Labour's insane economic policies are taking us back to the dark 1970s

Yahoo

20 hours ago

We have been here before. The crisis that the country faces may be catastrophic but it is not unprecedented. Anyone old enough to remember life in 1970s Britain will recall an almost universal sense of utter hopelessness and resignation. Most people (but not all, as it turned out) seemed to be beyond any thought of constructive rebellion against apparently invincible forces.
Decline was not just an alarming possibility: it was inevitable and crushing in its finality. The everyday business of life was not simply encumbered by incompetence and infuriatingly poor services as it is now. It was made virtually impossible: the lights were going out on a regular basis along with facilities like heating and cooking, which relied on electricity; the train service on which commuters depended (no working from home back then) was repeatedly withdrawn sometimes without warning; and essential supplies were obstructed, which caused desperate shortages of goods. It was often observed, with characteristic British irony, that it was like living through the war – only this time the enemy wasn't foreign.
You know what happened next. The Thatcher Government broke the death grip of trade union power which had crippled the British economy, not just by new legislation that directly limited the unions' coercive practices but by dismantling the nationalised industries over which they had a monopolistic hold.
Along with union hegemony, the suffocating grip of Left-wing councils was also brought down. I recall this particularly vividly because my family's life in the London Borough of Haringey had been turned into a class war nightmare by a vindictive Labour council whose rising star Jeremy Corbyn obligingly closed down the schools in solidarity with the striking caretakers.
But the miraculous revolution did not happen overnight. The first attempt to beat the coal miners who were critical to this struggle failed because the deprivation that their prolonged strike caused was too great for the population to bear. It took the Government a year of stockpiling coal in a carefully planned strategy to survive another winter of strikes before the breakthrough came.
There was no instant revelation on the political front either. The presentation of what soon became known as Thatcherism, with its transformational view of how wealth was created and distributed ('growing the pie' as opposed to simply dividing up the existing one into more equal pieces), was a major philosophical undertaking.
This was no mere electoral strategy. It was a historic shift of paradigmatic social thinking: a systematic argument with the Marxist analysis that had dominated political discourse in its harder or softer forms for a century.
It took philosophical thinkers like Friedrich Hayek and Nobel Prize-winning economic theorists like Milton Friedman, translated into practical action by an inspirational political adviser like Sir Keith Joseph, to create solutions that no one could have foreseen a generation before.
Yes children, that was how it happened all those years ago that Britain emerged from what looked like an inevitable descent into domestic failure and global insignificance. But how can this be relevant now? After all, we have learnt the essential lessons about how to create economic growth and encourage the spread of it through society – haven't we?
We know that private enterprise must be allowed to flourish if actual wealth is to increase, and that the state can only spend real money that markets produce if it is not to bankrupt the nation with debt. And, what is more, if the state inhibits or depresses the ability of private entrepreneurialism to flourish, there will be no possibility of it improving living conditions for anyone.
Surely we know all this – don't we? The awareness of it must be embedded in the consciousness of every serious politician who aspires to power. (The unserious ones who are so ideologically purblind that they will not accept it are, I genuinely believe, unlikely ever to be more than a disruptive nuisance.)
Blairite Labour had to demonstrate that it had been converted to the new truth before it could hope to be re-elected. It staged a ceremonial renunciation of the old dogma with the removal of its commitment to state ownership of the means of production and declared itself enthusiastically committed to capitalist free markets – so long as they were accompanied by 'social fairness' (which was, unfortunately, redistribution by another name).
After all that, here we are. A new Old Labour Government is now restoring the suffocating employment rights which make the dynamism and flexibility of entrepreneurial business impossibly difficult. It promises enormous amounts of money that don't exist and cannot be produced, because of the restrictions it has put on private enterprise, to public services like the NHS designed on the old monopolistic model. It caves in, without a struggle, to the demands of every public sector union for all the world as if the 1980s had never happened.
What is at the heart of this? To understand such retrograde thinking, you must listen to the rhetoric in which it is expressed. The Prime Minister and his hapless Chancellor speak of 'working people' as a homogeneous class whose communities are as conformist and predictable in their attitudes and loyalties as they were 50 years or more ago. Their lives are seen as inextricably bound up (and limited by) a single local industry which must be renewed or replaced by another industry or by a technological revolution into which the population can be inducted.
There appears to be no understanding that what used to be a solid, passive working class which wanted nothing more than safe jobs for itself and its progeny was awakened by the 1980s to the possibility of social mobility. The working people to whom Labour is offering its expensive beneficence may now quite possibly be inclined to start up their own ventures and move on. Pouring government money into regional capital projects will mean taxing their new enterprises into the grave.
The revelation of the Blair years was that there were lots of working (class) people who did not welcome the traditional, patronising Labour message. They may still be a minority, these brave individualists, but they are the future and they will not be ignored.
Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.