Kelly’s Eye

I SUGGESTED a couple of weeks ago that the Conservative Party might benefit from a period in opposition so that it could restart from first principles. Perhaps, judging by our current direction of travel, it’s the entire country that needs to pause and question whether we’re going the right way.

The mantra of our times – “The government needs to do more” – should be put up in lights on the walls of the BBC and ITV newsrooms, so repetitively is it chanted by every talking head they can find.

So the NHS remains the only wholly state-funded universal health system in the Western world, which still produces worse outcomes on a whole range of health issues than European neighbours free of hang-ups about parallel private contributions.

We similarly expect the state to fund the costs of our social care. That too means piling more taxes on a shrinking workforce, and principally the young.

Living on the never-never at the next generation’s expense should be shameful, no matter how often some might try to reconcile it by writing them off as “snowflakes” (which begs the question, if that’s the case, then who brought them up that way?).

Instead we appear content to have broken the compact that has held since the end of the Second WorldWar: the current younger generation is the first since then to be materially worse off than its predecessor.

At the moment, we have two main parties whose economic policies are – no matter how hotly each denies it – largely indistinguishable. Those policies are informed by a groupthink that has beguiled the West with cheap money since before the 2008 Crash, and which culminated in the pandemic, when the Bank of England printed more money in the first year of Covid than it did in the decade leading up to it.

Even those sums will pale into insignificance compared to the bills required to pay for our net zero insanity – which this week’s COP27 will doubtless ratchet up further.And those who govern us show no sign of knowing where the brakes are, let alone using them.