3 days ago
We still have time to avoid this looming dystopia
Rayner College, Oxford, June 2044
'The characteristic blindness of the 20th century … concerns something about which there is untroubled agreement between Hitler and President Roosevelt or H G Wells and Karl Barth.' (CS Lewis, 1944)
Those of us who came relatively unscathed through the Great Catastrophe of the early years of this decade can now – unlike so many of our countrymen – look back and ask ourselves what went so badly wrong.
Some of it is obvious. Mass immigration transformed our major cities and gradually suffocated our public services. Our casual, unfunded, ill-thought-through defence commitments led to the destruction of most of our Armed Forces and kit in Ukraine a decade ago.
Our failure to enforce the criminal law properly meant the fractious social environment of the 2020s degenerated into flight from the cities, no-go zones, and violence not seen since Northern Ireland in the 1970s.
But these are symptoms. The real cause was our gradually accelerating economic decline and the social tensions that followed, turbo-driven by the psychological Bantustans created by the Equality Act. The middle classes in the private sector saw a future of struggle and genteel poverty, while public 'servants' behaved like pre-Revolutionary French aristocrats defending their privileges.
The rich got out, and so did the young – if they could. The productive part of the economy was overwhelmed by the hangers-on. Conflict became inevitable when those with something to lose said to themselves 'we need a strong man: crack a few heads if you have to, I don't care anymore', and when those who didn't decided to try overthrowing the system as a whole.
What went wrong? Why did we condemn ourselves to economic decline and worse? It's not that we lacked lessons. The Americans avoided it. The Argentines dug themselves out of it. The Eastern Europeans were doing well enough until the 2033-4 war.
Of course we can see the answer clearly now. The economy didn't grow because we didn't want it to grow. On that, our leaders were united.
If I had said, in the days when classical music was still a thing, that I wanted to be a concert pianist, but didn't learn to read music and didn't practice, eventually people would have concluded I might say it, but I didn't really want it.
Similarly both Left and Right said they wanted growth. In practice they put other objectives first. Left and Right may have had different objectives, but they still had one big thing in common: they thought they knew best. No one would trust the market or trust the people. Our characteristic blindness, as C S Lewis put it, was to statism. And if the 20th century should have taught us anything, it was that statism led to economic decline and war.
The big problem areas were obvious. In 2025 Britain was about three to four million houses short. A massive building programme was needed. The Left's solution was new towns and social housing. The Right wanted building in cities and mansion blocks. No one wanted the one thing that might have made a difference: scrap the 1947 Planning Act, protect national parks, and let the market work. That's why young London professionals now live two to a room in south east Esher – and why so many have left for South East Asia.
Similarly, Left and Right blamed different things for the NHS's failure, but no one would let the market in to solve them. They had slightly varying views of the ideal tax burden, but both believed in regulating business. They had slightly different views about how quickly we should decarbonise but neither disputed the goal. That's why – until the government banned them – we all had a private generator in the 2030s.
Both Left and Right wanted growth. Just not as much as other things: electoral success, political convenience, avoiding reality. To be charitable, maybe most of them didn't really understand what was needed.
Certainly very few in the 2020s, let alone later, spoke of the power of the market, the prosperity created by free individuals, the new ideas that came from government getting out of the way. All the talk was of regulation and of social engineering. No one spoke of incentives and of profit.
We can see now that this meant Britain couldn't benefit from the skills and enterprise of all its citizens, only from the dubious skills of its policymakers. AI, which might genuinely have helped every person change their life, in fact only reinforced our leaders' belief that ever more cleverly worked-out policy could solve our problems. That is, after all, why Baroness Rayner founded the college where I now sit, as she said at the time, 'to use my experience to inspire very ordinary people to believe they can run the country'.
How strange it all seems now. If there is one silver lining to these past horrific few months, it is that we can now face reality. Like Adenauer's Germany in the 1950s, we don't have the luxury of deceiving ourselves.
Scrap the controls, free up the markets, get people rebuilding: that has to be the way out of our problems. We have had no end of a lesson. And now we must turn it to use.
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