I don’t know about you, but most of the people I meet these days seem jubilant. They have either discovered the joys of working from home or else have been on six weeks’ ‘annual leave’, paid for by the government. “Never before in my life have I had six weeks’ paid annual leave”, said one happy bloke yesterday.
At Miss Ardern’s enthronement, she famously warned us that “capitalism has failed”. My accountant predicted at the time that we were in for a “dose of socialism”, but I don’t think any of us were aware, in 2018, of how prescient the capitalism’s ‘failure’ warning would be. Nor were we aware of the extent to which the general population wished to be dosed-up on socialism.
Miss Ardern’s detractors, of which I am one, make much of her inexperience and unsuitability for her position. They also say that she’s an intellectual light-weight, who appears to have the reading and emotional ages of a twelve-year-old. All of this may be true, but the public adores her. And if she doesn’t know what she is doing, her powerful minders clearly do. She is the smiling face of our deliberate and imminent ruin.
Towards the end of World War II Winston Churchill was very much influenced by F A Hayek’s book The Road to Serfdom. Hayek, an Austrian-British economist and philosopher, believed that in the lead-up to the war and through the war effort itself western democracies, including Great Britain and the United States, had “progressively abandoned that freedom in economic affairs without which personal and political freedom has never existed in the past.”
Society, argued Hayek, had mistakenly tried to ensure continuing prosperity by centralised planning, which inevitably leads to totalitarianism.
Hayek found that the roots of National Socialism lay not in “right-wing extremism” but in fact in socialism, and he criticised the thinking of British wartime leaders, particularly those of Clement Attlee’s ilk. Attlee, the leader of the Labour Party who ran the home front, was Churchill’s deputy in the wartime unity government.
“The increasing veneration for the state”, said Hayek, “the admiration of power, and of bigness for bigness’ sake, the enthusiasm for ‘organisation’ of everything … and that ‘inability to leave anything to the simple power of organic growth’ … are all scarcely less marked in England now than they were in [Nazi] Germany.”
Hayek saw the activities of free markets as the way to “improve the general level of wealth” and “build a decent world”. He viewed international organisation as a further threat to individual freedom. He concluded: “The guiding principle that a policy of freedom for the individual is the only truly progressive policy remains as true today as it was in the nineteenth century.”
To its credit the Conservative Party used its own wartime paper rations to assist in publishing Hayek’s book.
On VE Day, 8 May 1945, Churchill appeared before the crowds who hailed him as the great wartime leader that he was, and as perhaps the greatest British leader ever. Yet at the general election which followed, on 26 July 1945, Churchill was thrown out in favour of the socialism of Attlee’s Labour Party.
In his general election broadcast Churchill had taken up Hayek’s theme, stating: “No socialist government conducting the entire life and industry of the country could afford to allow free, sharp or violently worded expressions of public discontent. They would have to fall back on some form of Gestapo…” The public did not heed him. A leading article in The Times rebuked Churchill and praised “the development of economic and social planning” in the Soviet Union.
Still viewing Stalin as an ally, and largely shielded from his regime of mass murder, the public wanted socialism.
Then, as now, society was shaped by wartime experience. In responding to COVID-19 we are constantly reminded that we are “at war”.
Historian Charles Moore remarks in The Telegraph that war is great for socialism. “Its demands seem to overwhelm all normal considerations of liberty, privacy, property and diversity. It provides a seductive, but false model for the ensuing peace: let us all work together, all do what we’re told. … It is seductive because it purports to reward everyone equally for sacrifice. It is false because it assumes the benign agency of an ever-mightier state.”
The “war” in which we find ourselves is a socialist’s dream. In the name of conquering the virus, liberty is curtailed, collective action is exalted, expenditure from the public purse soars and the Government assumes responsibility for almost everything.
In a major emergency, only government has the power to command. Socialism’s sleight of hand, so well observed by George Orwell, is to pretend that emergency is a permanent state of being in which the state must go on running everything, forever. The writer Anthony Burgess believed, incidentally, that Orwell’s novel 1984 did not point to some future dystopia, but rather was a depiction of life under Britain’s Labour government in 1948 – with its propaganda, slogans, state coercion and physical decay.
As with the USSR after the war, the People’s Republic of China is now showing itself capable of advancing its people’s prosperity without freedom, by utilising its coercive power. The National Party has proved its willingness to tug its collective forelock to China over the past three decades. Miss Ardern will now be delighted to acquiesce to a regime with which she is ideologically aligned. She is sure to be joined by many fellow travellers on the ‘Chinese’ path, who don’t see any need for freedom – abroad or at home.
The legacy media, which are on the brink of becoming government-funded – and thus state-controlled – will no doubt endorse this view, realising Churchill’s ‘Gestapo’ prediction. Its more hysterical columnists (Lizzie Marvelly springs to mind) are virtual Communists anyway and will have no difficulty at all endorsing total state control. The allegedly ’sensible’ contingent (which includes the likes of Audrey Young and Fran O’Sullivan) will, I predict, write ‘considered’ pieces on the ‘kindness’ of centralised planning.
Britain’s war did not end in 1945. The country endured a further five years of ‘perpetual war’ under socialist rule which was committed to rebuilding British society as an “ethical commonwealth”, using public ownership and controls to abolish both wealth and poverty. This included a massive expansion in public housing (under which development rights were nationalised), the widespread nationalisation of industry and the creation of the ‘cradle-to-grave’ welfare system, including the National Health Service – an unwieldy behemoth which is idolised and irrationally worshipped to this day.
Does any of this sound familiar?
Churchill did not return to government until 1951 and by that time it was too late. The damage took decades to undo, and much still seemingly cannot or will not be rolled back.
As in 1945, we are due for another Big Reset. The New Zealand public sees totalitarianism as an antidote to its difficulties, and as a respite from personal concern. Freedom in the West is never guaranteed. It is always being contested, and the most compelling attempts to constrain freedom are those which appeal to public safety. A willing public actually appears to want total state control.
As we free-fall into the yawning jaws of the Ardern safety net, we might gain some short-term comfort – but what will we give up? The Big Reset – an economic and a social reset – is upon us and so too, I am afraid, is the path to serfdom.
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