I happened to be in England shortly before the riots, which
erupted in copycat fashion all over the country. No one saw them
coming. There have been many references to the “feral underclass,”
a name for creatures formerly tamed but now wild. The welfare
state, which has reached absurd levels in England, instructs the
underclass that they are not responsible for anything that happens
to them. Nothing is their fault and no one can tell them to do
anything.
The automatic receipt of “benefit” tells them that nothing
depends on their own effort or good behavior. Parents are severely
restricted in how they can discipline their own children. If you
want to read about England, keep an eye on Peter Hitchens in the
Mail on Sunday. Here is something recent from his
blog. Those who want to blame parents for the misdeeds of their
children “should heed the cry of one such parent this week, a
respected TV cameraman,” Hitchens wrote.
“I am heartbroken and totally ashamed,” he said of his
daughter’s criminal actions. “This is the end product of a society
that tells you that you can’t discipline your children.”
Those who do, he said, risk being reported to police or social
services. He concluded: “Children now have the power over their
parents, rather than the other way round.”
I think all modern parents will recognize the truth in this.
Except for David Cameron and Ed Miliband.
Cameron is the prime minister, nominally conservative, and
Miliband the leader of the Labour Party. He is so far to the left
that he acts as a kind of insurance policy for Cameron. No matter
how low Cameron falls in the public esteem, Miliband is not an
enticing prospect to replace him.
My brother Richard, a minor officeholder (councilman) in the
Conservative Party (he lives in an unaffected part of the country,
near Gatwick), warned me even before the rioting began that the
prospects for David Cameron are not good. He doesn’t have a
conservative bone in his body. He launched his career as a PR man
and that is what he remains. In fact, he has already achieved his
life’s ambition, which was to become prime minister. 10 Downing
Street is his address. So his inclination will be to rest on his
laurels. Tony Blair is his hero.
I can think of no better way of alerting American
Spectator readers to the Cameron problem than to say that he
is a compassionate conservative. Acutely conscious of his own
privileged background — Eton and Oxford — his guilt feelings are
easily stirred. A quick reminder that budget cuts hurt the poor
will suffice to whip him into line. His post-riot comments about
the “slow motion moral collapse that has taken place in parts of
our country,” were seen as more PR.
The alleged budget cuts in England have yet to take effect.
“Only in today’s bizarre, economically illiterate political climate
could such an extraordinarily large overdraft be confused for
draconian belt-tightening,” wrote a commentator for the (English)
Spectator. One department that does face cuts is the
police force. It was noted at the time that the police response to
the initial rioting was tardy or nonexistent. Post-riots, you can
be sure that those reductions in force will not happen. Thus do
bureaucracies take care of their own. My brother showed me a chart
with planned government spending increasing every year until 2016.
Optimistically, revenues also projected to rise sharply in the same
time. Reason: Under the Labour
government the top income tax rate was increased to 50 percent
(from 40 percent) and Cameron has kept that in place.
It’s assumed by all right-thinking people, including the BBC,
that this substantial increase in the cost of doing business in
Britain will have no effect on behavior. Richard Branson of Virgin
Air, who has moved part of his operation from London to
Switzerland, has already shown this assumption to be wrong. One of
several errors behind the plan to raise taxes on the rich (on both
sides of the Atlantic) is that the rich are exactly the ones who
are the least likely to be played for suckers and can most easily
move.
Few Americans realize that in forming his government, Cameron
teamed up with the (leftist) Liberal Democrats who were given major
cabinet posts and a great deal of influence. Cameron’s Business
Secretary, Vincent Cable, is anti-business, and would fit
comfortably into the Obama administration. The Lib-Dems are “the
yellow tail wagging the Tory dog, veto-ing or diluting mainstream
Conservative policies.” (Spectator again.) No real welfare
reform will occur: well-advertised future cuts have been offset by
immediate (and unannounced) increases. The National Health Service,
regarded for some reason as a national treasure, will remain intact
(there are still no charges for making an appointment to see a
doctor, as there are now in Sweden and France); foreign aid goes
onward and upward (giving away other people’s money convinces
liberals that they are morally superior people); carbon taxes have
been increased to counter the global warming that humans allegedly
cause (this will sharply increase the cost of energy and keep the
BBC happy); and of course there will be no retreat on the new 50
percent top income tax rate.
The betting is that Cameron will also retreat from a promised
reform of munificent civil service pensions, which are based on
final salaries. Cameron faces “industrial action,” or strikes, over
his insistence that government workers make extra payments for
pensions in excess of 100,000 pounds a year (about $160,000). In
addition, a raft of EU measures will give temporary workers full
employee rights after just 12 weeks on the job. Given that Britain
employs eight million such workers, this could have a severe impact
on labor market flexibility. Prudence will dictate that few such
employees will be hired in the first place.
All of which means that the British economy will continue to do
poorly. The main economic problem in England at the moment (as in
America) is that the progressives who continue to advocate
egalitarian policies have no conception that they don’t work—
don’t create jobs. The supposed morality of such policies blinds
their advocates to their destructiveness.
YOU MAY WELL WONDER why we in the U.S. should care about
Britain’s pathologies. If you feel that way you have a point. The
ruling class in Britain is rotten to the core. Now that they no
longer rule the waves it might be better for all concerned if they
were submerged beneath them. If a more fundamental rebellion in
Britain were to rid us of the whole sorry lot I would quietly
rejoice. But they are an object lesson.
Every time I return to the U.S. I sense that the same
destructive forces are at work here as in Britain—
with the important difference that the forces of sanity are
still alive and politically effective on this side of the Atlantic.
They see the shoals and the hazards, and are eager to avoid them.
To get an idea of politics in Britain you have to imagine a
nightmare: the Democratic Party of Obama and Dick Durbin of
Illinois opposed by a Republican Party led by Olympia Snowe and
Susan Collins of Maine. There is no equivalent to the Tea
Party.
The British establishment lives in constant fear of an uprising
by a party of racially aggrieved whites. But blacks in England,
because (as in America) their out-of-wedlock childbearing is
routine and not even discouraged, suffer more than anything from
poor “elite” leadership. As for the Muslims in Britain: their
families are relatively intact and their businesses are one of the
few welcome sights on the nation’s high streets. More often than
not, they were targets for the lawless mobs. They were the victims,
not the instigators of the recent rioting.
