Samizdata

This comment on the current Speaker, of the House of Commons, John Bercow, who is generally regarded by many people as a slimeball of the first order:

“If you feel that is an exaggeration, look what they did when last entrusted with what was potentially a great reforming measure – the chance to elect a new Speaker to replace the compromised and incapable man we must learn to call Lord Martin. They ended up choosing the legislature’s equivalent of Donald Duck, not because they believed he might step out of his cartoon one day and restore order to a profoundly damaged but vital institution, but because it would upset the Tory party. That is how serious the present parliamentary majority is about restoring the credibility of the Commons. And as we read endless stories about the new Speaker’s lavish refurbishments of his apartments, the size of his television, his wife’s political stunts and his decision not to dress properly for the State Opening, the full force of what a pointless little creep he is, and how he squats vacuously in one of the great positions of state, is brought home to us.”

There is a passage in F.A. Hayek’s The Road To Serfdom where the great man writes about how “the worst get on top” in political systems where there are few restraints on power. Mr Bercow validates that theory most admirably.

Oh, and Brian Micklethwait, like me, has met Bercow. He’s not a fan.

The Archbishop of Canterbury seems to be of the view that somewhere in the Bible, it says “take the wealth of others by force and give it to people best able to work the political system”. Just another statist thug, but then we already knew that.

Boris Johnson, Mayor of London and media columnist, has this to say about the new top income tax rate of 50 per cent, due to take effect from next April. He is pretty blunt:

So it is utterly tragic, at the end of the first decade of this century, that we are back in the hands of a government whose mindset seems frozen in the wastes of the 1970s. If Gordon Brown remains in power – and perhaps even if he does not – Britain’s top rate of tax will soar far above that of our most important global competitors. China, Germany and Australia are on 45 per cent maximum; Italy is on 43 per cent; Ireland on 41 per cent; France on 40 per cent; and America is on 35 per cent.

I would not mind so much if I thought this expedient was temporary, or that it would work. If the 50p tax was going to plug the hole in the nation’s finances, then it might be a good thing, and it would be right that the rich should pay a larger share. But even on the Government’s figures it is only due to raise £2.5 billion of the £700 billion required – and those estimates may be wildly optimistic. This tax is predicted to drive away at least 25,000 people; it may simply encourage more avoidance; it may actually cost money, not bring it in.

As he says, many of those whose lives are shaped by the shrivelled, dog-in-the-manger philosophy of collectivism will not give a damn. So what, they will say? And in the Daily Telegraph article that Boris Johnson writes, you can read a goodly number of such dismissive comments, from the sort of cretins – I use the word without apology – who seem driven more by hatred of the rich than by a serious desire to improve conditions generally.

But what interests me in the politics of this is how emphatic Mr Johnson is in saying what a disaster the top rate will be. He’s absolutely right, of course, and it is heartening that a senior figure from the opposition Conservatives should say so. I have my problems with Mr Johnson – he’s certainly no consistent advocate of small government – but by goodness, it is good that he is making this point and in this emphatic way. No doubt Mr Johnson will be told by the various unlovely allies of David Cameron to shut up, to not be “difficult”. (The same thing happened when he mentioned the Tory promise to hold a referendum on the EU Lisbon Treaty). Well, to hell with that.

It appears that an incoming Tory – or BlueLabour – government will not reverse this new, top rate in the first budget after any election. That would be a gross mistake. I hope Mr Johnson does not shut up on this issue. Of course, he also has to practice what he preaches in his own job.

Richard Reeves writes an article in the Telegraph called It’s not about the size of the state – it’s what David Cameron does with it that not only falls at the first fence (the title pretty much alerted me to the fact this was going to be filled ‘advice from the enemy’), it is overflowing with analysis that encapsulates the intellectual failing that underpin BlueLabour. Let me do a fisk-lette:

This week Cameron strayed further still, using the Hugo Young memorial lecture to attack Labour’s record on poverty and inequality. He said that a “re-imagination in the role, as well as size” of the state was needed to build what he called “The Big Society”. It is audacious stuff. Cameron has adopted Labour’s goals of narrowing the gap between rich and poor, reducing child poverty and promoting social mobility, and then damns Labour for failing to achieve them.

What is audacious about conceding the choice of battleground entirely to the nominal enemy? I say ‘nominal’ because in truth the philosophical/ideological differences between New Labour and the Tory Party (BlueLabour) are not that significant.

It is a bit like the ‘audacious’ plans by the allies in World War II to area bomb German cities to break morale by slaughtering enemy workers even though earlier German attempts to do that to Britain had been an abject failure. If “London can take it”, it did not seem to occur to the ‘audacious’ RAF and USAAF that, chances are, Hamburg and Berlin probably can “take it” too.

And so Cameron’s audacious stuff is to try and do what Labour tried, just ‘do it better’. Far from being audacious, this is just more of the same heard-it-all-before by-the-numbers political droning, tailored slightly to appeal to whoever he is talking to at the moment and which way the weathervane is pointing today. Audacious would require an actual meta-contextual shift and Cameron has made it clear he represents continuity, not radical change.

Labour’s response has been to accuse Cameron of advocating “Thatcherism or 19th-century liberalism”. Wrong on both counts. Mrs Thatcher was more likely to join the National Union of Mineworkers than to say, as Cameron did, that “strong and concerted government action” was needed to “remake society.

So if government action (i.e. the welfare state) has hollowed out civil society, it seems remarkable that the notion that more government action might far from “remake society” but rather just continue its unravelling. The brutal truth is that David Cameron (and I suspect Richard Reeves) do not really understand that society may be something governments can weaken and destroy but they is not something that states can “remake” because societies are not “things” in the same way states are, they are emergent collective properties produced by countless several interactions.

But for much of the 20th century, politics was defined by attitudes to the state: the Right against, the Left in favour. And in one area Cameron remains instinctively opposed to state action, which is financial redistribution to reduce poverty. Cameron claims that inequality has worsened under Labour. Actually, the picture is complex: on some measures the gap has narrowed. The fairest assessment is that income inequality today is roughly the same as it was in 1997.

The ‘right’ (a sloppy term really) is against the state? Like Ted Heath maybe? And just how many ‘right’ leaders in the 20th century actually shrunk back the size of the state, as opposed to just growing it a bit more gradually? Never mind that ‘inequality’ per se should not even be an issue (someone else getting richer does not make me poorer), the size of the state is the issue. The larger the state, the more civil society is circumscribed. The larger the state, the more wealth and opportunity is sucked out of productive sectors by confiscation and regulation.

The only think we need more of from government is inaction… we need less across the board, not more… Richard Reeves cannot see that because he is a regulatory statist who sees government in terms of the parties being competing ‘management teams’ rather like Soviet design bureaus… offering creative options within essentially the same ideological system and meta-contextual framework. But in truth we do not need ‘better’ government action, we need ‘less’ government action… dramatically less. We also need actual intellectual opposition, not a difference of management theories. In short we need a far less powerful and intrusive state vis a vis civil society.

It is very much about the size of the state.