In our first-past-the-post system, it is still a two-party battle between the Conservatives and the Labour Party (despite the presence of other minority parties, like the Liberal Democrats, the Green Party and Reform).
It is worth reminding ourselves that Western politics is a machine that turns good people and good ideas into bad people with bad ideas. It does attract some people who want to help, but mostly who want control. Once these people are in control, they use the machine to further their own ends.
This is not a flaw in the system, it is how the system works.
Here is a situation in the UK where the opinion polls predict a twenty points advantage to the Labour Party (unprecedented), a leader of the opposition apparently so much more popular than the standing Prime Minister, and yet Labour’s share of the vote will be far lower than when Tony Blair (the last successful Labour leader) stood for the first time, around 34%. People don’t want more of the Tories (and who can blame them?), but they don’t want Labour either (who can blame them?). It looks as though we may get a government that nobody wants.
After 14 years of Conservative leadership, a sense that “the other lot deserves a chance” is a powerful appeal to an electorate fed up with promises unfulfilled. “Change” is the one-word slogan of the Labour Party. It captures what is so widely desired. But Labour does not want to say, quite possibly does not know, what that change would be.
Sir Keir Starmer wants voters to believe Labour is the party of growth. History suggests otherwise. He has positioned himself as the candidate for change. The word change was everywhere at the launch of Labour’s election manifesto. It is the title of the document. Instead of “New” Labour under Blair, we have “Change” Labour under Starmer.
The Labour manifesto tells us that in government it would trigger growth, boost Treasury revenues, reform planning, build more homes, reduce debt, cut NHS waiting lists, expand the Armed Forces, make the streets safer, and control our borders. It doesn’t tell us how. So the change Labour seeks is not one of direction but merely of administration. Its hubristic pitch is that the party can run the country better than the last lot, even though it will be the least experienced in history.
Starmer would have us believe that, less than five years after supporting a neo-Marxist platform for power, Labour is now a pro-growth, wealth-creating, free enterprise party. Yet it still contains Left-wingers who do not share this worldview. Including Starmer himself.
The key to improving our economic and social situation, to better living standards, is growth and productivity. Without economic growth, the government cannot afford lower taxes; without lower taxes growth is unachievable. Weak growth reduces tax revenue and widens the fiscal deficit without reducing the pressure for more spending. And just as our fiscal deficit hits new heights, Labour plans to tax us some more.
The truth is that you don’t get growth just by saying you want it, by spending money, or by getting bureaucrats to draw up plans. You get growth by allowing people and companies to invest, spend and invent, as they see fit; by letting them keep more of what they have earned; and, as far as possible, by staying out of the way.
The floaters in this election are undecided because of the gap between the serious state of Britain and the world – in relation to war, money, culture, demography and the environment – on the one hand and the feebleness of the main parties’ proposed remedies on the other. It is genuinely hard to choose.
The Conservative and Labour parties are bland and uninspiring, their differences like choosing between Sainsbury's and Tesco.
Socialism has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it. The basis of socialism had always been hatred towards the rich and successful. Resentment has always been the driving force of the Labour Party. They preach the politics of envy.
The problem with ideological socialists is they want to provide everything, making everyone dependent on the State, dumbed down, travelling the pace of the slowest. Innovation and new ideas are stifled whether it’s in education or health or technology or business. All paid for by taxing the middle classes, who become inevitably demoralised and less productive.
If socialists understood economics, they wouldn’t be socialists.
Labour’s priorities are to strengthen trade union rights, to extend more rights to workers, damaging productivity further, and to weaken the power of private companies. They forever want more and more people work for the pervasive State, unproductively, being paid for by fewer and fewer private taxpayers.
The anti-business lobby of the Labour Party wants nationalisation, rent controls, price caps, higher taxes on success, more regulation and state intervention. But high government spending is inefficient and unproductive, beset with conflicts and vested interests, leading to misallocation of taxpayer’s resources and waste. Bureaucratic processes mean big government projects are typically slow, late and over budget. Big government is detrimental to growth, while higher taxes lower growth.
Labour policies are fantasy, delusion and ignorance.
Let us not be seduced into thinking that socialists have the answers, with their desire to drag us back to the social nightmares of the 1970s. Their policies do not survive contact with reality.
There is always a deep sense of malaise associated with all socialist regimes: nothing seems to work, long queues and waiting lists for public services, not enough housing to go around. Every Labour administration since the Second World War has resulted in devaluation of the pound. Taxes have always gone up and Labour is now at a total loss for solutions.
Labour doesn’t really think anything can happen except through government direction and fiat; it thinks ministers are reliably cleverer in directing economic resources than the people who own those resources and believes that letting a free people get on with life, to their mutual benefit, is a sign of neglect and indifference.
The Tories have been abysmal, yes, but Labour will be even worse: Keir Starmer will double down on the social-democratic and culturally nihilistic policies tested to destruction by the Conservatives.
It’s the modern British disease: we are living so far beyond our means as to have become entirely detached from reality. We are an increasingly impoverished and indebted nation, a rudderless second-order global power, and yet, like penniless aristocrats harking back to a bygone age, we retain expensive tastes and a misplaced sense of entitlement.
Our economy has underperformed terribly since 2008, and yet we feel able to spend even more on the NHS, on benefits, on pensions and constantly hike the minimum wage. We want to spend and spend yet more, encouraged by demagogic politicians who tell us that we can have it all. With no economic growth, and a dire outlook caused by 25 years of social-democratic idiocy, the sums aren’t close to adding up, and printing even more money would be lethal in an inflationary age.
I look at the future with fear for our children: we are bequeathing them
a poisoned legacy.
Britain is a country in decline, a nation that was once a world leader, now bumping along at the bottom of the international league table in everything from political influence to financial acumen. The English are not pasty-faced, mean-spirited, stingy, badly dressed, unfriendly, unadventurous and unimaginative people because they want to be, but rather it’s the only way they can survive.
And in the end, they will get the government they deserve.
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