When Andy Burnham returned from the summer recess to make his first Commons speech as Prime Minister, he promised MPs a “clear diagnosis” of what ails Britain. From the 1980s, he said, the country took a series of wrong turns. According to him, political power was centralised, economic assets were privatised and industry was hollowed out. Thatcher was the villain and the 1970s constituted the lost Eden. The Institute of Economic Affairs rightly called it a speech steeped in nostalgia. Weeks later, at the Labour conference in Liverpool, the PM went further. Invoking 1945, he declared that “we built the common good”, then promised to repeal the Thatcher-era ban on public ownership of water companies and to launch GB Grid, a publicly owned company to take on private energy operators. Energy, water and housing were to come back under “public control”.
“Common good” is no accident of speechwriting. It is the title of Mariana Mazzucato’s recent book. She is the self-billed “one of the world’s most influential economists” and her consultancies with governments, international agencies and politicians are too numerous to list here but investigative reporter Charlotte Gill’s blog provides good coverage. The day before Burnham took the Liverpool stage, she published a Project Syndicate column urging that the state’s public-finance institutions be scaled up and the fiscal rules reformed to let them “grow”. Britain, she says, has recorded the lowest public investment in the G7 for most of three decades, a gap she puts at
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Common good = communism ie. an unelected “elite” deciding what is good for the proles and imposing it on them by taking from undeserving Peter and giving it to deserving Paul.
Ah, the common good.
Wasn’t that was communism was about?
The idea that you can have a society where, whilst the individual is reduced to a terrorized, enslaved non-entity, society as a whole enjoys unprecedented levels of wellbeing.
The idea that stealing from the slightly better off and giving it to the poor will make society, on average, wealthier.
Or, as Dostoyevsky put it: why shouldn’t we kill the loathsome old loan shark woman and give her money to the poor student? Everybody will be better off.
The spreadsheet calculation that you can just confiscate and distribute and a new era of prosperity will follow.
It never works.
Never.
These guys are stuck in a simplistic Marxist explanation of the world and no matter how many times it fails, they are still ideologically wedded to it.