WintonsWeek Just Imagine: A Grown Up, Mature Britain No NHS, Welfare State; Private Schools, Tax Low, Prosperity High State Institutions Breed More Labour Supplicants “Labour relies on keeping its Rotten Boroughs poor and fed on class war bilge” As the big political Conservative and Labour beasts publish their manifestos, Sky News is asking celebrities to share their political visions. As the publisher of a famous, must-read web site, it can’t be long before the call from Sky comes, so when the phone rings, I’ll be ready. I’m afraid that my political agenda might be scarily radical for some tastes, and will seek to ditch herds of sacred cows, so I’ll try and set the scene first. If you are thinking about political change it makes sense to try and fast forward a bit to make sense of where we ought to be going. If you try and peer down the road to, say, 2050, I think it is not being over-optimistic to assume that everybody will be substantially better off. After all, neo-Labour can’t be expected to be in power for all that time, so some limited progress will be made at least during the Conservative years. I can think back 50 years to a time when there were no cars parked on working class streets. TV didn’t exist. Foreign travel ditto. Every last penny of ordinary peoples’ budgets was accounted for. There was no so-called disposable income. All your wages were needed to feed and clothe the family. There was poverty and slums. The country is now unrecognisable from 1950’s mode. NHS Will Seem Barking So my political vision seeks to drive forward to a time when higher incomes will mean that many of today’s institutions will simply seem looney. The National Health Service, introduced by Labour’s post-war Attlee government, will cease to exist when British citizens are wealthy enough to make their own health insurance provision. The idea of the state controlling health because most citizens need a safety net will seem risible. Genuine choice and high standards will be available to all citizens, a bit like in America today. MRSA won’t exist. People will not believe stories of the early 21st century when patients were herded into wards with little privacy, after waiting 6 months for their operations, because the state neo-Labour commissars, the same ones that built “council” housing in the 1950s and didn’t think working class people needed central heating, had decreed that privacy didn’t matter. Unintended Consequencies The welfare state, that second counter-productive aberration of Labour’s post-second world war period in office, will go. What started out as a generous-sounding way to outlaw poverty, has in fact turned into an evil generator of poverty, of ideas as well as living standards. Socialist just don’t get the Theory of Unintended Consequences do they? If the safety net is set too high, all incentives for self-help go out of the window. But of course the Welfare State generates supplicants for Labour apparatchiks and they will seek to retain it at all costs Even Americans Conned The same goes for state education. I’m amazed that my fellow citizens apparently believe that the government should dictate all education, and then they’re surprised that standards fall inexorably. Here’s an area where even Americans have fallen under the sway of the statists, and have allowed teachers and state bureaucracies to dominate the delivery of education. American state education is even more corrupted and useless than ours. In 2050, education will be funded by individuals and controlled not just locally but each school will be independent. This will start with every citizen with school age children getting an annual voucher for the cost of education, cashable at any school, public or private. Parents will be at liberty to add money to the voucher. PAYE Must Go Income tax will be at a flat rate of 10 per cent, and will be payable annually. One of the, many, great errors made by our Parliamentarians in the 20th century was to introduce Pay As You Earn (PAYE). I think it was the Liberal party before 1910. This allowed successive governments both Labour and Conservative to gradually rip off the citizenry by forcing them to pay up tax first, before their wages were in their hands. This allowed governments to steal huge sums from their citizens with little resistance, because they all became used to receiving the net figure, not the gross. If you presented today’s citizenry with an annual tax bill, the howls of protest would soon galvanise our leaders into slashing tax rates. Incidentally, the next time you hear someone say that they’d like to pay more tax, ask them how much they pay now. I’ll bet that most of the chorus for higher taxes comes from those who either pay very little if any tax, or, being self-employed are able to marshal teams of accountants to make sure they pay as little as possible. Flat Tax Everybody will pay the same rate of tax, which means that those earning more will pay more. The idea that big earners should pay tax at a higher rate than lower earnings is grotesquely unfair and illiberal. It just goes to show the cowardice of our political leaders that none of them have had the guts to stand up and say so. In more enlightened times all citizens will pay the same total of income tax; all citizens are equal, after all, are they not? Speed cameras will be thing of the past in 2050. That’s because individuals will cease to drive. All journeys will be handled by computers. Drink driving will be ok again, or rather it won’t exist because nobody will drive themselves. E.U. Will Implode Oh and of course the European Union will have long ago imploded. Germany and France will probably still be stumbling along in some murky socialist half-world. The newly liberated countries of Eastern Europe like Poland, Estonia, Latvia, and Czechia, will be dynamic free marketeers, led by Britain. All this means of course that political dialogue in the future will be radically different. Now, when the Tories suggest that there’s a better way of delivering health care, instead of presenting an opposing case, neo-Labour uses the politics of fear and abuse. “The Tories want to privatise the NHS,” cries Labour’s dissemblers, refusing to talks about the merit of different methods. Of course, the Labour party is not interested in better health care. It sees the NHS as a way of using its power to bully the citizenry into submission, like the Welfare State. More state spongers means more people too dependent to vote Labour out. Labour relies on keeping its Rotten Boroughs poor, and fed on class war bilge. Tear It Down Now, the Tories are too timid to say that this would be the best thing that could happen to the Nation’s health care. I dream of the day when Labour party leaders start their lying patter about Tory plans to tear down the sacred NHS, the reply comes back, “Too right, it’s going”. That will be the signal for Britain to finally reach maturity. No welfare state, NHS, or state education. Taxes will be low, freedom and prosperity high. Education and health care will be liberated. That will be the second and final instalment of the rationalisation revolution, the move to individual responsibility started by Margaret Thatcher. Let’s Keep The Voting System I hope there is one thing that will last until 2050, and that’s our voting system. Simple and incorruptible, the day our citizens go to the polls to mark their choice on a ballot paper should be a celebration of our freedom and democracy. Let’s hope any attempt to computerise voting is stopped in its tracks. Neil Winton – April 15, 2005 Top