no way any Manticoran government could accede to that sort of demand when our military personnel paid so high a price to occupy them in the first place."
That wasn't quite accurate, of course, though he had no intention of pointing that out. The Havenite position did, indeed, insist on the return of all occupied planets, but everyone in the Foreign Office recognized that as little more than the staking out of a bargaining position from which concessions could later be made. And High Ridge, unlike New Kiev, knew Descroix's reports to the Cabinet had carefully not mentioned Giancola's latest suggestion that perhaps plebiscites—overseen by the Republic, of course—might allow individual star systems to choose which side should retain control of them.
It was probably as well he hadn't brought that up, he thought, watching New Kiev's lips tighten ever so slightly at the words "military personnel." She might not share the contempt which a Reginald Houseman felt for the Star Kingdom's military, but like most of the Liberal leaders, she was at best ambivalent whenever it came to the use of military force. The fact that the Star Kingdom occupied any foreign star systems, regardless of how or why that had come about, offended every anti-imperialist bone in her body, and knowing political expediency forced her to actually support such an occupation, publically at least, only made it worse.