The young embrace socialism because they are ignorant of its destructive power
You think broadband is expensive now? Just wait till it’s free. You don’t like the energy companies? Wait till they’re run by the state. Fed up with late trains? Oh boy, wait till someone tells you about British Rail.
The facts of life may be Conservative. But the facts of life are, by definition, learnt rather than intuited. No child – pace Gilbert and Sullivan – is born a little Conservative, because Conservatism rests on experience rather than theory. Or, to put it the other way around, socialism sounds perfectly reasonable until you try it.
Why, after all, have two companies producing the same thing when one can be reallocated to a more socially useful purpose? Why leave the economy to arrange itself higgledypiggledy when central direction might eliminate inefficiencies? Why trust the profit motive over the accumulated intellectual resources of an entire state? These questions recur in every generation.
In reality, of course, socialism leads to misery and squalor every time it is implemented. Let me repeat that. Every. Time. It. Is. Implemented. But, because it sounds plausible as an abstract proposition, people who have no memory of its real-world failures keep coming back to it.
This difference in experience explains, in large measure, why there is such a vast disparity in voting intentions. According to YouGov, among voters over 70, the Conservatives lead Labour by 66 per cent to 10. Among those aged 18 to 29, Labour leads the Tories by 51 per cent to 20. That differential is not wholly new, of course. It rests on several factors, including parenthood, changes in people’s financial status and alterations in brain chemistry. But the gap has never been so wide, and the reason seems clear enough. Young people do not have any memory of socialism.
The under-29s don’t remember when Europe was divided by a wall, complete with guards, dogs and mines, built to prevent people fleeing from planned economies to free ones. They don’t know, first-hand, that every Labour government – every one, without exception – has left office with unemployment higher than when it started. They are, in other words, necessarily assessing socialism theoretically, not empirically.
If, when you heard that Jeremy Corbyn planned to nationalise broadband, your first thought was that it used to take ages for the state-run telecoms company to install a phone line, you are right; but you are also almost certainly over 50. To the “Ohhhh Jeremy Corbyn” crowd, nationalisation is not a tawdry 20th-century failure, but an interesting novelty.
Corbyn knows it, which is why, with his new manifesto, he is going for broke – figuratively and literally. Even on his own figures, this programme is nearly twice as expensive as the far-Left programme he proposed in 2017. But his figures are incomplete. They don’t include the cost of nationalising water, energy, rail, mail and telecoms.
Two years ago, Labour’s spending plans were not properly assessed. In a funny way, Corbyn and Donald Trump benefited from similarly asymmetric coverage. Both were treated as joke candidates. No one, it was assumed, would take their promises seriously. So pundits simply put their proposals before the electorate with a kind of amused smile, while saving all their fisking for the supposedly electable candidates. Result? Plenty of voters heard the promises, but not the analysis. Most people, for example, knew that Jezza was offering to scrap tuition fees. Almost no one asked where he would find the £11billion.
Labour strategists have evidently calculated that, this time, they might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb. Their plans will once again be dismissed as ludicrously unaffordable, but they won’t engage with that criticism. Instead, they will call it, as Corbyn did this week, the self-interest of “the wealthy and powerful”. Some people will believe them, they reckon, and some will believe their critics. But the number of people in each category won’t be appreciably different whether the policies cost £50billion or £1trillion.
Hence the most aggressively socialist programme put before the British electorate by a major party. Labour will wage war on business, raising corporation tax, capital gains tax and stamp duty. It will carry out an expropriation programme, in effect seizing private pensions, private schools, private homes and 10 per cent of every sizeable company. It will raise spending on – well, on pretty much everything, from benefits to greenery. The manifesto is a little red book with a big red price tag.
Does anyone actually believe that all this is going to be paid for by people with incomes over £80,000? Even if high earners sit around waiting to be taxed – even if not a single person is pushed into earlier retirement, or emigration, or shorter hours – there is nowhere near enough money in the top 5 per cent to pay for this gargantuan expansion of the state. The £80,000 figure seems to have been plucked from the air – possibly to please Labour MPs, whose salary is £79,468.
Capital controls would be inescapable: people would react to the election of a Marxist government by moving their assets. John McDonnell has said in the past that he would “scenario-plan” to deal with a “run on the pound”. The first practical impact that many young people would experience after a Corbyn victory would be being unable to carry money overseas – a reminder that socialism brings coercion as well as poverty.
The IFS calls Labour’s plans “not credible”. Momentum calls them “incredible”. Too right, comrades. I just hope the country doesn’t learn it the hard way.
‘In reality, of course, socialism leads to misery and squalor every time it is implemented’