The word Labour hates

If you want to understand today’s socialist governments, including our own, study your Marx.

For people can change their opinions, their tastes and even their convictions, but one thing they can’t change is their DNA. And Marxism is encoded into the chromosomes of all socialists, including those who oxymoronically call themselves ‘democratic’.

Once you’ve realised this, you’ll have no trouble identifying the word that grates on socialists’ ears more than any other. That word is ‘private’.

You know, as in private healthcare, private income, private pensions, private enterprise – private anything, except private parts to which socialists pay rather morbid obeisance. That exception is courtesy of Freud, that part of the unholy trinity they worship, which also includes Darwin and Marx.

The other day Boris Johnson wrote an apologetic column about his having gone private to take care of a kidney stone. He probably doesn’t think it’s apologetic. After all, he makes an argument for private medicine, and he rebukes Starmer for hating it.

But Johnson’s argument is wholly based on the need to help the NHS out by relieving the pressures rendering it less marvellous than everyone knows it is. He doesn’t for a second question the wisdom and morality of creating a rapacious, egalitarian Leviathan raised to a socialist cult by decades of rampant propaganda.

In fact, his article makes all the appropriate sacrifices to that cult: “our beloved NHS”, “We love the NHS, and we want to protect it”, “We must fund it properly and cherish it properly”.

Now, the NHS is a method of financing medicine, that’s all. It’s not, as so many Britons believe, either a deity or even free medical care.

‘Free’, to a semantic rigourist, used to mean something one didn’t have to pay for. But someone does have to pay for all those CT scans and ECGs. Such things are expensive; and the more inefficiently provided, the dearer they get.

If patients don’t pay for them directly or through insurance policies, the payment comes from the state, which can only make money the old-fashioned way: from taxes. ‘Free’ thus means that the transfer of money from patient to hospital is mediated by the state acting as a general contractor with megalomania.

We may argue the pros and cons of this method, but any such argument should properly revolve around a dispassionate analysis of costs and benefits, as compared to other methods. What’s there to “love”, “cherish” and “protect”, other than Boris’s chances of a political comeback? Such emotive words seem out of place, but not to modern glossocrats.

They love, cherish and protect the triumph of public over private or, in other words, the steadily accelerating transfer of power from the individual to the state. This is the essence of socialism and more or less its sum total, as bequeathed by Marx and his subsequent accomplices.

All the bien pensant phraseology that essence hides behind can be safely disregarded. It’s just camouflage designed to conceal the true nature of socialism.

If you can’t accept this as gospel truth, and there’s no reason you should, then accept it as a working hypothesis. I maintain that this understanding of socialism is the only one that explains the entirety of empirical evidence before our very eyes. And if you end up agreeing with that, then the hypothesis becomes a fact – or is there something I misunderstand about the scientific method?

Consider the visceral hatred socialists feel for private pensions. An article in today’s Mail bemoans that “Britain is facing a pension poverty ‘time bomb’ after Rachel Reeves’ punishing tax grab helped plunge retirement savings by 20 per cent in six months”.

The authors make all the good points about this tendency leading over time to a vast increase in the number of people dependent on the state for their livelihood and therefore ending up impoverished. The point the authors don’t make is that such is exactly the desired effect.

I never tire of saying that the more the state does for you, the more it can do to you. Hence, the more dependents the state acquires, the further it advances its core desideratum: increasing its own power over the individual.

It would be a mistake to think that Rachel in Accounts can’t do the sums as well as the authors of the article. Of course, she can – as can any owner of a calculator.

It’s just that she and the authors embark on their intellectual journeys from different starting points. And Rachel’s path leads her to seeing that destination as desirable. There is that dread word, ‘private’, stamped into the dirt again.

That’s why, when the supposedly ‘more conservative’ Labour government of Blair and Brown took over, the first thing they did was launch a five-billion raid on private pension funds. Since then, Labour and Tory governments have been competing with one another as to who can rob private pensions better. Labour still holds a narrow lead, but it’s only a matter of degree, not substance.

Or take inherited private income, something socialists describe as ‘unearned’. That was Marx’s bugbear, and so it remains for his descendants. Yet no such income is ever unearned — it can always be traced back to someone who indeed earned it.

And that successful individual paid taxes on that income, contrary to what many socialists claim. In fact, the top one per cent of UK earners provide 29 per cent of all tax revenues, and the top 10 per cent twice as much. (These proportions are much higher in the US.)

However, the state insists on taxing inheritance again, which any sensible person would see as terribly unfair. The British government imposes a 40 per cent tax on any estate above the tax-free threshold of £325,000.

So let’s say a middle-class Londoner lived and died in a house he bought in 1975 for £20,000. That sum came out of his taxed earnings, and he continued to pay property levies on the house, and also probably interest on the mortgage, his whole life.

He then bequeathed the house to his children, but after several property booms, the same dwelling now costs £1.325 million (both amounts are close to available statistics). This means the man’s heirs must pay £400,000 in inheritance tax on the house alone, not including any other assets passed on.

Do socialists realise this is unfair? They probably would if they thought in such terms. But they don’t, and the only thing fairness means to them is anything that increases their power. That’s why they’d rather the heirs went broke than gained a measure of financial independence.

The same goes for the socialists’ treatment of private enterprise, which they detest with wholehearted passion. That’s why they nationalise whatever they can and try to suffocate everything else with taxes, both overt and hidden.

The present Labour government is no exception. It took over on 5 July 2024, and in the first nine months of its tenure, a staggering 203,000 UK businesses went under. And some 16,500 millionaires fled the country, taking with them the tax revenue they generated and the jobs they created.

At the same time, the government is strangling farms with death sentences, jeopardising the country’s self-sufficiency in food production. Again, there is no rational explanation for this self-harm, but there is an irrational one: Marx’s hatred of farmers, that most individualist of breeds.

Only urban socialism, wrote Marx, could rescue “a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life”. The Bolsheviks tried to put this dictum into practice, but succeeded only in murdering millions of peasants and permanently starving the country. Our Labour Marxists haven’t done anything quite so drastic yet, but the mindset is the same.

We are living through the worst period for British enterprise, both urban and rural, in decades, but the data only go to 29 March. If the same trend continues, and there’s no reason to think it won’t, before long the government won’t have to bother nationalising the economy. There won’t be much left to nationalise.

Those kinder than me ascribe all such outrages to the unintended consequences of socialist policies, but they are wrong. The consequences are very much intended, if only intuitively. What’s bad for the people is good for the socialist state, and the good of the state means greater power in the hands of its administrators. QED.

All this proves my hypothesis, at least to my own satisfaction. Things like incompetence and stupidity don’t begin to explain socialist depredations. No one is as stupid and as incompetent. But some people are as fanatical, as self-serving, as rotten and as, well, socialist.

P.S. In the same article I mentioned, Boris Johnson writes: “Given my circumstances, anyone in the NHS would have been given exactly the same treatment, and with no undue delay.”

He should read the piece I wrote in 2012 about my experience in similar circumstances: http://www.alexanderboot.com/how-the-nhs-tried-to-kill-me/