The American Spectator

Political Hay

(Page 2 of 2)

editorialized: br> /p>

The public sector has employed an additional 354,000 people since 1997, and is due to grow by more than 200,000 over the next three years. It now employs 5.3 million, one in five of the working population...Industry has lost 11% of its workforce, Whitehall has more than half a million civil servants, about as many as the city of London....The new ruling class has privileges that most people working in the productive sector can only dream of: generous state-funded pensions, guaranteed against fluctuations in the stock-market; jobs guaranteed against fluctuations in the labour market; and subsidised housing reserved for public-sector workers....Practically all the new money pouring into health and education is being spent on salaries. Public sector pay is now rising faster than ever before, but efficiency is some 16% below that of America. We are spending a third more on the National Health Service, with hardly any improvements...Taxes are due to rise by another 95 billion pounds over the next three years.

br> The London Spectator editorialized on September, 2 this year: "The latest OECD figures show Britain now faces a heavier tax burden than Germany. The value for money offered to the taxpayer is appalling: productivity in the National Health Service has fallen, though spending on health had doubled since 1997."

CAMERONIAN TORIES SEEM OBLIVIOUS to all of this. Support for the Tories is up in the opinion polls because under New Labor many aspects of British life (including immigration, education and crime-control) are a shambles. Britain seems to have had enough of the high-taxing, high-spending socialism that Cameron seems determined to perpetuate. According to a recent poll, nearly half the population thinks the country is a worse place to live than it was 20 years ago. More than one in four said failing public services had made life worse, although public spending on health has doubled in the last six years and 700,000 more public-sector workers have been taken on since New Labour came to power in 1997. There is great resentment over the fact they will enjoy indexed-linked pensions while the government has slashed the value of private pension funds by tax-raids.

In a "statement of core principles" Cameron has said tax-cuts will not be a top priority -- and when a politician says that you can't say you haven't been warned. It also promised, somewhat ungrammatically, "giving all those who work in our public services the freedom to fulfill their vocation."

Does this include those with a vocation for ordering other people's lives about and constructing their own Utopian dreams via State Power? Here are a few examples of their recent activities: the Daily Mail of September, 9 reported a Mr. Gordon MacKillop has been summonsed and may be arrested and prosecuted under the Protection from Harassment Act 1997 for dressing a gnome in his garden in a miniature policeman's helmet -- he was woken late a night by two policemen who served him with the notice telling him the constabulistic mannikin was offensive to his neighbors. Two days later it was reported that up to two years in jail or fines of up to $5,000 were being considered by the government as penalties for the crime of not having a bell on a bicycle, although the number of injuries caused by people being hit by bicycles is negligible.

A day later it was reported that some local authorities told war veterans that they could not hold Remembrance Day marches unless they organized public liability insurance, carried out risk assessments and engaged marshals in fluorescent jackets to police the event. On September, 17 the Sunday Mail reported a driver spent two nights in jail after having been accused of "revving his car in a racist manner." (The charge was later dropped). Does Cameron think that what this intrusive and bullying, yet inefficient and dysfunctional, nanny state really needs is more power and prestige?

Cameron speaks of "developing with America a tough and effective foreign policy for the age of international terrorism: a policy that moves beyond neo-conservatism, retaining its strengths but learning from its failures." It is impossible to know what this means. Neo-conservatism is a term with many meanings, "Jewish conspiracy theory" among them. But it hints towards a weakening in the close alliance whose maintenance has been Blair's one great positive achievement.

Former Tory Minister Ann Widdecombe asked recently: "Why does Her Majesty's Opposition run a moral Vichy instead of a moral resistance?"

Churchill wrote of Alfred the Great in A History of the English-Speaking Peoples that in eras of confusion and decay Britain had a knack of producing a great leader and champion to save the situation. There seem none on the horizon at present.

The best hope for Britain is that Cameron is untruthful and that, like Blair in reverse, he will gradually introduce an agenda he has been at pains to distance himself from.

That he and those around him actually believe what he is at present spouting would mean three socialist, left-of-center parties (with the Liberal Democrats) for Britain, and no sizeable right-of-center party. Blair's likely successor as Labour leader is Gordon Brown, an old-fashioned socialist to the left of Blair.

Thatcher's courage and hard-headness in the 1980s pulled Britain out of deep trouble and also restored it as a world power. Now a future for Britain as an impoverished, broken-backed socialist state is not inevitable. But it is again looking possible.

topics:
Taxes, Foreign Policy, Education, Africa, Socialism, Conservatism, Immigration