Why Britain Is So Left-Wing

...and one third of the population lives in municipal housing...

...There were only two ill-fated and short:lived Labour Administrations between the Wars and never once a socialist majority in the House of Commons, yet their opponents were always intellectually and morally on the defensive...

...That freedom is, in Hayek's words, "the source and condition of all moral values," and is compatible only with an economic system in which power is dispersed through competitive markets, has never been widely understood here...

...The elementary economic notion that all resources are scarce and must therefore as far as possible be rationed between competing uses by the price mechanism, is but feebly grasped...

...If proper allowance is made for the time lagbetween the expression of an idea and its universal acceptance, the truth of this becomes immediately apparent...

...That the Conservatives have not only been unable to prevent Britain's twentieth-century drift to collectivism but have actually encouraged it at times (particularly during the 1930s), is a remarkable tribute to the power of ideas in molding societies and nations...

...Lloyd Georgian Liberals proclaimed their social radicalism while the Conservatism of Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain strove to accommodate and pacify the growing militancy of organized labor...

...Many figures now prominent in British public life and in the Civil Service, were in their formative years during the decade before the War and have never completely shrugged off the mental association of unemployment and hunger marches with capitalism...

...A historical explanation of the growth of socialist thinking in Britain is incomplete without an attempt at conveying some of the deeply rooted psychological attitudes which have favored this development...

...Few were there to point out that the collapse of Wall Street in 1929 was a tribute to the State's mismanagement of the monetary system...

...Capitalism, not the Federal Reserve banks, was put in the tumbril...

...As Keynes put it in a famous passage in The General Theory: "Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist...

...Trade" has never been an entirely respectable activity in the eyes of the British...

...In short, British capitalism has never had a widely recognized moral base and its reputation has consequently suffered...

...From about the turn of the century onwards, a small, intellectually powerful band, devoted to their cause and disinterested in its pursuit, inaugurated a campaign of education in socialist theory, which, though ideological in its ends, was by contrast, highly pragmatic in its means...

...The center of gravity of political debate in the thirties shifted steadily to the Left...

...As yet, the countercurrents of libertarian scholarship, mainly nurtured in the United States, have achieved little significant penetration of the groves of British academe and have made even less impact on the self-consciously pragmatic style of Conservative politics,with the notable and towering exception of Mr...

...Government spends half the Gross National Product and accounts for almost half of total investment...

...The result...

...Statistics, however, only tell part of the story...

...The Webbs, in particular, wielded great influence because of their willingness to engage in research, to prepare speeches, and to write articles for others, while they themselves stayed very much in the background...

...In turn they have instilled their convictions and prejudices into the minds of the succeeding generation...

...for in the field of economic and political philosophy there are not many who are influenced by new theories after they are twenty-five or thirty years of age, so that the ideas which civil servants and politicians and even agitators apply to current events are not likely to be the newest...

...The profit motive has been no more popular with the upper classes in Britain than with the working classes...

...By the time the Second World War was over and the first majority socialist government formed under Attlee, the antisocialist cause had been severely compromised by the unjustifiable existence of numerous large private monopolies...

...Government after government cheerfully plunges into the quicksand of statutory control on wages and prices, and ministers stump up and down the country delivering patronizing sermons about "backing Britain" and the necessity of curbing "sectional greed...

...People talk of "our free National Health Service," oblivious of the fact that it is financed by taxes which hit just about everybody...

...Observers may be surprised at this evaluation of a nation that inaugurated the Industrial Revolution and more than any other, depends for her livelihood on foreign trade and world markets...

...Their capacity to work through people minimized opposition and enormously increased the range of opinion over which their views were disseminated...

...That history has made them a relatively conservative and aristocratic people with a respect for tradition and hierarchy, and a dislike for the brashness, classlessness, and individualism of commercial civilization...

...That these cataclysms owed nothing to the spirit and doctrines of liberalism was not understood...

...After 1918, the utopian visions and moral judgments of the socialists dominated the literary and political establishments...

...The wider libertarian dimension of economic liberalism has usually been ignored in Britain because the noneconomic implications of different kinds of economic organization have been subjected to inadequate scrutiny...

...The trouble with Britain is that she has enjoyed the benefits of freedom and constitutional government for so long, that she has tended to take her liberties for granted and has given too little thought to the framework of ideas and institutions which can alone preserve her heritage unstained...

...Socialism encountered no significant ideological resistance from the Right...

...fifteen industries are nationalized at least in part...

...Herbert Spencer's Man against the State (1899) was practically the last major philosophical assault on the principles of collectivism launched in Britain, until the appearance more than forty years later of Hayek's Road to Serfdom...

...The establishment of the public school (private schools in American terminology) system of education, founded in the nineteenth century, was principally designed to educate the sons of the new middle-class industrialists into the ways and outlook of the aristocracy, with the stress being laid on patriotism, duty, and public service...

...It is said that every action provokes an equal and opposite reaction, but this was certainly not true of the intellectual trends of the time...

...Conservatives were often wooed as assiduously as trade unionists and Labour M.P.'s...

...a quarter of the total working population is employed by public bodies...

...The old liberalism (in the European sense) of the nineteenth century was dying...

...Madfhen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back...

...Enoch Powell...

...Schumpeter predicted the death of capitalism and Bernard Shaw viewed Russia "as the wave of the future...

...Few were there to warn of the dire consequences for the international economy and domestic employment of the ensuing tariff wars upon which the major trading nations embarked with such misplaced energy...

...One would expect a country boasting the financial expertise of the City of London and importing two thirds of her food and raw materials, to be anything but anticapitalist in its ethos, yet the record stands...

...Even the responsibility for the Great War, historically produced by statist rivalries—by nationalism and protectionism—was laid at the door of "the Gospel of Mammon...

...In the postwar years the Conservatives have remained on the intellectual defensive and as a result have done almost nothing radical about breaking up the public sector and streamlining the Welfare State...

...Ironically enough, the Webbs were able to do all this largely as a result of the opportunities their private wealth afforded them to run a house with servants in which they could hold parties and give dinners for the purpose of fostering contacts and encouraging sympathizers...

...Although the inefficiency of socialism has by now been repeatedly demonstrated, although its intellectual pretensions and moral claims have been exposed and refuted by giants like Mises, Hayek, Friedman, and Rothbard, most politicians, journalists, teachers, and academics, are still marked by the legacy of the 1930s and 1940s...

...In the country where economics was first dubbed "the dismal science," little attention has been paid to the link between the free market and the free society...

...The professions have always been regarded as embodying the notion of "service" while trade, in comparison, has been seen as an essentially self-seeking search for profits...

...The British, like any other nation, are the prisoners of their history...

...The quality and inner consistency of the Conservative fight against nationalization was consequently gravely weakened...

...More significantly still, the very currency of political debate in Britain is loaded with pro-collectivist connotations...

...Most obnoxious of all, terms like "excess profits," "social justice," and "fairness" are bandied about with little thought given to the inherently subjective valuations they reflect...

...Everywhere the State abused its stewardship and destroyed the regulating mechanisms of economic liberalism, but the closing of factory gates and the lengthening bread lines were blamed on the market...

...But, soon or late, it is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil...

...Hence the Left has got away with its creation of a spurious dichotomy between the spiritual richness of the socialist commonwealth and the acquisitive materialism of capitalist society...

...There was no discrimination between the political parties...

...This was the age of the Stracheys and the Bloomsbury Set, articulating the disenchantment with liberal society felt by many in the wake of the bitterness and desolation of the First World War...

...Though its vital importance has always been acknowledged, its status as an occupation has never been on a level with that of the great traditional professions of law, medicine, and the armed forces...

...I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas...

...Phrases like the "Welfare State" and "the public services" are used in such a way as to suggest that anything which is a service is necessarily altruistic and as such must be provided by government...

...The cartelization of British industry under the Conservative governments of this period was largely inspired by socialist ideas about transport licensing and marketing boards...

...The Spurious Dichotomy These attitudes have been as strongly entrenched in the minds of those engaged in trade and manufacture as in others...

...A Generation of Fabians A whole generation grew up in politics and in the universities, deeply imbued with socialist ideals and reforming zeal...

...As for the Conservatives, they were caught up in the dream of Empire and consequently their social policies were paternalist and their economics protectionist...

...The early socialists, the most eminent of whom were Beatrice and Sidney Webb, set out to win all sections of public opinion to their way of thinking...

...The advance of British socialism is explained by the intellectual history of Britain in the last eighty years, which is the history of the development and acceptance of socialist ideas...

...Events only seemed to confirm the criticisms and prognostications of the Left as the British economy sank into the Depression in the aftermath of the Great Crash...

...Thus Beatrice Webb was able to write in her autobiography, Our Partnership, that she and her husband: "feel assured that with the School [London School of Economics] as a teaching body, the Fabian Society as a propagandist organization, the LCC [London County Council] Progressives as an object lesson in electoral success, our books as the only elaborate original work in economic fact and theory, no young man or woman who is anxious to study or to work in public affairs can fail to come under our influence...

...So-called pragmatists, who like to think of politics as the art of the possible, are usually unaware that what at any time is deemed "politically possible" is itself a product of the prevailing climate of ideas...

...Not, indeed immediately, but after a certain interval...