Britain Is Sleepwalking Into Total State Control of Our Daily Lives

In a gloomy piece for the Telegraph, Sam Ashworth-Hayes warns that Britain is blindly sleepwalking into total state control, sacrificing individual freedom to an ever-expanding, intrusive government that now dominates every aspect of daily life. Here’s an excerpt:

Thank God we won the Cold War. For a while there, it was touch and go, the future of the world on a knife-edge.

On one side, we had a system permeated top to bottom by an official state ideology. Employment and freedom was made contingent on adherence, an extensive network of censors and informers was established to maintain the illusion that dissenters were a minority, harsh punishments were meted out to political prisoners and the state took control of vast swathes of the economy.

On the other, the promise of freedom: freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, freedom of religion and association, freedom to do as you would with your private property.

It was, as I said, close. But in the end, despite Thatcher’s brief, doomed fightback, the Socialists won.

It’s a tongue-in-cheek reading of British history, but it doesn’t take a great deal of exaggeration to see how it could be true.

As AJP Taylor once wrote, “until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state beyond the post office and the policeman”.

That is emphatically not the case today. Having won the wars, the advocates of freedom comprehensively lost the peace. They lost to such a degree that those of us born and raised afterwards find it hard to comprehend the scale of the change.

It’s easiest to start with the size of the state. To be sure, socialism in Britain has receded from its high point. The nationalisation of coal, iron, steel, electricity, gas, roads, aviation, telecommunications and railways has been mostly undone, although steel and rail are on the way back in.

But by comparison to our pre-war starting point, we live in a nearly unrecognisable country. In 1913, taxes and spending took up around 8% of GDP. Today, they account for 35% and 45% respectively. To put it another way, almost half of all economic activity in Britain involves funds allocated at the behest of the government, and over half of British adults rely on the state for major parts of their income.

And if anything, this understates the degree of government control. Outcomes which are nominally left to the market are rigged by a state which sees prices as less as a way for markets to clear, and more as a tool for social engineering.

Universities charge tuition fees capped by the state to students funded by the state, with the looming threat of lost university status if they veer from approved principles. Energy prices are capped, and in crisis subsidised. Mandates are put in place for the installation of heat pumps and sale of zero-emission vehicles as a share of business.

Wherever you look, there is meddling. The judiciary has revived the labour theory of value, awarding tens of millions of pounds in equal pay claims to shop workers who explicitly acknowledge they would never have taken warehouse jobs unless they paid far more than retail.

The benefits system has recast the old mantra as “from each according to their pre-tax labour income, to each according to their needs-based assessment”. The support of the proletariat is purchased, the middle classes are punished.

And the Government appears to view its primary task to be finding caches of private wealth or institutions that have slipped state control – private schools, pensions, and the like – and reeling them in.

Worth reading in full.