Britain needs reform

Spectator

a day ago

This week's spending review confirms that where there should be conviction, there is only confusion; where there should be vision, only a vacuum. The country is on the road to higher taxes, poorer services and a decaying public realm, with the bandits of the bond market lying in wait to extract their growing take from our declining share of global wealth.
When every warning light is flashing red, the government is driving further and faster towards danger
The Chancellor approached this spending review with her credibility already undermined. Promises not to raise taxes on working people translated into a tax on work itself which has driven up unemployment. A pledge to put growth first has been accompanied by changes to employment law that make the labour market more rigid and the cost of hiring workers commensurately greater. A party which excoriated the Conservatives for letting prices rise has pumped billions into public-sector wage hikes and seen inflation increase again. An apparent determination to take difficult decisions to control spending by removing pensioners' winter fuel payments has crumbled in the face of backbench pressure. The farcical retreat has only emboldened those in Labour who want to drive us deeper into debt.
The NHS and the Ministry of Defence are the most hopeless spending addicts but they are not the only departments to have wrung more from the Treasury than the nation can afford – or the Chancellor indicated she wanted. Ed Miliband has shown that, whatever other criticisms may be directed at him, he is brilliant at getting high on the taxpayers' supply – with generous subsidies for domestic decarbonisation and billions for the most expensive energy the markets can provide. The Department for Education has secured millions more to get the state to pay for families' food. Angela Rayner has extra billions, not to build new houses but to buy existing homes for the state. The Department for Transport also has a line of credit to pay for schemes no private sector investor would go near. And any lingering expectations that welfare reform would yield significant savings seems fanciful given the Prime Minister's desire to end the two-child cap on benefit payments.
It is not as though this programme can be justified on the basis of an economy that's roaring back. Tax changes this government has introduced have led to a flight of the wealthy and a consequent depression in revenue. Alongside rises in inflation and unemployment, the cost of government borrowing is escalating to a level which causes international markets to demand a heftier risk premium. At a time when every warning light is flashing red, the government is determined to drive further and faster towards danger.
Perhaps the greatest sin of this spending review is one of omission. There is no indication that all this additional expenditure will be accompanied by meaningful public-sector reform. The civil service headcount is growing. In education, the greater autonomy and accountability which drove up school standards is being abandoned. Our shoddily inefficient criminal justice system remains a mess of unaccountable fiefdoms: lamentably inadequate chief constables hide their failures behind the alibi of 'operational independence', the Crown Prosecution Service is a creaking liability and courts are hidebound by a judiciary that resists effective management of their operations. The additional money for defence is going to a department whose procurement policies are hardly a model of prudence. And despite the best efforts of Wes Streeting, one cabinet minister who is at least intent on reform, the extra cash for the NHS risks being swallowed whole by staff unions rather than being used to create incentives for change.
The failure to fundamentally reform the functioning of government is all too visible in every operation of the state. Britain desperately needs reform. But our government offers only the inadequate management of accelerating decline.
Licences to kill
While the state proves incapable of reform, our parliament is attempting to prove it is world-leading in terminating innocent lives. Legislation to make it easier to kill the ill and elderly (the private member's bill to encourage suicide) appears still to enjoy majority support. And next week Labour MPs seek to amend the Crime and Policing Bill to decriminalise abortion. The state should undoubtedly treat any decision to terminate a pregnancy with sensitivity. But this amendment is an invitation to abusive partners to coerce vulnerable women into late-stage abortions and removes one of the last protections unborn children still have. Do we really want this decade to be one in which the only thing we do more efficiently than ever is kill innocent souls?