Ignore the general public

People want it all. They need to understand that they can't have it.

“People like Coldplay and voted for the Nazis. You can’t trust people.” - Super Hans

Kate Andrews and Matthew Parris each had an article in last week’s Spectator. Between them, they nail what has gone wrong in Britain in the last 15 years. In short, voters want lower taxes and higher public spending. Politicians are unable to deliver this and so focus instead on projects that are either trivially small or unrealistically ambitious. No fad is too fleeting. No headline is too small.

Here is Matthew Parris:

We witter on endlessly about ‘mental health’ and how we should be spending more on that least successful branch of medicine in terms of demonstrable outcomes. When the NHS struggles to afford costly new drugs or procedures our journalism snuggles back into the comfortable old lie that ‘one life lost is a life too many’. Nobody arguing for the amputation or cancellation of HS2 ever proposes that the imagined savings should just be pocketed by the Exchequer: they always argue it would be better spent on some different rail project. Motorists, meanwhile, rage against governments that have in fact lacked the guts to raise fuel duties in line with inflation. And, ever and anon, other less visible taxes keep rising – at 37 per cent of national income (says the IFS) the highest since the 1940s.

I have never known a time when our country has more depressingly resembled a mental health patient presenting with symptoms of what, given the current fashion for syndromes, we should perhaps call ADAS – Advanced Displacement Activity Syndrome. New laws to stop whatever abuse has most recently hit the headlines, new laws to be named after whichever child is the latest victim of private vice or public sector incompetence, new laws to bind ministers to their own promises, new laws to prevent ministers from repealing the new laws already enacted – promising, as it were, not to break their promises… I await the first new law promising that ministers won’t break their promise not to break their promises. And so it goes on as we slither into a nasty stew of suspicion, censoriousness and sentimentality.

We are governed by fundamentally unserious people. I include all political parties in this, but after 13 years of Conservative government it is they who must bear the brunt of criticism. Michael Gove watches an episode of The Blue Planet and before you know it, we have a ban on plastic straws and a plan for a bottle deposit scheme that no one needs. Theresa May wants to be remembered for something more than ballsing up Brexit and suddenly we are committed to the complete de-industrialisation of the economy. Boris Johnson gets COVID-19 and so supermarkets have to move the crisps down the aisle.

When good policies are proposed, they either run out of steam due to incompetence and inertia or are derailed by single interest pressure groups. Instead of taking action, the government sets up an endless succession of public inquiries, consultations and select committee hearings. It appoints members of the blob on large salaries to waffle ineffectually (night tzars, food tzars, cost of living tzars, etc.) and outsources policy-making to people who are guaranteed to propose ludicrous and/or unworkable policies (Henry Dimbleby, Javed Khan, etc.).

The prime minister of the day will talk about how the economy is their number one priority and will pay lip service to the free market once a year at the Conservative Party Conference while spending every waking hour on policies that are at best irrelevant to economic growth and very often antithetical to it. Legislating is used as a substitute for governing and target-setting is used as a substitute for legislating.

The voters, meanwhile, want lower taxes and more spending on public services, but can only have one of these. In fact, they are getting neither. Taxes have gone up and spending on public services - with the glaring exception of the NHS (may peace be upon it) - has gone down, as Kate Andrews explains:

The irony of the austerity era is how much fiscal pain was inflicted in some areas, while the size of the state was barely reduced. Between 2010 and 2015, the government cut public spending by an average of just 0.15 per cent a year. The money saved by the brutal cuts to long-term infrastructure investment was not returned to the taxpayer or used to reduce public sector net debt, which has doubled to £2 trillion since the Tories came to power. Instead, it’s been used to make ever-loftier spending commitments, which is what MPs think the public want to hear.

Those promises fall under two spending areas, mainly within the Department of Health and the Department for Work and Pensions. These costs now take up over 40 per cent of government spending, with £215 billion spent on health and £254 billion on welfare (of which £134 billion is in pensioner benefits). The Tories have come to express their loyalty to the NHS by how much cash they throw at day-to-day running costs, not by whether patients are better treated. Bribing the elderly with a ‘triple lock’ inflation-matching pension pledge has seen the welfare bill skyrocket, as has the cost of keeping 12 per cent of the working-age population on out-of-work benefits.

Politically, these are thorny issues. The NHS is unreformable because its management will run rings around any minister who makes a serious effort to clamp down on waste, inefficiency and prehistoric working practices. Nor can it be privatised because the public have been brainwashed into believing that the state must own and run the healthcare system for it to be free at the point of use.

The triple lock is difficult to fix because pensioners vote in large numbers. Nevertheless, any reasonable person - including, I suspect, most pensioners - can see that increasing pensions by 10.1% this year and by much more than the rate of inflation next year is unfair (wages have recently begun to rise in real terms for the first time in two years). The system is obviously unsustainable, especially in a low growth economy, but few politicians even want to have a conversation about it.

The point is that we are taxing and borrowing at a very high level while trying to keep public services going on the cheap (e.g. using low quality concrete in schools) or on the sly (Private Finance Initiatives). Add to this the palpable sense since the pandemic that many people bitterly resent having to do their jobs at all and there is a growing feeling that nothing works in this country any more.

What Matthew Parris describes as Britain’s ‘entitlement problem’ is what happens when the public has goals that are mutually incompatible. They want lower prices, higher wages, more jobs, more housing and economic growth but are opposed to almost anything that would achieve this. They want nothing more than to see increased funding for the NHS but when a tax is introduced specifically for this purpose (the Health and Social Care Levy) it is so unpopular than there is cross-party support for it to be abolished.

This is a country where the idea of legalising shale gas extraction during a global shortage of natural gas sparks overwhelming outrage. Yesterday, the House of Lords voted against abolishing ‘nutrient neutrality’ rules. These rules have only existed since 2017 and were created by a trade bloc to which the UK no longer belongs, but they are nevertheless considered more important than building 100,000 homes.

Speaking of the EU, the head of the European Commission yesterday complained that ‘global markets are now flooded with cheaper Chinese electric cars’. The horror! People are inevitably calling for more tariffs. This is a classic example of one of the most common forms of unrealistic cakeism. People want lower prices but they also want to protect manufacturers. Like the UK, the EU is all about net zero. It desperately wants more electric cars but apparently not if they are ‘cheaper’.

Closer to home, politicians in York are fuming about a bowling alley and pool bar being granted permission to open. The Labour MP, Rachell Maskell, condemned the Liberal Democrats for (uncharacteristically) allowing the development to go ahead, while the Green Party condemned everybody.

Martina Weitsch, vice chair of York Green Party, said: “We don’t want to come across as the anti-fun party.

“We think that having fun, having a party and enjoying life is important.

“But there is a time and a place for that and it has to consider the impact it has on the people who live in the vicinity.”

The time and place for fun is, apparently, not in the evening in a venue that used to be a nightclub.

It is time for the public to understand what the trade-offs are. They need to be told that yes, you can have all the stuff you say you want - nutrient neutrality, silent city centres, triple lock pensions, net zero, protectionism, bans on everything you don’t like, 20mph speed limits, high speed rail, state-run healthcare, more borrowing, more regulation, more tzars, more badgers, more wolves or whatever - but you are going to be poor.

Nobody wants to hear that and nobody is going to hear that, because politicians won’t level with the electorate. And so politicians will have to make the decision for them. They will have to be - I know this sounds crazy but hear me out - leaders.

It should be taken as read that local residents will oppose any development that they don’t directly profit from, that single issue pressure groups will oppose everything, and that opinion polls will always show support for luxury, high status policies unless the consequences are spelt out. But it seems fairly clear from opinion polls on voting intention in the last two years that lower prices, higher incomes and economic growth are the real priorities of the British public and that these should therefore be the priorities of the British government even though public opinion will be against the engines of economic growth in the short-term.

In short, the only way to give the public what they really want is to ignore public opinion except on the day of a general election.