Our nation is addicted to promises of free stuff

Give the people what they want, not what the establishment thinks they ought to want. That was the biggest innovation behind Rupert Murdoch’s Sun newspaper, according to a new play.

Ink tells the story of how Mr Murdoch bought the underperforming Sun in 1969 and, within a year, had transformed it into Britain’s biggest tabloid. Like its protagonists, it plays slightly with the historical facts in order to tell a good story. Essentially this is a post-war version of Doctor Faustus, with Rupert Murdoch in the role of Mephistopheles, and his first editor, Larry Lamb, as the man led astray.

It’s not pious, though. Lamb’s fall is also a liberation – a Yorkshire miner’s son sticking two fingers up at the do-gooders using their papers to prop up the establishment or “better” the working classes.

In his eureka moment, he creates the driving ethos of the new Sun by encouraging his staff to declare whatever it is they like best in life, no matter how crass or crude. The result is the guiding phrase of his new tabloid, all in aid of boosting sales: “Win free love!” (“Love” standing in, delicately, for “sex”).

The Glastonbury Festival was founded just a few years later, so it should be no surprise that the latest flag-carrier for free stuff, Jeremy Corbyn, feels so at home there. Voters like the idea of a free pass out of difficult decisions, especially when they’ve experienced the longest squeeze on living standards in living memory.

As the Bank of England’s warning about consumer credit showed, it is very hard to wean ourselves off the good life. Wages aren’t going up, but the British are damned if we’re going to stop spending.

We might be reaching the end of the road, though. The savings rate is at an all-time low and personal borrowing, as the Bank pointed out, is ballooning. This is one of the biggest challenges for government and the biggest threat to Conservatives in the next five years. We’re hooked on the need to “win free love” and Mr Corbyn is now the one offering it. Sadly, unlike The Sun, his offer comes without a sense of humour.

Visiting the holiest Jewish site in Israel might sound like a deeply meaningful experience for a Jew. On my recent trip there, I gave it a miss. The truth about the Western Wall, the only part of the Second Temple still standing, is that women aren’t as welcome as men. The site is run according to Orthodox rules, with separate zones for women and men to worship. Unfortunately, the women’s section is a fraction the size of the men’s. Whereas the men can quite easily wander up to the wall to pray or insert their written prayers in its nooks and crannies, the women are stacked five deep.

Benjamin Netanyahu’s government had previously agreed to establish an official area where worshippers can mix, but he’s now backtracking in the face of Orthodox resistance. He is, in response, rightly receiving a sledge-load of condemnation from nonorthodox movements the world over.

As things stand, I doubt I’ll visit the wall again. My first visit, at the age of 18, was certainly rather fascinating, but it was freighted with so much expectation, and the experience of queuing and passing through airportstyle security so mundane, that I found it hard to relate to the intensity of worship taking place before the worn stones. I imagine many Muslims on their crowded pilgrimage to Mecca feel the same. Perhaps once in a lifetime is quite enough.

There’s a new sort of political correctness on the rise: Brexit terminological purity. The policemen (or police people) of this new propriety object to various terms whose meaning we all broadly understand, but which they feel carry negative connotations. Exhibit one: “hard” or “soft” Brexit. I’ll grant that there’s a little bit of ambiguity around a “hard” Brexit, whose definition ranges from any scenario in which we leave the EU single market and customs union to a particular result, in which we crash out without even a divorce deal in place. But we all know roughly what it means: regaining control of our borders, trade policy and laws. A “soft” Brexit, on the other hand, is clearly some sort of fudge, like staying in the European Economic Area. Despite these broadly shared understandings, however, many Brexiteers insist that these terms are profane and a sign of the speaker’s implicit bias.

Now, another clearly understood term is coming under attack. Instead of a “transition” period, I was told recently that I ought to refer to an “implementation” period, as Theresa May did, carefully, in Parliament yesterday. Forgive a young brain, but it’s jolly hard to keep up with all these newfangled, “correct” terms. Can’t we just call free trade free trade?

Addressing the Centre for Policy Studies’ Margaret Thatcher conference, Sir Roger Scruton suggested that one of British democracy’s best features is our “hesitation” – our ability to disagree without hating one another or assuming we have a monopoly on truth. In that spirit, I’d like to suggest that in opposition to Corbyn’s radical Left activist group Momentum, the Right establish its own shock (or mild surprise) troops – under the banner “Inertia”.

FOLLOW Juliet Samuel on Twitter @Citysamuel; READ MORE at telegraph. co.uk/opinion