British viewers of Prime Minister’s Questions yesterday were treated to the spectacle of the Chancellor of the Exchequer visibly weeping as she glared, like a wronged spouse, at her boss, Sir Keir Starmer, from the front bench of the House of Commons.
We’ll come to the bigger story behind this image in due course, but the ‘optics’ of the moment, as the SpAds would put it, were too precious and too apposite not to memorialise. This is the nakedly visible representation not just of an individual in a spot of bother, but of an entire political order coming to an end. While all developed states are heading for economic, political, moral and spiritual crises, Britain is the leader of the pack. Its governing regime, the structure by which the ‘some’ have ruled the ‘many’ since 1997, is clapped out and beyond rescue. It has no ideas and it has, to use that old Match of the Day-ism, lost the dressing room. And one can almost see this realisation in Reeves’ expression – even while recognising that she may have had more personal reasons for her tears.
The reason why it is Britain that is at the cutting edge of global decline is that it is Britain that has most thoroughly embraced what Leo Strauss called ‘political hedonism’, meaning, essentially, the politicisation of the idea that the good is synonymous with the absence of displeasure.
Strauss called Thomas Hobbes the first political hedonist because Hobbes was the first to declare the state to be founded not on natural right but on authority. It was not that there was no such thing as morality; Hobbes was clear about that. But moral principle did not provide adequate grounding for rule, because opinions about how to apply it differed. Rule was rather simply the expression of the authority of the sovereign, created by human ‘imaginations’. It existed to serve an end: the creation of a social order without which life would be, famously, nasty, poor, brutish and short. In other words, it derived from an understanding that the political good and the avoidance of displeasure were identical.
This conceptualisation of the role of the state as being to minimise displeasure, having begun in the 1600s, has now reached fruition in truly exotic and extraordinary forms. And it explains a great deal about our current predicament. It explains Reeves’s (surely now inevitable) downfall. But it also explains much else about the manner in which things are deteriorating.
Let’s begin with the Universal Credit and Personal Independence Payment Bill. The basic problem here is easily stated: the British state spends way beyond its means. And the big culprit is social security. Total welfare spending in 2023-24, according to the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), was £296.3 billion; by 2029-30 it will be £377.7 billion, and heading further north. £81.4 billion here, £81.4 billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money: this situation is not sustainable. One way or another, it will have to stop.
In response, the Government had decided to make what are referred to widely as ‘cuts’, chiefly to what is called Personal Independence Payment or ‘PIP’. PIP is a wheeze wherein people can claim around £100 a week (the exact amount varies) for help with “extra living costs” if they have “a long-term physical or mental health condition or disability” and experience “difficulty doing certain everyday tasks or getting around”. These payments are no doubt important for some people but are clearly handed out too easily, and are projected to balloon in cost from £17 billion today to somewhere around £35 billion by 2026-27. They will be responsible for the lion’s share of a projected increase in outlay on disability benefits from about £30 billion to £50 billion in the same timeframe – which is to say, two years.
Up with this is something which we cannot put – if we want to remain solvent, anyway – and Labour duly decided to make the aforementioned ‘cuts’ through the new bill. These ‘cuts’ in fact translated into a reduction in the rate of increase, in the order of about £5 billion. This would mostly be achieved by changing the way that eligibility for PIP was to be assessed – making the exercise a bit more stringent, in other words.
Shaving £5 billion off a £20 billion increase, which is itself only part of an £81.4 billion increase, would in itself have been small beer. But even this modest speed bump lying across the road to insolvency has proved politically impossible to keep in place. First, a successful rebellion by Labour MPs forced an amendment which protected existing PIP recipients from any changes. And then, just the other day, a panicked Keir Starmer sought to buy off the rebels with a further concession: there will be no change made to the PIP assessment at all until a ministerial review is concluded in the autumn of 2025 – and since this review, the so-called ‘Timms review’, will be ‘co-produced’ with disability campaign groups, it seems safe to say it will recommend no changes are made in perpetuity.
One year into a five-year Parliament, then, with Sir Keir Starmer sitting on what it is fair to call a stonking majority of around 170, it has proved impossible for his Government to produce even nugatory salami-slice reductions in the rate at which welfare spending is going up – let alone reducing welfare spending overall. His Work and Pensions Secretary, Liz Kendall, is one of the very few Labour politicians around who even has the faintest glimmering of the light of capability in the eyes. But she has got nowhere. She is wading in treacle. Welfare reform is kaput. It has ceased to be. Bereft of life, it rests in peace. It is a dead policy.
This is, of course, bad. It depicts the country’s political class in their worst possible light – cynical, short-termist, unintelligent and cowardly. But above all, it is suggestive of sclerosis: a profound incapacity to take action where it is needed.
But it is interesting to set these developments in context. Because there were two episodes in recent weeks that frame what happened to the Universal Credit and Personal Independence Payment Bill in an interesting light. In the two moments in question, Parliament moved with quite startling swiftness and alacrity to legislate on matters of great significance – and without any of the dramatic rebellions and U-turns which accompanied the Government’s doomed attempt at welfare reform.
In the first of these two episodes, legislation regarding so-called ‘assisted dying’, or euthanasia, found its way through the House of Commons to the House of Lords, after having had its third reading in the Commons on June 23rd. The Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, if it becomes law, as now seems likely, will provide a framework within which adults will be able to lawfully request assistance to end their own lives – as happens currently in places such as the Netherlands, Belgium, Canada and the US state of Oregon. This bill may well have difficulties getting through the Lords, where it will no doubt be extensively debated, but it is hard to imagine that now ultimately it will not be passed in some form or other. This, it is important to emphasise, was not mentioned in Labour’s manifesto issued prior to the 2024 election, and came rather out of the blue – yet we now find ourselves in the position that euthanasia is relatively undramatically going to become part of our lives after a couple of fairly desultory Parliamentary debates.
Meanwhile, at the other end of life, so to speak, in the second of our two episodes, MPs voted on June 17th to decriminalise abortion up to the full term of nine months, where previously it had only been decriminalised to the 24th week of pregnancy. It will still be unlawful to assist a woman in carrying out an abortion after 24 weeks of the pregnancy. But it will now be lawful, essentially, for women to abort babies themselves up to literally the point of birth.
This dramatic change in the law took place through a brief amendment to another piece of legislation, the Crime and Policing Bill, which was tabled by the Labour MP Tonia Antoniazzi and voted on by the Commons more or less immediately. And, as is the case with assisted dying, it will almost certainly now come into effect – although it will, for reasons of process, have to accompany the rest of the Crime and Policing Bill as it wends its way through the House of Lords.
The contrast here is stark. Parliament, it seems, is very bad at limiting the growth of welfarism. But it finds the overturning of social mores and traditional morality – which is in its own way far more consequential even than national solvency – very straightforward. What explains this?
The answer, of course, lies in modern Britain’s commitment to Strauss’s political hedonism. If the only purpose of the state is to minimise displeasure then it naturally follows that measures taken to ‘eliminate suffering’ are easily accomplished – they are things which public power finds it easy and indeed logical to do. And the minimisation of displeasure is, of course, transparently the rationale both for the legalisation of ‘assisted dying’ and the decriminalisation of abortion up to birth (the latter, for instance, being described as necessary by the British Pregnancy Advice Service to ensure that “there will be no more women investigated after enduring a miscarriage, no more women dragged from their hospital beds to the back of a police van, no more women separated from their children because of our archaic abortion law”).
Shrinking the welfare state is within the opposite category: it is something which it is impossible to do without causing a great deal of displeasure indeed. And it is therefore a project which modern politicians find extraordinarily difficult. It gives them the heebie-jeebies. They are not able to conceptualise that the purpose of politics may be something other than making the population feel nice. And they approach the making of the slightest reduction with vast timidity and trepidation.
Antony de Jasay, who had read and admired Strauss, gave all of this a formal explanation in his seminal book The State (1983). Here, the basic rationale is made plain. If a society loses a commitment to pre-political norms – an overarching system of law connected to social values; a sense that the future matters; a desire to maintain an association between a particular people and a particular place – then all that is left is a relationship of bargaining between state and society. Why should the state exist? The only answer is transactional: to make life more pleasurable, or less displeasurable – in other words, to embrace political hedonism and maximise utility.
This means that modernity, which above all is associated with the abandonment of pre-political commitments, is characterised by a tendency for the state to grow. It wins loyalty the only way it knows how – by cobbling together a majority and distributing to it the property of a minority. Any governing apparatus’ essential appeal is therefore always the same: it assembles a coalition of the ‘unprivileged’ and says to them, ‘Lend me your support and I will give you the resources held by the privileged.’ Support is leant through voting but also through the perhaps more important but less widely acknowledged implicit promise not to revolt. And the effect gets bigger and bigger over time because the natural incentive is to increase the size of the ‘unprivileged’ majority and bestow on it a larger reallocation or redistribution of resources; any governing regime is much more worried by attempts to outflank it from the ‘big state’ rather than ‘small state’ angle, and is therefore always incentivised to itself govern more, as it were, ‘bigly’.
This puts the state on a trajectory to what de Jasay called “welfare-dispensing drudgery”. For all that politicians may have other ideas which they wish to pursue, other values which they wish to actualise, other projects they would like to see to fruition, all that they can in the end achieve is the micromanagement of redistribution. The assemblage of conglomerations of interest groups into a workable majority and the operationalisation of the transfer of wealth to it from the minority becomes a bigger and bigger task, until in the end it is all the state can really achieve and becomes its sole occupation.
The modern British state meets the description of ‘welfare-dispensing drudge’ rather nicely: this is a governing apparatus that will be spending £108 billion a year merely paying the interest on the national debt by 2026-27, more than it spends on defence or education. And all the while it will be overseeing a growth across the same time frame, as we have seen, of £81.4 billion in social security spending. Its sole raison d’être appears to be to keep a lid on social tension by buying off particular interest groups so as to hold them together for ramshackle support. And, as we have seen in this recent debacle, it appears both unwilling and unable to revoke the trend – if anything it appears poised to grow yet further as an ever-increasing proportion of the population is encouraged to rely on it for financial support.
This can go in two directions, de Jasay tells us. The first direction leads towards a big crash. It could simply be the case that those who govern us drive us into a wall through sheer incompetence as the complexities of welfare-dispensing drudgery become too difficult to manage. Nobody should discount the likelihood of this happening: history is replete with examples of ruling classes doing profoundly stupid things, and very often in those examples the rulers who made the mistakes were considerably more capable, learned, intelligent and gifted than the likes of Sir Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves.
The second direction leads towards totalitarianism. Welfare-dispensing drudgery, in de Jasay’s account, is inherently unstable, because sooner or later those who are in power tire of this mundane activity and seek instead to do more exciting things – whether that be the construction of a well-oiled kleptocracy or the realisation of truth and justice or anything in between. And in order to do those more exciting things, they need to create ‘surplus power’ above and beyond the oversight of redistribution. One way to achieve this is simply to do away with the messy, awkward, unpleasant process of balancing competing interests that comes with deliberative, democratic politics, and replace it with naked state control of all social resources. This has the beneficial effect of inculcating reliance by the population on the state itself, and none of the untidy drawbacks of trying to manage redistribution with an eye on the polls and the ballot box. And it thereby allows rulers to free up time and energy for other more romantic and, perhaps, personally rewarding activities.
My money is on the former of these scenarios emerging, and I think it will indeed emerge very soon. I am not sure there is a person alive in Britain today who does not feel in his or her bones that something awful is going to happen in the course of this Parliament (perhaps there are a few people down in Tunbridge Wells). It would be amazing if we make our way to 2029 unscathed. The problems are too deep-rooted and the path to a different grounding for state authority than political hedonism is too overgrown. Plan accordingly: that’s my strong advice.
Dr David McGrogan is an Associate Professor of Law at Northumbria Law School. You can subscribe to his Substack – News From Uncibal – here.
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Very interesting and thought provoking. I can’t reconcile my feeling of existential dread about the economic future with what I see around me: everyone I know seems to be moving house, going on fancy holidays, driving an expensive car; am I being too gloomy?
No you’re not…
Most of the public aren’t aware of the mess we’re in and I think it’s going to rapidly become one of those situations where everything is fine right until the point it isn’t fine…
However at that changeover point I think things are going to get very difficult and a lot of the country is going to get a very rude awakening…
Exactly.
Difficult to feel any sympathy whatsoever for the forthcoming travails of those voting for the Uniparty over the last 20 years or so.
Too gloomy? Not really. I have been predicting a crash for some years now even prior to the Scamdemic and Bozo trumpeting a Great Reset. If a reset was on the way it certainly necessitates some form of prior destruction and this is what Kneel is under orders to produce.
State Benefits are nothing more than a runaway train and my time in DWP saw only year on year more imaginative ways to stoke the engine. Clearly it has now reached an impossible speed and the only ending will be a crash and the crash will be brutal. No wonder the remnants of the British Army are training for civil war.
Spot on. Most people I know who are intelligent enough to see what’s going on are almost wilfully blind because they are doing so well and having such a good time with holidays, flash cars and nice homes that they don’t want to hear about an impending crash. It’s the moral dimension that’s worst…..the lack of purpose for younger people and the virtuous feeling middle class people get from being in favour of ever growing welfare bills, immigration etc. etc. which guarantees no politician with the guts to address the situation will ever get elected. Look how Farage has gone native.
We also have the prospect of robotics taking over what is left of production, the same thing could happen in the professions and even the medical profession will not be immune (no pun intended). We are almost certainly facing rapid change that will make the Industrial Revolution look like a side show. It will effectively increase wealth at the expense of labour (work). So the question will be how wealth is distributed if the problem of production vs purchasing power can be solved. It’s no good having massive productive power if nobody can buy anything.
I think Elon Musk has the right idea, he appears to have realised that car ownership will be replaced by car hire (robotaxi) and he is moving into humanoid robotics in a very big way. He and Trump are at odds and I think Musk will be around longer than Trump. Whether I’m right or wrong remains to be seen but this is the way things are moving.
We need people in power who can deal with these issues, but it is unprecedented, we may well be entering a period where abundance is possible but getting from the outdated communist/socialist system to the new world is an unprecedented challenge. There will be a New World Order but not in the way the global elite have been trying to force on us.
I just don’t think our political class have the ability to cope with what is going to happen, their are plenty of people like Musk out there but do we the ability to let them do their thing and create a balance at the same time? It could be a very bumpy road and people need to start focusing on these issues. If we can find people with vision to guide us through what is coming down the tracks at light speed we may get through it, but our current batch of politicians are not up to the task.
A really good observation.I seem to be in a similar bubble and often wonder if I am reading too much doomsday scenarios.
But I cannot understand how current spending can continue.
I do think you can sense it in less than full restaurants, ability to get last minute theatre tickets.
I think these are signs that the middle classes have started to watch their spending.
Disturbing and compelling in equal measure, thank you.
I would only add that the forthcoming explosion will not be an isolated one – the Maastricht criteria for the Euro zone have been tossed aside by the very caste that pretends to believe in The Rule of Law. France is running a similarly impossible deficit and is in a similar state of stasis due to the deification of the provident State.
Sadly, even the US is on the same path, with Musk breaking with Trump over exactly this issue, a tragic waste of a potentially powerful synergy.
In the Netherlands there is now talk of virtual capital gains tax, so taxing gains on your investments which have not been cashed. So you would potentially have to cash in any gains to pay for this tax and are just unlucky if the investment looses value the year after…
If the Labour Party – a socialist party – cannot reform the welfare state – something it created – then no one can.
Ponzi schemes cannot be tapered. They cannot be wound down to a soft landing. Not even to a controlled crash.
Once the poverty of the 1930s had been alleviated by the post war Labour governments, a new definition of poverty had to be created to keep Labour in business. And subsequently the Tories, given that they had become social democrat by the 1930s. The oddity of this can be seen in that the numbers of people measured to be in poverty fell after the 2008 financial crash. This was simply because the median income had fallen.
As for the abortion amendments, when the Ambulance Service turns up at a woman’s domicile after a DIY abortion up to the point of birth, they will have to pretend that the wreckage they find there isn’t a baby.
I don’t know about your first point – surely it would be up to a conservative party to reduce spending on benefits? I mean, one that was actually fiscally responsible? It doesn’t seem that any such party exists at the moment…
I think the problem is that, without economic growth and the reduction of idiotic taxation, there won’t be growth in employment to replace welfare payments.
If people are forced to work without seeing the benefits of doing so then they will simply refuse to do more than the bare minimum.
Personally I think this is where we are now…
I’m 42 and will pay my mortgage off next year having brought at 26.
If I was 26 today I wouldn’t have a hope of buying my house at today’s prices. It’s the same for most other young people. Rents are through the roof and most are being pushed into HMOs with no security.
With the changes that immigration has brought to the employment market and AI starting to become more and more used most are looking and not seeing much of a future to work towards so why bother trying…
I agree. Everything has been taken from the young. Their ability to buy a house and start a family is near impossible. On top of that they have been saddled with the debt of generations before them. What is the point of working?
Many school leavers, that used to go to technical college and participated in the manufacturing industry, now go and study an Arts or Humanities subject that makes them less employable, wealth consumers instead of wealth creators, with no understanding that intelligence (that they think they possess) is no substitute for Education and Experience in a relevant discipline. For most, I’m thinking of a STEM related subject as that is how Wealth is most easily created. The Arts and Humanities are a luxury, an enjoyable luxury and, in excess, are an unpleasant luxury.
Exactly this. There aren’t enough jobs to change the balance. But cutting welfare without jobs to go to is taking more into poverty. And all this time, inflation especially food and utilities is pushing from the other side. Something has to give. Strange that people vote socialism because they think they will get a little more, and they end up getting a lot less.
‘…..at the moment….’? Such has hardly ever, maybe never, existed.
The Conservative Party repeatedly won general elections and had to clear up Labour’s economic messes. Then Cameron entered No.10, and thought, ‘why bother, we’ll be the heir to Blair’.
The abortion amendments are just a first step. Who on earth thinks they are going to stop at this stage?
There will be some cases of self-administered late term abortions that will require medical assistance. From then it will be only a small change to make the medical assistance available also for the induction of the procedure too. Makes sense, doesn’t it? All for the woman’s safety, compassion, empathy, blabla.
Ultimately with suitably clever propaganda anything can be portrayed as an act of charity.
Same with euthanasia. To start with it will be just the terminally ill. But of course, one way or another we are all terminally ill, as we all die eventually.
You can be in ‘relative poverty’ no matter how rich you are. And I do love the idea that a financial crash that makes everyone poorer ‘lifts’ people out of it. But who cares whether it’s self-contradicting nonsense or not?
Wasn’t it Nietzsche who predicted that there were only two possible outcomes for a godless society: nihilism (which, I think can manifest itself as hedonism) or totalitarianism? But nihilism can’t last very long, so probably totalitarianism.
The signs are certainly visible, since Covid the governing elite has also seen how easy it is to implement it.
I could see how an emerging Islamist movement could take over. This may seem far fetched at the moment but let’s not forget that Lenin’s Bolshevik party was also a relative fringe group; the main thing that made them so special was that they had no reservations about using violence and terror to achieve their aims. Sounds familiar?
Islam taking over? That is the plan.
I’m not doubting you Hux. I tend to flip-flop between malevolence and incompetence like the Good Lord Toby, but whose plan is it if Islam is the plan.? It is certainly happening, and the great leaders seem unwilling to bring down immigration and protect the Islamist. But who ultimately is driving this plan, and how do they benefit..? Cui bono.
The hugely wealthy globalist cabal (individuals, foundations, NGOs and trans national corporations) who seek to replace the nation state with some kind of global technocractic order may be a good place to start.
Smudger’s reply matches what I would have posted.
My stumbling block with this theory is the clash of ideals with the woke brigade. There’s not room for both so one has to go.
Which seems eminently feasible. Creating social strife is built in to all the planning.
In what way does the consideration of these complex but valid theories relate to the chancellor’s very public loss of self-control? Can anyone enlighten me? Had she found an even more terrifying black hole than the last one?
Perhaps she realised she’d just been pushed into one.
Of course! It’s obvious now you point it out….
Well she’s certainly recovered well and appears to have her ‘game face’ back in situ. Perhaps she’s bi-polar and just needed an increased dose of ‘uppers’;
”Rachel Reeves, 24 hours later.
Don’t they realise they look like a joke? Everyone in the country saw her crying yesterday, and now today, she’s wearing makeup and a fake smile.”
https://x.com/TheNorfolkLion/status/1940735649482744036
Yeah, she’s definitely back in the saddle;
”Rachel Reeves has been talking about ‘reforming’ cash ISAs for a while to “encourage investment” in the dying London Stock Exchange. She’s now set to slash the allowance from £20,000 down to as low as £5,000 in her Mansion House speech on 15 July.
Now the UK’s largest mortgage lenders – Yorkshire, Coventry and Skipton building societies – have said cutting the allowance will send mortgage costs soaring.”
https://order-order.com/2025/07/03/reeves-to-send-mortgage-costs-soaring-after-cash-isa-raid/
The housing situation’s not looking any better, is it?;
”EXCLUSIVE: Migrants to be housed in family homes – councils offer CASH and refurbishments after Rachel Reeves vows to empty hotels.
“British citizens will be pushed to the back of the housing queue. This is exactly what’s happening.”
https://x.com/TalkTV/status/1940852121555161267
Is there a risk of BBC Parliament tightening up on what is broadcast live, or modifying camera work, editing etc? Censorship at large, perhaps, maybe even on the grounds that it stabilises the markets etc.
I doubt it would work, these days everybody has a mobile phone, it’s easy to record anything.
“One way to achieve this is simply to do away with the messy, awkward, unpleasant process of balancing competing interests that comes with deliberative, democratic politics, and replace it with naked state control of all social resources.”
In other words, create a quango with an impressive sounding name, appoint your friend at the top and then abdicate all responsibility to them.
Looks to me like you’re buggered guys, luckily I’m already long gone.
Succinctly put! 🙂
Thomas Hobbes actually described the state of nature that (in his view) would prevail without the imposition of a social order as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”: I am very surprised that David McGrogan has got this wrong, the solitary aspect being important as an allusion to an almost total absence of social bonds, a state which drives the poverty, nastiness etc. At least, I suppose, he didn’t use the usual misquotation ie. “nasty, brutish and short.”
Or another version: “nasty, British, and short”
I’m wondering which will kick off first:
The civil war, as predicted by Prof David Betz.
Or the financial crisis which the Blob and the Westminster Uni-Party have primed over the past few years and Labour MPs are now doing their level best to deliver.
Whichever one comes first will inevitably lead to the other.
The Crash comes first because TPTB can determine the timing.
What is also not taken into account is the public sector pension provision which is held “off book”. another major element of contribution to an imminent explosion in the economy
The UK Government is nothing more than a giant charity, taking money from those who are in the private sector and dispensing it too the population it depends on to keep it in power.
Yes people feel something bad is going to happen, but when you’re a recipient of benefits, and that’s a lot of people (think child benefit for example), then there is the public sector, who earn more and who have free pensions a private sector employee can only dream of, and then of course the migrant who is granted citizenship, because that’s another voter.
These Turkeys don’t vote for Christmas.
So yes the economy will crash, and yes these Turkeys will lose their benefits, But the real losers are the poor saps who work, take no benefits, own a home, and a private pension, they will see their fruits of labour wiped away.
The Turkeys apart from having to actually work lose nothing that was theirs in the first place.
What I learnt in school about Hobbes was that he considered the natural state of human affairs the so-called war of all against all. This is essentially the feudal situation where life was largely lawless and people only owned what they could defend against those who’d want to take it from them. This led to a society where competing bands of armed people who hard sworn allegiance to some lord where in a constant state of petty warfare against each other and those who couldn’t defend themselves at all. The term robber baron was originally coined for this situation. This ended in the early modern period when individual knights and barons were stripped of their right to go to war against each other in favour of the now usual system of codified laws, official courts tasked with creating authoritative interpretation of the laws and police forces organized by the state who’d enforce the law by violent means when necessary.
Hobbes was one of the philosophers/ state theoreticians who created the theoretical underpinnings and justifications for this new mode of government. His idea was that the subjects of the state had essentially all agreed to a so-called social contract which stripped them of some of their traditional freedoms like the freedom to make war on other people and take whatever they could from them and in exchange for this, the state guaranteed to enable them to live their lives and engage in whatever their business affairs were in peace.
This has certainly neither anything to do with hedonism – denying a meaning of life beyond chasing worldly pleasures – nor with the state being responsible for avoidance of displeasure in the McGrogan uses the term, as I’m strongly suspect that he’s not living in a castle surrounded by a moat with his knight retainers and spending most of his time with training how to use arms well enough to ensure that no one will ever dare to rob the precious volumes of his legal library.
Something which really sucks about so-called democracy is the constant apocalyptical undertones of public debate. Nobody can ever simply be wrong about something and no situation is ever just one which could and should be improved further, provided someone has an idea how to do that and the means to follow it through. Instead, we always get the fight between the mad forces of darkness and severely embattled forces of light and the price is always the fate of the world as we know it even in the case of the most tedious petty disputes (like this one).
How about a less hysteric viewpoint? The current Labour government will spend money in ways the opposition disapproves of. A future government led by a different party will very likely spend money in ways Labour – then the opposition – will disapprove of. But neither of both will have apocalyptic consequences as the disagreement is really about fine-tuning of government spending the bulk of which will – by-and-large – remain unchanged regardless of which party is presently in government.
I agree.
What plan have you got in place?
If anyone thinks that there are not £billions that can be safely cut from the welfare bill then Richard Littlejohn’s column last week on what you can get a PIP for and the explosion of motability cars to the point where you don’t even have to be able to drive, just know somebody who can drive it for you.