Heavy taxes, a bloated state - we're marching down the road to serfdom
timesonline.co.uk
Gerard Baker
MUCH INK has been spilt in an effort to explain why this election campaign has failed to engender excitement in the streets. Allow me, as a quasioutsider, to offer a provocative thesis.
I haven’t lived in Britain for more than a decade now, having spent most of my time in the US. But back in the country for the election, I’m not surprised at the palpable sense of futility. The British people are steadily being reduced to a state of cringing dependence on an ever-more voracious and aggrandising Government and a political establishment of almost unconquerable scale that supports and sustains it.
The response of our once competitive political system has been not to offer an alternative to this long march to serfdom but, hemmed in by the tightening constraints of politically permissible debate, to produce feeble dissent around the margins of a vast consensus whose core no one dare challenge.
Take the silence on the most obvious and pressing case — the growing proportion of our national income that will be consumed by the state.
After years in which the UK actually managed to restrict the growth of government, a period not coincidentally that created the conditions for the best economic performance in a couple of generations, the tax take is set to rise sharply. Within three years, taxes will account for more than 40 per cent of gross domestic product, the highest level in 25 years, and beginning to close the gap again with the levels in sclerotic Western European countries.
It will get worse. The Government now backs a more or less open-ended commitment to pouring ever more resources into the demonstrably inefficient bureaucracy of the NHS. Pensions, welfare benefits and education will devour tens of billions more even than current projections suggest. Labour practises ambiguity on this — alternately taking pride in all that money that has been thrown on the NHS bonfire and promising “reform” through the introduction of more choice in public service provision. But does anyone really think that the party intends to reverse the slide towards Scandinavian levels of profligacy?
It is not impossible to stop this train from leaving the station. But what are the opposition up to? The Tories say the answer is — wait for it — a £4 billion tax cut. Mercy! Will the entrepreneurial instincts of the British people be liberated, and the impending socialisation of more than half the UK economy halted, by a measure that will reduce the size of the state by a whopping 0.6 per cent?
The Tories try to cover their hopeless insufficiency to the task by focusing their grubby little energies on immigration, a campaign that includes the depressingly anti-market promise that they will tell companies in search of skilled overseas workers to get lost.
As for the Liberal Democrats, has there been a more inaptly named political structure in the world since some clever North Korean came up with the Democratic People’s Republic? The liberalism that this party favours is the sort that would accelerate the confiscation of private property now in train by returning to some of the punitive tax rates of the 1970s. The democracy they favour is the sort that involves surrendering sovereignty to the EU and the United Nations as fast as possible. Didn’t there used to be something called the Trade Descriptions Act that forbade this kind of mis-selling?
The lack of serious fiscal choice on offer is only a reflection of a broader surrender to the principle that government has the answers and the people should stop worrying their little heads about it. Every conversation one has in this country seems to start from the premise that everything that ails us can be put right by government — whether it is obesity or the decline of classical music.
And what exquisite irony! The one thing in the past four years that the Government really did get right — the deposing of a dangerous dictator and the liberation of 24 million people from tyranny — is now regarded in the closed circle of serious political discussion as an act of pure evil.
Of course, underpinning, sustaining and nourishing this consensus is a new Establishment that holds the British people in thrall to its supposedly progressive ideas. Its stultifying and baleful influence is transmitted by the clammy grip of its three main tentacles: the universities; the “experts”, and, above all, the media.
Most university teachers regard their first duty of course as being to promote and nurture the principle that government has the answers. But spreading from that simple “truth” are a few others: that Israel and America are responsible for the bulk of the bad things in the world; that globalisation is impoverishing; that British history is a matter, mostly, for shame, and that we would all be better off if we would just let Europe run things for us.
Their close allies outside the academy are the ubiquitous experts — in government, in pressure groups, in think-tanks. In a complicated age of information proliferation, these have assumed a kind of sacerdotal eminence: the people listen meekly as they promote their theories — global warming as indisputable fact and that science must take precedence over ethics.
Above them all are the media, the self-selecting and self-perpetuating elite in broadcasting, newspapers, the arts (have you ever heard a novelist express an original political view?). This is the pinnacle of the Establishment that offers its highest recognition to people who make such programmes as The Power of Nightmares, the “documentary” whose tendentious bilge flowed from a manifestly false premise that the terrorist threat was all invented by neoconservatives (did the producer ever speak to a member of the Clinton Administration, which spent its last two years increasingly obsessed with the terror threat?).
As a young man of, I confess, a somewhat more leftish inclination, one of my heroes was Shelley. I can see the shortcomings now of his ideological preferences. But as the British public’s liberty is sold into the serfdom of the British Establishment, Shelley’s words have a curious resonance.
It’s useless in this final week of the election, given the paucity of choice, to expect them to echo to any effect now. But soon enough, maybe, the British people will heed them:
Rise like lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you
Ye are many. They are few.
gerard.baker@thetimes.co.uk
|
