Snobbery has a new face and it wants to make everything more expensive
The cost of living is high, but not quite high enough for a certain category of modern-day liberal. For what they deem the “cheapness” of British life has become the source of a moral panic. Cheap food, cheap booze, cheap clothes, cheap fuel and cheap holidays are regularly said to be the cause of any number of social evils, from obesity and alcoholism to environmental apocalypse.
Gone are the impulses of previous generations of “progressives”. Once upon a time, liberals campaigned for free trade on the basis that it lowered the cost of living for the working man, celebrating falling prices as a consequence of rising productivity and free exchange. Now, scare stories about American “Frankenfood”, and foreign imports in general, are used to justify barriers to trade and our continued membership of an EU customs bloc that keeps prices high by restricting non-European produce.
The relative affordability of clothing has been relabelled “fast fashion”, a term that implies that good-value clothes are necessarily wasteful. Nearly every political party seems to be running on a platform of making flying dearer. Hand-wringing economists fret that fuel duty isn’t steep enough simply because of the fact that many people still drive.
Partly, this is eco-lunacy, partly a reflection of a slow extinguishing of belief among the liberal-Left that people are capable of making
‘Handwringing economists fret that fuel duty isn’t steep enough simply because of the fact that many people still drive’
responsible choices. It is not inevitable that the affordability of this product or that will lead individuals to overindulge. And yet the overwhelming tendency now is to believe that lower prices merely encourage greater consumption, rather than a recycling of the money saved towards other purposes.
Witness the relentless pressure from campaigners for supermarkets to end buy-one-get-one-free offers or loss-leading promotions. They seem to think the problem is the discount, rather than the moral failing of the individual who cannot help themselves but to over-consume.
But it also reflects the emergence of a terrible new snobbery. The quality of the product or service is irrelevant: if it is cheap, it is morally reprehensible. Everything must be more expensive, to discourage consumption and restrict choice to the select few who can afford it – and by implication those who have the capacity to make proper decisions. Higher taxes, regulations on production, tariffs: all are proposed as a means of enforcing such views. Companies that make a virtue of their affordability – Wetherspoon, Tesco and the like – are damned as preying on the naivety of their customers, rather than providing a useful service.
If you buy everything from artisans and craftsmen, good for you. I get my vegetables from a greengrocer, and pay a bit more for the privilege to support a local business. But that is a choice available to me because I save money elsewhere.
The truth is that the cost of living here is high, and it is getting higher still as politicians pile obligations and responsibilities on to businesses and consumers. Will anyone celebrate all that is cheap?