A Land Fit For Zeroes

Roughly, it all began - maybe during the WWII itself - when there was talk of a desire to build a better society, which probably led to the post-war Labour election victory, the beginnings of the NHS and welfare programmes, the destruction of the slums and so on. In fact, a start on creating the ‘land fit for heroes’ that had been promised at the end of WWI, but had never really materialised.

However, by the end of the 1970s it became apparent that bureaucratic socialism was a disaster for the UK economy. Nationalisation, incomes policies and all that management from the centre had failed. There were many and various reasons for this, including a belief that politicians could only "manage decline gracefully", but what it all boiled down to in the end is that a modern industrial economy is just too complex for central control*. This was – and still is for some – a very hard lesson for those of us from the left to take and to learn.

The destruction of the post-war consensus by the Thatcher government was a shock to us, which took me personally long time to get over.

I grew up here in the Black Country, one of the cradles of the Industrial Revolution and still in the 1970s very much an area dominated by heavy industry. Consequently, I grew up surrounded by - and immersed in - left-wing politics, almost to the exclusion of all else. So, it wasn’t until fairly recently that I was able to view it dispassionately, and – even now – still find it difficult to acknowledge the necessity of the ‘Thatcherite’ changes. Still, though, I do not believe that it was the only way of doing it, and certainly not the best way. However, the change did happen and there are very, very few who would seriously wish to go back to how it was then, economically at least.

However, despite this reshaping of the economy the ‘Thatcherite revolution’ left social policy – mostly – alone, moving in this - mostly again – leftward way which saw the state taking over more and more control. So, now we wait for such a realisation in the field of social policy. A realisation that what once was a challenge to the conventional wisdom has now become the conventional wisdom itself, more often than not causing more problems than the original way of doing things it was meant to rectify.

Labour policies betrayed civic society and British values, but Cameron isn't offering any remedy

*The same thing happened, but much more disastrously in the communist countries of Eastern Europe too, of course. However, more recently China has shown exactly how to recover from too much central control and free up the economy. Not that China is perfect though, of course.