27 May 2021
Pre-Owned Manifesto
BR is back! Go by bus
by J.R. Thomas
A Mr Johnson, interviewed in the Westminster area, said “Crikey! This has been the deal of the century, my friend. I ordered one Red Wall and got a whole Labour Party manifesto free. Stop it, Dilyn!” Could that be Mr Boris Johnson, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom? It certainly is. Having fought a one-issue election in December 2019 on getting Brexit done, Mr J. found himself having achieved his objective but with a slight lack of longer-term policies and dreams to peddle. As it was, a little virus from the East solved that problem for a while – and with some degree of success.
But that does not quite overcome the problem of what Boris does next. Indeed, what Boris does next will become increasingly constrained by what Boris did last, Boris and his next door neighbour, the amazingly popular Chancellor, Rishi Sunak. The vaccine may have been instrumental in bringing us back to normality, but whilst the scientists were working out a medical solution, the government – and the opposition, the media, and many commentators -were busy panicking. Not without reason in the early days, when the virus seemed much more deadly than it has in fact turned out to be, and when the only solution seemed to be to lock the population in their homes and close down the economy. At that point, prudent economic management, of the type practised by Rishi and his perhaps more grounded predecessor, was jettisoned and Corbyn economics was hastily adopted. That is perhaps a little unfair on the bearded one, who has never shown much interest in or understanding of economics; it is McDonnell economics that we cite. But whatever you call them (Biden economics?) they are the economics of disaster.
The Left has always held that economics are the servant of the people and can be made to do whatever the socialist dreamers in charge might wish. Restraints on spending are just a capitalist plot by the rich to further oppress the poor, and as for balanced budgets, what nonsense! The magic money tree will always serve the people, and if there is any difficulty, well, the rich will provide – whether they like it or not.
This is no great surprise coming from the Left, and, maybe because in these times, when Leftism is fashionable, there is surprisingly little challenge from those who really know – professional economists, for example – that water can only be pushed uphill a little way before it comes back to half-drown the entire community in the shape of long term and very expensive debt, and probably a douche of inflation to make the citizenry really feel the pain. But what is surprising is to hear such nonsense coming from senior Tory politicians, especially ones who worked for Goldman Sachs and can be presumed to have grasped the basics of how national and international economies work. This Conservative government has taken on record peacetime borrowings, to fund record levels of government expenditure. Some is for good reasons, such as keeping the work bereft able to eat and be housed, and some is for bad – we point the finger here at a fourth railway route from London to Birmingham, and, um, a tunnel from Northern Ireland to …er… well, nowhere, nowhere in Scotland what’s more. Which also brings us to the ever larger large sums of money to be flung over Hadrian’s Wall to try to bribe the Scots to be England’s chums – it hasn’t worked so far and there is no reason to suppose it ever will. This is the spending behaviour of a Labour government, seen on many previous occasions, and although we have not yet seen the sequel – enormous ramping up of taxation in a (vain) attempt to try and get the debt down, there are warning signs coming from Downing Street about tax avoidance (bad), corporate taxation (must go up), and sharing the pain (and we all will).
So having taken that page out of the Corbyn manifesto, what’s on the next page? Propping up failing businesses – yup, that one is well underway, as money is “invested” into bad business and good alike. The truth is that we have no natural advantages in this country in, say, making steel. In fact, we have a lot of disadvantages, in that we have no iron ore, very little and soon no coal, expensive labour costs, exceptionally high electricity costs, and a heavy regulatory regime. (If we must subsidise job creation, let’s do in the digital industries, or bio-technology).
Housing was one of the great deregulatory successes of the Thatcher years. The rented housing sector was revitalised almost overnight. By removing the perpetual tenancies, the rent controls, the monstrous over regulation, new landlords, new homes, new attitudes to competing for tenants appeared almost overnight. The bad council landlords eased themselves out of providing undermaintained stock, often by handing it to housing associations who took on professional management and were invigorated by what they saw in the private sector. The Left have always hated all this and want to get housing out of the hands of greedy private (insert further expletives of your choice) landlords and back into the maw of the state. Well, wishes are coming true as the Tories interfere more and more with tenancy conditions, landlords’ ability to evict at lease expiry, heavy-handed registration processes. Next, no doubt: rent controls. Then: withdrawal of most private landlords.
And on the next page of that Corbyn tract, yellowing on BoJo’s desk? Stop the freeing up of the NHS, which over the last twenty years and more has seen, at last, lots of new investment with private capital building new hospitals and buying technology to speed up and improve medical treatments, management localised and given (admittedly very limited) discretion in its area. Not for much longer; control will be brough back into Whitehall, Mr Hancock will become el supremo of the NHS. It’s enough to make you go private. In fact, give it five years and that will be the only route for some treatments (some folk say it already is).
Here’s another idea, from the Momentum Book of Seizing the Commanding Heights. Grant Shapps has just told us. Renationalisation of the railway system. Privatisation of the railways, a John Major solution to a failing railway that was no longer fit for purpose, was carried through in a half baked and downright weirdly complex way, with the tracks owned by one lot (under Whitehall control); the operators by private companies – often the very bus companies the trains were supposed to compete with; the rolling stock by finance companies for the tax breaks. Even so, it worked, astonishingly well, with record passenger carryings, reopened stations and lines, almost complete renewal of the rolling stock (not really needed but it is amazing what can be done if it gets written off against a tax bill), and even the freight business going through a revival. Alas, Covid has been a disaster for the train operating companies and recovery will be slow. Mr Shapps, instead of lessening the burden of a daft system, is ramping it up some more, by imposing a new centralised publicly owned operator called “Great British Railways”. Back to the past indeed, and curly sandwiches and all the rest will be on Platform 1947 shortly. This is indeed the silliest decision taken on the railways since they were nationalised the first time round.
So there we are. We may have voted Conservative and Johnson but we seem to have got Labour and Corbyn. All we need now is the announcement that Britain’s independent nuclear deterrent is to be scrapped. [Just joking Boris, just joking. Oh.]
