Ed Miliband appears determined to turn the clock back and to make the country relive the disasters of the past.
Immediately after the Second World War, the Labour government of Clement Attlee introduced a range of measures, some of which laid the foundations for the mess in which we find ourselves today. Nationalisation of a variety of industries led to the eventual destruction of some and to the weak markets which exist today in energy supply and rail transport. The great institution that was the NHS was poorly understood; naively, it was believed that costs would fall as the health of the nation improved, and there was no understanding of the increased demand that would arise from an increasingly aging population, or from medical advances. Far from costs falling over the years, they have risen almost exponentially, and another great socialist ideal has proved to be unsustainable in the long term.
In the 1960s and 1970s, the governments of Harold Wilson and James Callaghan took us further down the road of industrial collapse and public sector profligacy and inefficiency. We had state control of prices and incomes, vast government borrowing and regular strikes by workers of all types. The vast swathe of nationalised industries was in a state of constant agitation and their outputs were shambolic in every respect. Inflation was rampant, interest rates high and everyone ended the 1970s much poorer than they'd been a few years earlier.
By 1979, the country was in a state of turmoil with rubbish piled high on the streets and industries such as car making, ship building and aircraft manufacture in terminal decline. It took the strong will of the Conservative governments of Margaret Thatcher and John Major, plus a certain amount of luck, to turn things around and recreate a strong economy. When Labour came back into power under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown in 1997, the economy was growing strongly and the 'public finances' were in robust good health.
Blair and Brown then set about destroying things. With typical left wing abandon, they threw money around and showered it on anyone they considered to be 'poor', at the cost of major industry and those they considered to be 'rich'. They introduced measures such as a 'minimum wage' which is, itself, a ludicrous concept; it does not make anyone better off, it actually makes more people worse off. They invented the shockingly expensive and counter-productive system of 'tax credits' with which we are now saddled, a system which actively encourages people not to work, or to work only limited hours.
Nonetheless, their followers simply saw extra money in their pay packets or benefit cheques, and thought it was wonderful. They tinkered with the education system and ruined it; they poured billions of pounds into the NHS, money which appears to have disappeared without trace, and they played around with the railways to such extent that they, too, are now a mess. They also interfered in many other areas, introducing state controls which have proved anything but beneficial. While doing all of this in the name of 'the people' and 'the poor', Blair became a multi-millionaire, demonstrating beyond any doubt that his overriding interest was in enriching himself rather than in improving the lot of the people he purported to represent.
In 2010, the people finally decided that they'd had enough of the Labour government, helped in this decision by the appalling events of the banking crisis and credit crunch. Labour, of course, claimed that this was all the fault of the banks though there is no doubt that much of what affected the UK was a consequence of government action over the preceding 13 years. Since 2010, the coalition government of Conservative and Liberal Democratic parties has striven to bring some sanity back into our lives and the signs are that they may now be beginning to succeed. Inevitably, Labour doesn't agree.
Instead of welcoming the signs of improvement in our economy, Miliband seems to be hell-bent on taking us back to the grim old days of state intervention in everything. He proposes to introduce a mandatory 'living wage' in place of the 'minimum wage' something which would increase costs for all companies and, therefore, prices; he wants to introduce state controls over the prices of gas and electricity, further remove children from their parents by bringing about even more state-sponsored childcare. He wants to restore the inequality that existed between private and public sector tenants. In short, he wants to go back to the disastrous days of the 1970s, when Britain suffered the ignominy of being shored up by the International Monetary Fund.
The epithet of 'Red Ed' to described Miliband is well deserved. A vote for him and his party in 2015 will be a vote for a return to old-style socialist state control and the associated mess that always develops from such government. Don't be conned, don't do it.
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