Naught For Your Comfort
ECONOMIC PERSPECTIVES 151 - JUNE 2024
This is the title of a book by one of my childhood heroes in South Africa, Father Trevor Huddleston. This title resonates profoundly with the deeply disturbing features of our present circumstances, yet it’s difficult to pinpoint an appropriate remedy - other than that it would need to address features at the very heart of political debate - such as the meaning of a ‘free’ society; or limits to the ideals of personal freedom and responsibility; or the optimal role and size of the state.
One glaring illustration of this dysfunction is the widespread acceptance that millions of people quite capable of working for their living are content to be supported fully or in part by the state – indeed consider it to be their entitlement. At the same time we witness a corresponding abandonment of the social principle of personal responsibility - even a responsibility to take care of ourselves. It’s evident in the erosion of basic disciplines in schools at a loss to know how to deal with something as basic as the smartphone plague and its damage to children’s mental faculties and attention spans. A blanket ban would be too drastic, but why are teachers incapable of rationalising their use during school hours without necessitating yet more state regulations? And if they witness an infringement, have they never heard of that beneficial practice known as ‘punishment’?
What happened to self-reliance?
This is just another example of the post-lockdown spoon-feeding that has replaced self-reliance, as has already happened so comprehensively in the state’s desperate recourse to taxation as a weapon to combat every self-inflicted curse, from obesity, alcoholism, drug-abuse and smoking to the latest official threat to our beleaguered NHS: addiction to crypto-trading. Our head of public health has called for new regulatory action to ‘stop young people from getting hooked on new forms of betting: the NHS cannot afford to keep picking up the pieces of societal problems’. As ever, there is a far more cost-effective solution known as ‘parenting’. But when the asylum is being run by its inmates, that’s likely to prove as popular as punishment!
Another manifestation of derangement considered normal is the transformation of language into a lingo that none of us speak. An extract from an advert for a job in a public art gallery: ‘The role will play a key part in driving the organisation’s curatorial and research activity with a particular focus on diversity and inclusion. The role is responsible for delivery of strategic leadership, and the selected post-holder will have the ability to galvanise colleagues across the organisation towards a shared vision. By working closely with stakeholders the post-holder will ensure that activity is aligned with our approach to audiences.’ One of the surest signals of the approaching collapse of a civilisation is the destruction of its language - welcome to the horrors of Orwellian group-speak!
Just as bad is having to endure shallow, patronising and irrelevant pre-election drivel, adopted by politicians of all stripes to declare their unfulfillable pledges. They promise ‘extra support’ for ‘ordinary working people’ or ‘working families’; or ‘a new deal for working people’ and the latest version ‘no tax rises for working people’. Beyond an inference that the intended beneficiaries are not layabouts, all this anodyne tripe conveys is some copybook working-class imagery. But who, really, are these ‘working people’? Some of the country’s wealthiest men and women are ‘working people’. How many of them believe they will suffer no tax rises?
The party of business
Keir Starmer even manages to keep a straight face when claiming that Labour’s top priority is ‘wealth creation’, while Rachel Reeves, his probable chancellor, declares that Labour is the ‘party of business’. One of her economic inspirations, by the way, was the Cambridge professor Joan Robinson, once an ardent defender of the Chinese tyrant and mass-murderer Mao Tse-Tung. This gives a flavour of Robinson’s economic philosophy: ‘I do not regard the Keynesian revolution as a great intellectual triumph. On the contrary, it was a tragedy because it came so late. Hitler had already found out how to cure unemployment before Keynes had finished explaining why it occurred.’
To be worthy of its slogan any party of business would axe the dregs of remaining EU regulation; leave its Court of Human Rights; institute a regime of unilateral free trade; and dismantle the lethal treasury/central bank symbiosis that’s again ready to print our money to destruction at the whim of a Marxist chancellor in thrall to a prevaricating economic ignoramus.
Once again we hear the populist cry ‘British jobs for British people’ – which is yet another plea for homophobic protectionism – but not a word about how they will cut migration, or by how much. Particularly insulting is the assumption that members of the public (such as ‘working people’) are incapable of seeing through all this grotesque kidology: all those well-crafted but superficial promises are unaffordable. Even the standard failsafe of funding Utopia by ‘taxing the rich’ is no longer believed, and a 500pc council tax surcharge on second homes will not suffice. The facile chant that ‘those with the broadest shoulders should pay more tax’ rings hollow – especially as the Institute of Fiscal Studies now calculates that 30pc of the entire income tax haul is shouldered by just 1pc of taxpayers.
Taxes will assuredly rise
Even the plebeian rump knows full well that the one-way trajectory of taxes is UP, and over the next few years an extra four million workers will be pulled into the 40pc rate of income tax, and another 450,000 will be facing the 45pc rate, thanks to the ‘fiscal drag’ that fails to acknowledge what happens to the actual tax burden faced by ordinary working people’ when allowances and exemptions remain static in money terms, while price inflation ravages our purchasing power mercilessly.
Our incumbent leader is now talking about replacing the minimum wage with a ‘genuine living wage’. Well, perhaps its recipients will also welcome the surge in unemployment that assuredly will follow. Yes, our old friend ‘the law of unintended consequences’. But the tragic difference this time is that they do intend it!
It would be extraordinary if this beleaguered nation could expect better treatment from the virtually certain Labour administration about to preside over this nation’s fiscal allocations. The incumbents’ traditional hostility to wealth, business and landlords is set to intensify. They promise a ‘proper’ windfall tax on North Sea oil and gas companies already facing an unaffordable headline rate of 75pc which they plan to raise to 78pc. Nor can a chancellor, even one living in cloud-cuckoo land, magically wave away the stupendous level of public debt that exists after 14 years of gross fiscal ineptitude, flagrant money-printing and interest-rate suppression inflicted by the stupendously treacherous Tory regime.
There really is nothing left. Not a cent for that relic known as public services - no, not even a few potholes.
EMILE WOOLF [June 2024]
Economic Perspectives 151
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