Next UK General Election Promises a Political Upheaval

Nigel Farage is the betting favourite to become the next UK prime minister with odds shortening on his Reform party to win the most seats.

Farage has a huge advantage over Kier Starmer in that he is not boring and not perceived as more of the same. The only thing that seems to have changed with the advent of a Labour government is that everything is even worse.

It has been obvious to me for ages. Still, it is being recognised more widely that the high spending high taxes strategy adopted by European states since the war, with an interruption in the UK when the mighty Maggie was in charge, does not deliver. Society is not becoming fairer and growth has slowed to a trickle. Governments keep making promises, for example on immigration and failing to deliver. The NHS staggers from one disaster to another and doctors take so long to respond to 111 calls that by the time they do reply patients have either died or forgotten why they called.

We need a fresh approach. I think I know what that fresh approach should be. Close down the failing state, dismiss all the bureaucrats, unleash private enterprise and exploit accelerating technological progress.

We need a safety net for the most vulnerable in society but if you pay people handsomely for getting a sick note from their GP many people will do that and the GP doesn’t care. It is not his money.

Thatcher called her opponents in the Tory party ‘the Wets’ and how right she was. Except for her, Wets have dominated the Government since the war. Comedians find it hard to be funny because they cannot offend anyone. The funniest jokes are deeply offensive; that is what makes them funny. I offend somebody nearly every time I open my mouth but at least I hope I am not completely boring. People need to learn to fight their corner. You have to be able to take a joke and make one.

Reform and Nigel Farage have an advantage because they offer the hope of something new. Farage needs to be bold, especially in terms of the economy. The Tories and Labour will find it hard to respond because their parties are stuffed with Wets imbued with the old big state religion. The Lib Dems are the ultimate example of this tendency – blandness on a Cosmic scale. The middle of the road gave political form with a leader so crass as to be risible.

The reelection of Trump in the US is a reflection of what is happening. Biden’s spending like no tomorrow with other people’s money or money that the Federal Reserve has helpfully printed for him illustrates perfectly what is wrong. Can anyone point to anything in domestic or foreign policy achieved in Biden’s presidency? He was just another apparatchik steeped in the old religion of the big state, high taxes, and nanny knows best.

To hell with all of them. Let’s give Adam Smith a chance.

Someone earning money by his own labor benefits himself. Unknowingly, he also benefits society, because to earn income on his labor in a competitive market, he must produce something others value. In Adam Smith’s lasting imagery, “By directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.”

Adam Smith has sometimes been caricatured as someone who saw no role for government in economic life. In fact, he believed that government had an important role to play. Like most modern believers in free markets, Smith believed that the government should enforce contracts and grant patents and copyrights to encourage inventions and new ideas. He also thought that the government should provide public works, such as roads and bridges, that, he assumed, would not be worthwhile for individuals to provide. Interestingly, though, he wanted the users of such public works to pay in proportion to their use.

EconLib

Adam Smith lived from 1723 to 1790 so through the Age of Enlightenment, which he personified. Imagine if a man of his genius was chancellor of the Exchequer. He would instantly recognise that many modern governments are spending fortunes trying to do the impossible. If they would stop banging their heads metaphorically against a brick wall and most importantly get out of the way with their absurd attempts at micromanagement we would all be better off and much happier.

There will always be rich and poor, winners and losers; that will never change. Homo Sapiens are a competitive animal, competing for territory, wealth, power and, dare I say it, women; and women compete for men. Places where they tried hardest to level the playing field such as communist China, North Korea, Cuba and Soviet Russia did not just fail but became monstrous in the process as they used the full apparatus of the state to try to enforce their impossible goals.

A modern worry is a tendency of advancing technology to concentrate staggering wealth in a few hands. We have been here in the early 20th century when men like Rockefeller and Carnegie became incredibly wealthy. We may need a latter-day Adam Smith to give insights into that problem but I suspect it is a stage and will self-correct over time.

If I am right in the direction in which Western politics is travelling this could be exciting for global stock markets and pose a challenge for old-style autocracies. Adam Smith and his enlightenment ideas are not a magic bullet for all society’s ills but it would be a massive improvement on the present state of affairs.

It all started with Franklin D. Roosevelt in the US and Clement Atlee in the UK. Horrified by the great depression they went the other way, with Keynes as the great cheerleader, trying to solve society’s ills with an ever larger and more interventionist state. At the least, this process has gone way too far and is finally triggering a growing populist reaction.

The hoi polloi, the plebs, you and me are fed up with elites who think they know what they are doing but, in the words of the great Georgette Heyer ‘quite mistake the matter’. As Oliver Cromwell said to the parliament that so annoyed him ‘You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. In the name of God, go.‘

The danger is that the populist reaction to the West’s complacent elites will usher in something we don’t want. There could be dangerous times ahead. I am an optimist. I think good men will win but these absurdly overblown state sectors funded by ruinous levels of taxation need to be savagely trimmed back. We need to look at what works and it is not an army of bureaucrats commandeering our money and telling the rest of us what to do.

My cousin blames Charles Dickens and he has a point. Dickens saw much to horrify him in society as cities grew faster than their ability to absorb people leading to great hardship. But the Victorians produced the greatest generations Britain has ever seen. Taken in the round the 19th century was a period of extraordinary achievement and we did not need socialism to correct the excesses; that would have happened naturally. Dickens’ books, brilliantly written if you don’t mind some of the longest sentences in the history of literature, but stuffed with anti-capitalist propaganda, led directly to Marx, Lenin, Stalin and the whole motley crew and underpinned a widespread feeling in Western elites that capitalism is inherently evil and can only be allowed to function when tightly controlled by all-seeing, all-wise bureaucrats. As we can see now this is bunk.

As the great 19th-century Liberal prime minister, E.W. Gladstone, also known as ‘the people’s William, said – ‘let the money fructify in the hands of the people’. He was my man and Thatcher was his heir.

His strong belief in Free Trade was only one of the results of his deep-rooted conviction that the Government’s interference with the free action of the individual, whether by taxation or otherwise, should be kept at an irreducible minimum. It is, indeed, not too much to say that his conception of Liberalism was the negation of Socialism.

Wikipedia

His grandson was my headmaster at Lancing, the school I attended on the south coast. He was a terrific guy too. His grandfather was hardly infallible but there is great wisdom in his words that we need to rediscover.