For some of you this will
sting a bit, but it has needed saying for a while now. It is you, the left, that
stand accused as being the principal cause of most of the economic problems in
your home country. You are largely to blame for the state of the NHS, for the
problems with social care, for the high unemployment levels in the under 25s,
for the fact that too many people are doing university degrees, for the housing
shortage, for much of the decline of UK industry, even for the rise in inequality
in this country. Moreover, you are also largely to blame for Donald Trump, for
Brexit, and for the rise of far right groups in the UK
and across Europe .
Here is why you are to
blame: your combination of wilful naiveté and yet strong opinions about the
things mentioned above helps encourage the people that govern us to adopt all
manner of foolishness on the basis that they think you will throw them out of
office if they don't acquiesce. For decades you have been complicit in creating
a political climate based on nonsensical arguments, shoddy counterfactuals and
lazy myopia - fervently endorsing ideas and policies that are either based on
factual misinformation, poor reasoning or idly choosing to ignore or overlook
large swathes of the population that feel the costs of your decisions.
Take the most obvious case
in point - the NHS. You have for years treated it like a sacred religion, and
forced politicians to live with the lie that it can be sustained in the same
way it was for the first four decades of its existence. Your belligerent
demands for it to be safeguarded from proper market-based resource allocation
has pressured politicians to ignore the supply and demand crisis, the costing
crisis, and the fact that our living longer, our increased aging population,
the increasing number of diagnoses and the increasing technological scope for medical
advancement means it is no longer operating under the same framework under
which it operated a few decades ago.
You have created this
problem, by making politicians so terrified to respond to these realities that instead
all they can do is resort to pathetic party political tit-for-tat squabbling
about who puts more money in to the NHS and under whose leadership it would be less
worse off. You have left them feeling like they have no option but to behave
this way.
There are plenty of other
cases where you have done something similar. For decades you have applied
social duress on our politicians and made them believe that the only chance
they have of carving out a political career is if they publically endorse a
whole menu of economic foolishness that satisfies your beliefs. Where there is
inequality, and people struggling to make ends meet, people struggling to find
work, people in developing countries struggling to enter the competitive global
marketplace, and people struggling to pay their rent or being able to afford to
live in big cities - you must take a lot of responsibility for these things, because the truth is, the government you have been complicit in fattening up is responsible for pretty much all of these problems (and that is no exaggeration).
You have demanded that the political
institutions that put up barriers to free trade become ever-bigger and more
powerful; you have pressurised politicians to perpetuate facile price floors
like the minimum wage; you have made more and more voracious demands on the
earnings of the nation's most prodigious innovators and job creators; you have intransigently
peddled the long-standing fairytale that the answer to most of the nation's
problems are to be solved with higher taxation and more public sector
involvement in our industries; and you have repeatedly promoted the
economically toxic policy of domestic subsidies and the bailing out of financially
deteriorating businesses and industries.
In short, you have
pressurised the politicians of all parties into normalising bad policies -
policies that increase unemployment and make it harder for the unemployed to
obtain work; policies that stunt job creation; policies that make the cost of
living higher for ordinary working people; policies that stifle growth and
dissuade outside investors; policies that keeps regions in industrial atrophy; and
policies that makes vital public services like health far more vulnerable to
financial crises than they need to be.
For decades you have insisted
on injudicious political ideas, and then demanded that the only people fit for
governance are people who will enforce these ideas. And an equally bad (arguably
worse) knock-on effect of this is that most of you let politicians
get away with not having to proficiently justify their policies at a level
beyond the superficially inane. You will almost never see a politician under even
the slightest bit of pressure to admit the costs of a policy as well as the
benefits, nor even acknowledge that most policies profit a small proportion of
the population at the expense of a larger (unconsidered) group.
How preposterous it is that
enshrined in our cultural climate is the habitual dismissal of majority groups
affected by a policy, and the normalisation of anaemic economic arguments. And
how sad that the politicians that govern us have to survive on spin, on popularity-mongering
and by forever being afraid to admit their mistakes, or of having a public change
of mind, or of introducing a prudent policy if it's unpopular.
You have played a big part
in creating this monster and the concomitant lefty social commentators and politicians
that feed on its body lice. And this needs to be at the forefront of your mind
every time you open a paper or turn on the TV and see what you think is an
injustice, or a group of people struggling to find work or live as comfortably
as they could be. Most of the things you complain about and strive to fight
against are creations of your own making. You are like Geppetto smashing up Pinocchio
with a hammer, or like Victor Frankenstein taking an axe to the monster you've
spent decades creating.
Fear not, though - the
next Blog post that will be following this Bad Cop offering will be the Good Cop
approach to remedying all that's wrong as per the above criticisms. I will
offer a solution to how all this can be put right with a pretty radical but
effective overhaul of our current framework.
