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.
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Voodoo “climate science,” voodoo “energy policy,” voodoo “carbon taxes.”
The “transition” being made by Britain and Europe is a transition to economic ruin.
God save us from wonks posing in hard hats and visibility jackets.
By an amazing coincidence these bits of voodoo all have the same aim: bringing the population under micro-managed control.
And extracting more and more cash via taxes, levies, subsidies etc etc – the money only goes one way…
The EU has nothing to do with trade; it is about politics. The globalist Establishment wants us IN the EU and is carrying out a step-by-step process to make us an Associate Member.
Our only hope is a Reform Government, which actually implements LEAVE.
There is no such thing as an Associate Member of the EU so it helps if you get your facts correct.
During the months before the EU Referendum, the creation of an Associate Member status was being discussed and then PM Call Me Dave was praying that they would propose this so he could use it during his campaign to keep us tied to the EU but to his horror it was not proceeded with so he hoped a rushed vote would save him – it didn’t of course.
And on facts, it is amazing after over 5 years since leaving how few politicians and media journalists understand that the EU Customs Union is ONLY for members of the EU.
They’re going to create a 2-tier EU (Eurozone = EU; non Eurozone – Associate Member).
Cameron initially proposed it with the UK leading the non-Eurozone nations, but they refused. Macron revived the idea. They’re just waiting for the Ukraine war to be over then it will be created:
This all comes as no surprise. The Labour Party and their satellites (Greens, Libdems etc) and most Tories, have, since Brexit been doing their utmost to create conditions to reverse the will of the people. It can only be said that these people are zealots and therefore unable to reason outside of their own insane ideology.
I hope reform make it absolutely clear that policies enacted by this unpopular idiotic government will be reversed.
But I suppose the only good thing to say is that they are just digging a bigger hole for themselves!
Starmer et al seem to be pursuing a similar crash and burn course as Sunak did. Almost like they don’t care about staying in power – just do as much damage as possible for one term then slide into cushy quango jobs, lecture circuit etc.
Agreed. I’ve always thought that from the perspective of the Tories and Labour the referendum was a means of getting a remain vote to enable them to join the Euro and fully give up the last vestiges of sovereignty. It would have served the dual purpose of convincing the rest of the EU populations that all was OK. Unfortunately it all went wrong when people voted to leave, so they went all out to muddy the waters, elected May and bunch of dubious characters, sent Starmer and the rest of the traitorous bunch of (expletive) to plot with Brussels on how to concoct a dodgy deal.
So now we are faced with a couple of years of more BS. No doubt they will do what they did in Ireland and pretend that the economy has rebounded when in reality the whole thing is a house of cards.
The whole project is teetering on the edge of disaster and that will spur on these fools.
I am surprised Sunak stayed as an MP and didn’t go back to the US or home to India. But then as he and his wife are already loaded he doesn’t need to grub around for money post PM-ship like Blair and Johnson.
Rishi Sunak is set to return to his former universities as he takes up two new jobs in the UK and America.
The former prime minister announced he would be joining the University of Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government as a member of its World Leaders Circle.
He will also take up a visiting fellowship at the Hoover Institution, a think tank based at Stanford University in California.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvgl7823ezqo
He must have a very light workload as an MP….
Next Starmer will ban political parties opposed to the EU dictatorship.
I think that would be too risky and too obvious a strategy. I would expect him to do something more devious, say by finding ways of restricting funding to parties that are not aligned with the anti-Brexit strategy, or by silencing high-profile members of those parties
They already are, see the Stasi tactics they are enacting at the moment and read my comments on the DS, which are if anything understated.
https://dailysceptic.org/2025/05/19/the-sheer-bug-eyed-insanity-of-labours-banter-ban/
Two-Tier and The Blob have cancelled democracy in the UK.
The anti-democratic EU rules.
I place him in the same category as Philby, Blunt, Burgess and MacLean.