Please elaborate on how you think a constant right wing nationalist government would have us in any better a position during the period you have in mind. Which policies and how would they have made us stronger/better?
I am hoping for sensible debate on this, not some glib side-step answer e.g. it could not be any worse.
There are several ways in which I think a right wing government would have benefited the country, and will do if we have one from now. The key ideas are a smaller state sector, emphasis on ambition and aspiration, a greater expectation for people to look after themselves, and a value placed on British heritage and tradition. Before anyone tries to claim it, this does not mean “everyone for him / herself”, it just means that we reverse the culture of people expecting to be looked after by the state instead of the state being a back-stop if they run into difficulty, and the associated growth of the cult of victimhood which has taken over our society.
I could write 10,000 words on it but won’t do so here. What I will immediately highlight is that we are in this situation for several key reasons.
Firstly the government (correctly in my view) paid vast fortunes to support the country through Covid. There is a massive price to pay, and we appear to have forgotten this.
Secondly we are massively over-generous with our welfare spending. Many elements of normal life have been medicalised and deemed worthy of financial support from the tax-payer, and on top of that we have increasingly sought to divorce people from having to deal with the impact of their own decisions (scrapping the 2 child cap on child benefit is a classic example, if you want more than 2 children make sure that you can pay for them yourself).
Thirdly we are not allowed to address public sector inefficiency. Public sector workers need to face the same requirement for productivity as their private sector counterparts, who won’t retain their jobs if they are not sensibly productive. This discipline is absent from the public sector.
Fourthly we have made profit a dirty, immoral concept, when it must be clear to any economist that capitalist societies are vastly wealthier than leftist ones. We need to create conditions which encourage enterprise and entrepreneurship. Strong economic growth will restore the government's finances far more effectively than anything else. The current government simply doesn't understand this.
Fifthly we have failed to deal with excessive and inappropriate immigration. Some immigration is beneficial, but it must be aimed at people who wish to come and work hard to get on, and whose values are aligned to fundamental British values, such as freedom, democracy and tolerance. Instead we have not only a large number of illegal immigrants claiming asylum, but also a substantial number whose attitudes and behaviours are divisive and / or are a burden on the country financially.
I don’t speak for all right-wingers, and I qualify these remarks by saying that we must ensure that prosperity is sensibly spread, that government involvement in essential services such as water is sensible, and that for the time being the money saved on welfare and efficiency needs to be refocused on health, education and security, not used for tax cuts.
England
