Old Socialist eventually finds, the elusive, diminutive, ‘Culture Department’.
The Reader might just ask what is a ‘Culture Department’?
Here are the opening paragraphs of Colvile’s essay, that does not mention that ‘Culture Department’ :
Here’s a riddle for you. Energy costs are lower than they were yet some people are having to pay more. How come? The answer, as Rishi Sunak explained last week, is that during the energy crisis, the government lopped an average of £1,500 off every bill in the country.
This was treated by the left as a hideous blooper from an out-of-touch prime minister. In fact, it’s a statement of the bleeding obvious. Not to mention a perfect example of where we are when it comes to spending. The British state is forking out more than ever before. Yet politicians get precious little thanks for any of it — just endless calls to spend even more.
This point was driven home by two other stories. First, it was announced that government borrowing is lower than expected. Hooray, chorused Tory MPs — room for tax cuts! But then the Institute for Fiscal Studies put out a report on the long-term state of the public finances, which threw cold water on any such enthusiasm. It showed not only that the gap between tax and spend is still cavernous, but also that spending is set to climb over the next half-century at pretty much a 45-degree angle.
“The UK’s ageing population will effectively confront policymakers with a choice in coming decades,” wrote the authors. “Increase levels of tax substantially to fund higher spending or substantially reduce the scope of the public services that the British state provides.”
Any business would take drastic action to repair its balance sheet if faced with such a combination of heavy debt and rising costs (and indeed the rising cost of heavy debt — thanks to higher interest rates, the annual bill to repay our creditors is likely to top £100 billion, making it larger than any departmental budget bar the NHS). But adjusting outgoings to incomings doesn’t seem to be in Britain’s political vocabulary. Instead, we are adding to our commitments: the big social care and childcare reforms in this parliament essentially boiled down to spending more on each.
…
In these 339 words, The Reader has yet to confront that ‘Culture Department’. But Mr. Colvile is concerned with various problems of a ‘balance sheet’ : he imitates the patois of the bookkeeper. That should not surprise, as Colvile’s adoration of Thatcher, who came from a Nation Of Shopkeepers, and their ‘values’, is a kind vulgarized, penny-pinching Neo-Liberalism: one writ small, the other writ as World Historical Fraud.
Finally, here is where The Reader confronts momentarily, a diminutive ‘a department for culture’ …
Let’s throw out a few. Do we genuinely need a department for culture?
Not to forget Colvile’ faith in the Myth of ‘The Market’ :
What could instead be done at local level — or by the market?
A revelatory collection of Neo-Liberal/Thatcherite clichés follows :
Why does NHS England duplicate many of the functions of the Department of Health and Social Care?
(The language of priorities is the religion of socialism, and all that.)
At some point, for example, politicians will have to address the inexorable rise in NHS compensation costs (which have almost doubled in the past seven years), or the fact that the proportion of the working-age population claiming disability benefits has more than trebled since the early 1990s, despite all the medical advances over that period.
But we also need people to pay more of the costs of their old age.
Asking people to cover more of their care costs, for example via an insurance scheme funded post-mortem by a limited fraction of their property wealth.
All of these challenges are the work of decades rather than years. Many would be deeply controversial. But in the absence of a miraculous surge in growth and productivity, the choice ahead of us is clear. Either we do some hard thinking about what the public sector shouldn’t be doing, as well as what it should — or we resign ourselves to a future of far higher taxes, and a far larger state.
Colvile is a practiced Thatcherite /Neo-Liberal. This is The Times!
Old Socialist
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