No, Daniel Hannan. Once you are reduced to treating Hayek as if he were a serious authority on anything, then it really is all over. Never mind once you have started blathering about the non-existent "Anglosphere", a device for conforming Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand to a purely American model which the Americans themselves have now decisively rejected at the ballot box.
There was no need
to get the British used to large-scale State action by means of the War,
thereby paving the way for the Welfare State and for public ownership.
The Tory Britain of the Inter-War years was not only no stranger to
nationalisation (of the BBC and of electricity, for example), but she also had
the most advanced Welfare State in the world, with Britons taking for
granted the things to which American New Deal Democrats, Swedish Social
Democrats and the New Zealand Labour Party still only aspired. Taking
them for granted under the Tories.
No wonder that all
three parties offered Keynes and Beveridge Commons nominations, but they
both stuck with the Liberals, so they both had to be given peerages
instead. And no wonder that the NHS was in all three manifestos in
1945. The Conservative Party and its allies did eventually vote against it on a couple
of technicalities, but only in the secure knowledge that it was going to
go through anyway.
On returning to office in 1951, when the NHS was
very new and practically bankrupt, they left it intact, as they
continued to do until after the last General Election, which Labour
would have won outright if the Conservatives' real agenda for the NHS in England, now beginning to be given effect,
had previously been made public. Far from the War's hastening the emergence
of what came to be seen as the post-War settlement, in reality it
delayed that already well-advanced emergence by an unnecessary six
years.
And for what? We ended up giving Poland to Stalin. How was that any better than letting Hitler have Poland in the
first place? We lost our global status, and were in debt to our great
rival for it right up until 29th December 2006. Have you got that? 2006!
Moral standards collapsed during the War, and everything to do with the Swinging Sixties really started then. We laugh now about the women from whose bedrooms the Normandy Landings were reputedly launched. But it was, and is, no laughing matter. There is always a baby boom after a war, so there was bound to be the Baby Boom after the War, imposing its views and tastes on both its elders and its juniors. Apparently forever. There were warnings about this in the Thirties. But then, there were warnings about a lot of things in the Thirties.
Germany rules via the EU, and has better schools, policing, transport infrastructure, working conditions, and standards of behaviour than we have, as well as cleaner streets, a huge domestic manufacturing base, and ownership of her own industries. She has long been out of recession. Of course we had to defeat the country that was subjecting our towns and cities to nightly aerial bombardment. But how and why did we ever put ourselves in that position? What for?
This evening, the latest three-part run of Foyle's War will come to an end. Foyle is now working for MI5 in the 1950s, against Soviet agents such as those with whom, as throughout the Cold War, both MI5 and MI6 were in fact riddled from top to bottom, only serving to prove that, while the New Left that had not yet then quite emerged was a very real ideological and cultural threat, the USSR was never a military one.
There were Soviet agents all over the place, to the point that they were a public joke, and Britain never fell. Overt Communist Party members in several unions effectively appointed a good many Labour MPs, plenty of whom became Ministers and even Cabinet Ministers. Upper-class fellow-travellers and paid retainers made their way to the very top of a Tory machine which, then as now, considered it bad form to ask a gentleman his specific political opinions. The Daily Worker and then the Morning Star enjoyed full Parliamentary Lobby access, including daily off-the-record briefings from Prime Ministers Labour and Conservative alike.
Having an evil government is not the same thing as being a threat to us. A lesson not learned then, not learned before then, and not learned since then.
Moral standards collapsed during the War, and everything to do with the Swinging Sixties really started then. We laugh now about the women from whose bedrooms the Normandy Landings were reputedly launched. But it was, and is, no laughing matter. There is always a baby boom after a war, so there was bound to be the Baby Boom after the War, imposing its views and tastes on both its elders and its juniors. Apparently forever. There were warnings about this in the Thirties. But then, there were warnings about a lot of things in the Thirties.
Germany rules via the EU, and has better schools, policing, transport infrastructure, working conditions, and standards of behaviour than we have, as well as cleaner streets, a huge domestic manufacturing base, and ownership of her own industries. She has long been out of recession. Of course we had to defeat the country that was subjecting our towns and cities to nightly aerial bombardment. But how and why did we ever put ourselves in that position? What for?
This evening, the latest three-part run of Foyle's War will come to an end. Foyle is now working for MI5 in the 1950s, against Soviet agents such as those with whom, as throughout the Cold War, both MI5 and MI6 were in fact riddled from top to bottom, only serving to prove that, while the New Left that had not yet then quite emerged was a very real ideological and cultural threat, the USSR was never a military one.
There were Soviet agents all over the place, to the point that they were a public joke, and Britain never fell. Overt Communist Party members in several unions effectively appointed a good many Labour MPs, plenty of whom became Ministers and even Cabinet Ministers. Upper-class fellow-travellers and paid retainers made their way to the very top of a Tory machine which, then as now, considered it bad form to ask a gentleman his specific political opinions. The Daily Worker and then the Morning Star enjoyed full Parliamentary Lobby access, including daily off-the-record briefings from Prime Ministers Labour and Conservative alike.
Having an evil government is not the same thing as being a threat to us. A lesson not learned then, not learned before then, and not learned since then.
When may we expect a lavishly produced television drama about how there
was never a German scheme to invade Britain, and how Hitler's
occasional imaginative forays into that area caused the professional top
brass of his Navy to threaten open mutiny? Or about how the Soviet
Union that had been broken by the War had neither the means nor the will
to invade Western Europe, never mind to cross the Atlantic or the
Pacific, and had no mind to repeat the creation of alternative Communist
powers by turning any major Western European country into another
Yugoslavia, never mind turning the United States into another China?
But it always has to be 1939, or 1940, or 1956, or 1962, or 1968. We dare not consider the possibility that it might not be. Never mind that, in the sense meant, it might never really have been at all.
But it always has to be 1939, or 1940, or 1956, or 1962, or 1968. We dare not consider the possibility that it might not be. Never mind that, in the sense meant, it might never really have been at all.
All true, of course, about the marriage of war, moral decline and Baby Boomers.
ReplyDeleteBut you forgot that war is also the "herald and handmaid of socialism" as someone once wrote.
That pre-1945 welfare state you mention was introduced because of the atrocious standard of our Boer War troops-just as WW2 brought us mass female workforces (after their conscription into munitions factories) and, eventually, Harold Wilson's devastating 1960's welfare reforms-which accelerated the collapse of marriage among the poor.
You have only just discovered all of this, so you really do think that no one else has ever heard of it, never mind long since seen through it. Oh, dear.
ReplyDelete"seen through it". Please give us the benefit of your historical revisionism, if you want to pretend the pre-1945 welfare state had nothing to do with the Boer War, or that the post-1945 one had nothing to do with WW2.
ReplyDeleteYou lost me at the r-word, and I won't have been the only one. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.
ReplyDeleteI have been pondering the baby boomers recently, prompted in part by discussions with a friend of the generation before who complains of all the lazy layabouts of my generation. My generation, and the next, are living with the fall out of the sexual revolution and part of me cannot help blaming the baby boomers. But then I have to accept that the baby boomers were themselves very young when condoms and contraception were thrown their way alongside LSD, shrooms and ganja and an exciting new ideology of 'free love'. It seems to me they themselves were failed by their parents, who should have behaved like grown ups, put their foot down and declared enough's enough. Perhaps they can be forgiven for not fighting this battle after giving so much in the fight against the Nazis.
ReplyDelete