In 2010 the Labour Party was kicked out by the voters
and replaced with the Conservative Lib Dem coalition under David Cameron. It
was natural for voters to blame Labour for the economic crisis of 2008 and to
seek an alternative. Labour had been in power since 1997. If Labour were not to
blame who was? So too with the crisis that Britain faces this year. The Conservatives
have been in power since 2010 and solely in power since 2015. If the Conservatives
are not to blame who is?
If I thought Labour was going to make a better job of running
the economy, I would vote Labour. I disagree with tribal politics and
supporting a political party as if it were a football team. Politics is only
partly about ideology, it is also about competence. There is no point having
the correct policies and aims (ideology) if you lack the skill to implement
them (competence).
I liked Boris Johnson and was willing to forgive him
much for delivering Brexit, when only he could, but since the beginning of the
pandemic his government has had both the wrong ideology and it has lacked
competence.
Boris was unlucky. Covid destroyed many of his plans,
getting ill plus marrying Carrie sent him leftwards. His only real success and
the only advantage Britain has gained from Brexit was developing a Covid
vaccine separately from the EU. But the competitive advantage of the fast roll
out of the vaccine was in part squandered by the slowness of Britain returning
to normal and returning to work.
I recently required the help of the council. I discovered
that everyone still works from home. You get an answering machine. To collect a
document, I was given a 10-minute window of opportunity. The service provided
is poor, not because of a genuine risk from Covid, but because council workers
won’t return to their offices.
Liz Truss ought to lose the next election. If Labour
cannot win next time, it’s hard to see how it can ever. But I fear a Labour
victory, not so much because I dislike Mr Starmer. He strikes me as decent and
able. The problem with Labour is that it will struggle to govern without the
support of the SNP and it will be difficult to avoid the price the SNP will
require. Worse the solution that Labour the Lib Dems and the SNP will each
argue for will make the situation in Britain worse especially in the long term
rather than better.
We are in the mess that we are in because we chose to rely
on renewable energy and to give up fossil fuels prior to us having the technology
to keep the lights on. It is a good thing long term to give up fossil fuels,
but however useful renewable energy is it is intermittent and we lack the means
to store it. On a cold still day in December we will have to import energy at
ruinous cost or do without.
The failure goes back decades. We ought still to be
digging coal and burning it in power stations. We should have built multiple
nuclear power stations. We should have continued to exploit North Sea oil and
gas to the full. Britain’s contribution to Global Warming is trivial, but we
had to show our green credentials in Glasgow, and for what, so that we all
freeze because we can’t afford to turn on the radiators.
But every failure of the Conservative Government since
2010, would have been still worse if Labour had been in power. We spent too
much during the Covid pandemic. Labour, the SNP and the Lib Dems wanted us to
spend more. We stayed locked down for too long, if it were up to Nicola
Sturgeon, we would still be stuck in our homes watching her daily broadcast. It
was the Left that argued most strongly that we should cut fossil fuel use
faster. It is the SNP and the Greens that opposed nuclear power.
Labour’s solution to the present crisis is to borrow
more and spend more. Labour will nationalise everything it can, introduce price
controls whenever possible, defend workers who strike and, in the end, I strongly
suspect give the SNP a legal referendum on independence as the price of being
in power.
The present Conservative Government has been the most
left-wing in history. Lockdown was the epitome of statism. The state paid your wages
and took away your freedom. It might as well have been the Soviet Union. The
people lockdown saved, the very old, would most likely be dead now anyway. The
people lockdown is killing still are dying because they can’t see their GP or
get treatment in a hospital. We had a wartime economy for a threat that was
killing approximately 0.3% of the population. But lockdown will in the end kill
much more than 0.3%. More lives would have been saved if we had done absolutely
nothing and kept working and going to the pub.
But we couldn’t of course continue as normal, because
idiots like Peston and Rigby would have accused Boris of murder, the BBC would
have scared the public half to death with film from wards showing people dying
in agony, as if you couldn’t find film exactly such scenes every day in every
hospital before and after the pandemic.
The Left was wrong about everything. The solution will
not be to continue with a form of Conservatism that continually strives to imitate
the Left. It will naturally delight the voters if you nationalise everything
and pay their heating bills. Britain is culturally left-wing. We loved being
paid to sit at home doing nothing. But we won’t love the consequences of it,
which will be shivering in the dark, long term decline and a lower standard of
living.
If we believe in Conservatism we must believe in
Conservative solutions to the present problem. The fault since 2019 was that we
were not Conservative enough.
We must get rid of price controls. Let the market determine
the price of heating. We must get rid of subsidies on renewable energy. If it
is going to part of a long-term solution, it must be cost effective and able to
compete. We must lower taxes, especially VAT to give people more of their own
money to spend. We must make Britain more competitive by increasing free trade
and by undercutting the EU.
We must make Britain less attractive to asylum seekers,
so that they know we will keep them alive here, but no more. That way they
might choose to stay in any of the safe countries on route. We must reform
whatever law or act prevents us from sending those who do not have a well-founded
claim elsewhere.
We must ditch any and all regulations that inhibit
business and make clear to those able to work that they must do so if there are
jobs available. Failure to do so must lead to financial loss. We will keep you
alive too, but no more. We must accept that the NHS is not the best in the
world and in fact is worse than any other in Western Europe. Only when you
recognise that there is a problem can you find a solution.
It may not be enough. Liz Truss will probably lose the
next election no matter what she does. But free market economics works. Subsidies,
nationalisation and price controls have never worked in history. So at least be
properly Conservative. If we are very, very fortunate, the British voters will
begin to see that the economy is beginning to improve two years from now and
vote for the solution to continue.
If we continue with left-wing Conservatism, spending ever more money to nanny the British voter, we might as well have Labour.
