Theresa May’s political incompetence carries a high price.
Theresa May has proved an apt pupil
of the David Cameron school of political incompetence. Lacking principle,
she is not even good at being unprincipled: a Machiavellian, it turns out,
minus the cunning.
It did not help that she had the
charisma of a carrot and the sparkle of a spade. As she presented herself to
the public, no one would have wanted her as a dinner guest, except under the
deepest social obligation.
Technically, she won the election,
in the sense that she received more votes than anyone else, but few voted for
her with enthusiasm rather than from fear of the alternative.
Her disastrous campaign included
repeated genuflections in the direction of social democracy.
Even after her defeat, moral if not
quite literal, she burbled about a society in which no one was left
behind—never mind that it would entail a society in which no one would be out
in front, that is to say, a society resting in the stagnant pool of its own
mediocrity.
Unfortunately, egalitarianism is a
little like Islam in that, just as a moderate Muslim can always be outflanked
by someone more Islamic than he, so an egalitarian can usually be outflanked by
someone more egalitarian than he.
In the contest between the
Conservatives and the Labour Party, no one will ever believe that the
Conservatives are more devoted to equality of outcome than the Labour Party.
May therefore chose her battleground
with a perfect eye for defeat.
Perhaps the most alarming aspect of
the election was the recrudescence of the politics of envy and resentment.
This is not to say that there are no
genuine or severe problems in the country: the stagnation of productivity, the
precariousness of income, the deficiencies in public services, the low cultural
and educational level of much of the population, the inadequacy of the housing
stock, and so forth.
But the only solution ever heard to
these problems, which are evident the moment you leave a prosperous area whose
residents are likely to vote Conservative, is more government expenditure.
Even the Conservatives went in for
this, though more mildly than Labour. Prime Minister May refused to rule out
tax increases, for example.
The Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn
radiated dislike of the prosperous, even the modestly prosperous.
Corbyn and his party’s solutions to
the country’s problems were supposedly to be paid for by higher taxes on the
richest 5 percent of the population.
This proposal overlooked the fact
that the top 1 percent of earners already pay almost three times as much in
income tax as the bottom 50 percent combined, and also the fact that wealth
is dynamic rather than static, resembling more closely the bloom of a grape
than a cake to be sliced.
Taxes on capital (in other words,
state expropriation) were Corbyn’s obvious next step, with capital flight the
equally obvious consequence.
None of this worried the young, who
had as yet no stake in property, only what are sometimes called ideals.
The Labour Party offered them and
others the beguiling vision of living perpetually at the expense of others—Frédéric
Bastiat’s definition of the state.
The Laffer curve meant nothing to
them; punishing the prosperous was more important and gratifying than
understanding how to maximize tax receipts.
The election could take Britain back
more than 50 years.
Theodore Dalrymple is a contributing
editor of City Journal and the author
of many books, including Not with a Bang but a
Whimper: The Politics and Culture of Decline.
