Britain has sacrificed her defence for the sake of having the worst health service in Europe. But, to be fair, not just for that.
The sacrifice has also been made to bribe an increasingly decadent and work-shy population into voting in the worst governments ever, Tory or Labour. Another costly item is having 11 per cent of the population on disability benefits.
That’s more invalids than Britain had in the wake of either World War, but then Britons have become so much more fragile. Just think: after D-Day anniversary celebrations in Normandy a few years ago, several British journalists had to be treated for PTSD – with bemused nonagenarian veterans looking on.
In addition to spending 11 per cent of GDP on healthcare, we spend another 10 per cent on welfare payments (excluding pensions), and that proportion is climbing steeply like a jump jet, of the kind we no longer produce.
No country living within her means could afford such generosity. Since the welfare state is beyond any cuts and above any criticism, we borrow hand over fist to pay for it. This year it’ll cost us up to £126 billion to service the national debt. If Britain paid her way, we could triple the defence budget (currently about £61 billion a year).
Actually, it’s not just squandering money and borrowing rapaciously to make up the deficit. France actually spends some 15 per cent less on defence, but her navy is larger than ours. The same Royal Navy that deployed 127 ships in the Falklands conflict now boasts a meagre 13 warships, one of which is about to be scrapped.
Yes, we have two aircraft carriers to France’s one. But her solitary carrier strike group is now in the Middle Eastern theatre, whereas our two are sitting in port – partly for maintenance, partly for the lack of sailors. And the single destroyer Starmer has magnanimously agreed to dispatch to the Middle East won’t get there for at least a fortnight – because of the same shortage in personnel she hasn’t even sailed yet.
The Royal Navy under Drake protected England from the might of the Spanish Empire. The Royal Navy under Nelson protected England from the French Empire. The Royal Navy under Cunningham protected England from the Third Reich. Yet today’s rump Royal Navy can’t even protect a few acres of British sovereign territory on Cyprus.
(Our humiliation deepens every day: now even Spain, Italy and Holland have sent their warships to the Mediterranean. Actually, during the Second World War, Italy had one of the biggest and most modern navies in the world. Yet her navy stayed bottled up in port for the duration, scared to come out and engage the few Royal Navy warships patrolling the Mediterranean. Good old days, eh?)
One has to reach the painful conclusion that the French are more efficient than we are, which is borne out by personal observation. Just compare the public roads in France and Britain and you’ll see that, although both nations pay exorbitant taxes, at least the French get their money’s worth. (I’m talking strictly about public administration here, because France’s overall economy is no better than ours.)
We take pleasure in saying that French public administrators are corrupt, and indeed it’s easier there to smooth one’s way through their system with a timely backhander. But our public administrators are more malignantly corrupt at the more vital levels: by being grossly, some would say treasonously, incompetent, they corrupt the very essence of statehood.
This creates a vicious circle of corruption: the state corrupts the population, the population corrupts the state, and round and round she goes, with an ever-growing radius. Narrowing the circle never works. Only breaking it would provide a way out, but neither the governors nor the governed have the will to do so.
Blaming Labour for all our ills is a time-honoured sport, but socialists merely take advantage of the openings society provides. The difference between the two main parties, as they so far have been, is that of degree, not of kind.
Neither the Tories nor Reform is committed to breaking the vicious circle. And though occasionally politicians of the so-called parties of the Right make vague noises about the need to strengthen our defence, the echoes of those noises disappear into the ether and nothing ever gets done.
No party is committed to dismantling the corrupting welfare state, to the “basic features” of which the true-blue Tory Peregrine Worsthorne, former editor of The Sunday Telegraph, wanted all Britons to pledge “loyalty” as far back as in 1958.
Not even the Tories realised then, and haven’t since, that loyalty to the welfare state is at odds with loyalty to the country. For what is disloyalty if not stripping the country of her defences, now deemed unaffordable?
The problem isn’t unique to Britain, although it’s more virulent here than in some other Western countries. All the major ones, including the US, are spending more on servicing the national debt than on defence, although the gap in America is less gaping than here.
I don’t think that, because things happen, they were bound to happen. I don’t believe in determinism of any kind.
However, I do believe that ideas and the actions they inspire have consequences. The more undesirable ones could be mitigated or even nipped in the bud while they are still in the early stages. But, if allowed to fester for too long, they may well become irreversible.
Hence I am convinced that unbalanced democracy of universal suffrage was bound to produce over time a situation similar to the one we face now.
Tocqueville, to whom I refer more and more often these days, was a great champion of that political system. But if you read his 800-page book on the subject, you’ll find dispersed at regular intervals warnings about the concomitant dangers. One of them he flagged more often than others: in the absence of an enlightened electorate, universal suffrage will sooner or later turn into universal suffering.
The America he wrote about had 12 million inhabitants, whereas today she has 350 million. While today the only qualifications required for voting are age and citizenship (this one seems to be ignored in Britain), in those days all sorts of other restrictions existed that more than halved even the relative size of the electorate.
Obviously, when tens of millions of people vote, which is the case in most major Western countries (over 48 million Britons are registered voters), Tocqueville’s condition of an enlightened electorate becomes hard to satisfy.
And it becomes impossible to satisfy when public education has to be squeezed into the Procrustean bed of egalitarianism, which one may regard as either an inevitable consequence of universal suffrage or its cause. And human nature being what it is, unenlightened people will always vote for anyone who promises them more freebies and jam today.
They haven’t been trained to realise that, say, a free medical system is an impossibility: nothing in life is free. Free NHS means that it’s funded by the state out of taxes and burgeoning money supply. This is far from being the only or the best system of financing healthcare, but unenlightened voters either don’t know this or don’t care. “We are proud of our NHS” was one of the first things I heard when moving to England.
Quite. And we are also proud of the welfare state in general. But are we equally proud of collapsing public services that don’t really serve? Of defence that doesn’t really defend? Of education that doesn’t really educate? Of politicians manifestly unqualified to govern?
We aren’t. And yet we’ll throw our arms up in horror should anyone suggest that democracy of universal suffrage is bound to produce decades of incremental deterioration, eventually leading to the calamities I’ve mentioned.
When a system is fundamentally flawed, no amount of tweaking will fix it. Hence we are for ever stuck with successive governments that see defence as an unaffordable luxury and the welfare state as an ironclad necessity. Let’s just hope we’ll never have to pay for this with millions of lives.
I think your analysis is completely correct.
For two hundred years, the problem for Conservatives (and even conservatives) in the UK has been fear of the mob. We’ve seen the mobile vulgus in action abroad (1830, 1848, 1871, 1917), so we appease them at home by accepting their demands for more and more money and less and less work.
Paradoxically, it’s the devotion of a section of the mob to Mr Farage that now offers us the best hope of postponing the inevitable. But the inevitable can’t be postponed for long unless the mob can somehow be taught that Mr Micawber’s famous aphorism applies not only to individuals but in the long run also to polities: “Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds nought and six, result misery.”
P.S. Perhaps the Royal Navy ought to try a lottery? Or crowdfunding? These seem to be effective ways of relieving the “poor” of some of their huge reserves of cash.
The ironic thing is that turnouts are going down, and have been since voters realise that their vote is worthless when neutralised by political fait accompli (ie- lies, corruption and incompetence). The stats all show the decline since the millennium. This cynicism affects both the enlightened voter, and the voter who puts his cross on the slip merely because of a Colgate smile or a kneejerk class loyalty tradition (or both). Obviously this has the disconcerting effect of maintaining the dysfunctional progressive liberal consensus, which merely compounds the cynicism and apathy, which then deepens the problem . One third of the electorate didn’t vote in the Brexit referendum, and nearly 41% of the electorate didn’t vote in the last general election, resulting in some seats captured on less than a 20% electoral mandate. Furthermore, in the politically vital (but now half forgotten) 2011 referendum on whether to retain the FPP system, the turnout was 42%, which meant 58% of voters didn’t care enough to go vote about how their governments would be chosen. The vote to retain FPP won the day with 13 million votes cast., but in a grand irony worthy of Greek tragedy, this meant that a mere 28% of the electorate dictated the political future of Westminster politics – less than a third of the nation’s voters. How’s that for universal democracy?
In fact, Labour won their 2024 landslide with about 20 per cent of the popular vote. In today’s political jargon, this is called a ringing mandate. One problem with universal suffrage is that it makes each individual vote irrelevant. Only blocs of votes matter, and victory goes to politicians who are better at putting such blocs together. But people do see themselves as individuals, not ciphers in some impersonal aggregates. That may partly explain the problem you’ve flagged so correctly: low turnout. My question is: are we certain that a higher turnout would have yielded a different result?
Alexander Hamilton and James Madison both wrote about the dangers of the presidential election becoming a mere popularity contest, and the horror of campaigns being directed towards blocs of votes. This is why we ended up with the electoral college, which few voters understand.
When Tocqueville wrote his book, an electoral college existed for the Senate but not the House. He commented on a vast difference in the human material filling the two Houses. The senators were cultured and accomplished men, while the congressmen were, according to him, illiterate brutes (or words to that effect).
So many good points in such a short article! Thirteen warships! A formidable force. With the number of idle young men in Great Britain, I would think press gangs could quickly fill any vacancies in the crews.
As usual, the problems with voting patterns and government can be placed at the feet of the educational system. When I was in third grade (back in 1973! where have the years gone?) I had a civics textbook. None of my 5 children have had one. We had to memorize the preamble of the U.S. Constitution. I am certain none of the 5 could recite the first three words.
I fear the welfare state is here to stay. As inefficient as it is, it would be to hard to replace it with private donorship while those same would-be donors are under the extortionist thumb of the government. (For a good explanation of the early concept of Christian charity and how the welfare state came about, see The Tragedy of American Compassion by Marvin Olasky.) I have often pondered a scheme where people receiving welfare payments would not be eligible to vote. (Perhaps anyone receiving ore than 50% of their income from the government, excluding pensions? It would never pass, but who on the receiving end is ever going to vote for less money?)
I once tried to explain “free” healthcare and education. Let’s look at a hospital. Free land. Who donated it? Free building. Did the hundreds of tradesmen who built it all work for free? How did their families survive? Where did all the free building materials come from? Who donated the free medial equipment and daily supplies? Are the utility companies providing free energy? And the hundreds of doctors, nurses, administrative staff members, cooks, maintenance personnel, and janitors must all be volunteers, too. That’s nice of them. Most of those jobs require special training. Did they pay for that or was that “free” as well? It seems so obvious that “free” is an absolute lie, but even broken down this way the indoctrinated fail to see.