4 days ago
Britain is sleepwalking into total state control of our daily lives
Thank God we won the Cold War. For a while there, it was touch and go, the future of the world on a knife-edge.
On one side, we had a system permeated top to bottom by an official state ideology. Employment and freedom was made contingent on adherence, an extensive network of censors and informers was established to maintain the illusion that dissenters were a minority, harsh punishments were meted out to political prisoners, and the state took control of vast swathes of the economy.
On the other, the promise of freedom: freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, freedom of religion and association, freedom to do as you would with your private property.
It was, as I said, close. But in the end, despite Thatcher's brief, doomed fightback, the Socialists won.
It's a tongue-in-cheek reading of British history, but it doesn't take a great deal of exaggeration to see how it could be true.
As AJP Taylor once wrote, 'until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state beyond the post office and the policeman'.
That is emphatically not the case today. Having won the wars, the advocates of freedom comprehensively lost the peace. They lost to such a degree that those of us born and raised afterwards find it hard to comprehend the scale of the change.
It's easiest to start with the size of the state. To be sure, socialism in Britain has receded from its high point. The nationalisation of coal, iron, steel, electricity, gas, roads, aviation, telecommunications, and railways has been mostly undone, although steel and rail are on the way back in.
But by comparison to our pre-war starting point, we live in a nearly unrecognisable country. In 1913, taxes and spending took up around 8 per cent of GDP. Today, they account for 35 per cent and 45 per cent respectively. To put it another way, almost half of all economic activity in Britain involves funds allocated at the behest of the government, and over half of British adults rely on the state for major parts of their income.
And if anything, this understates the degree of government control. Outcomes which are nominally left to the market are rigged by a state which sees prices as less as a way for markets to clear, and more as a tool for social engineering.
Universities charge tuition fees capped by the state to students funded by the state, with the looming threat of lost university status if they veer from approved principles. Energy prices are capped, and in crisis subsidised. Mandates are put in place for the installation of heat pumps and sale of zero-emission vehicles as a share of business.
Wherever you look, there is meddling. The judiciary has revived the labour theory of value, awarding tens of millions of pounds in equal pay claims to shop workers who explicitly acknowledge they would never have taken warehouse jobs unless they paid far more than retail.
The benefits system has recast the old mantra as 'from each according to their pre-tax labour income, to each according to their needs-based assessment'. The support of the proletariat is purchased, the middle classes are punished.
And the Government appears to view its primary task to be finding caches of private wealth or institutions that have slipped state control – private schools, pensions, and the like – and reeling them in.
We are so used to state control of our lives that we act as if it is simply a fact of life that we require permission to build on land that we own. But prior to 1947, there was no such requirement. It was taken as granted that having purchased land for a family home, no-one would interfere with your effort to build one.
The Town and Country Planning Act put paid to that, handing councils the power to veto any and all construction. Combined with the surge in interest in state provision of housing – social housing went from 1 per cent of the country's stock in 1911 to 16 per cent today – and the result was to strip away our freedom to live where we would, as we would, and replace it with the utopian dreams of central planners.
Sometimes these extended to direct sabotage: when Birmingham was among the most prosperous regions in Britain, with services businesses growing faster than anywhere else in the country, London-based planners, having already obstructed the construction of factories, declared its growth to be 'threatening'. The result was a ban on office development, and the crippling of its economy.
Those parts which are under state control haven't fared much better. The charitable hospitals and friendly societies that existed prior to the NHS were swept aside in a project that explicitly aimed to replace this 'medley of public and voluntary institutions' with rational, 'planned' healthcare.
The results have been catastrophic. We have created one of the largest employers on earth, with some of the longest waiting lists and worst health outcomes in the developed world.
Between private and public provision, we spend almost 2 per cent more of our national income on healthcare than our Australian cousins in exchange for massively higher avoidable mortality. This should be a national disgrace. Yet despite the dismal experiences and the constant drip of scandals, it remains popular. The idea of healthcare provided outside the state is simply alien to a people taught that their system is the envy of the world.
When Boris Yeltsin visited the United States, it was a trip to a supermarket that convinced him of the futility of the Soviet model. Regrettably, Britain's indoctrination has been far more effective, resembling at times a last-ditch counterinsurgency campaign conducted against our own people.
The education system, under the thumb from preschool to grad school, has long abandoned efforts to instill national pride in favour of preaching about the benefits of diversity and nebulous British values that amount to upholding the state. Over 10,000 people a year are arrested for communications offences. Whenever attempts to impose multiculturalism on Britain hit a snag in the form of the latest terrorist outrage, the institutions of the state and its allies sing from a single sheet.
The result has been a curious demoralisation. Asked to list the key features of British patriotism in 1914, our representative Englishman might have listed the Empire, the monarchy, the Church of England, the Royal Navy. Ask today, and you'll get something about fairness, diversity, the BBC and the NHS.
This is, of course, all in jest. Britain is not a socialist country. And thank God for that, Comrade.
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