Equality is all very well you know, but…..
Andy Beckett tells us of that glorious past:
Less remembered is the fact that, thanks partly to his tax rises, Britons were more financially equal in the mid-1970s than they had ever been before, and ever have been since. Yet Labour seemingly received no electoral benefit: at the next general election, in 1979, it was comfortably defeated by Margaret Thatcher’s anti-egalitarian Conservatives.
So, the lesson from this is? That we should repeat those policies - truly swingeing taxes upon the middle class and above in order to gain that equality - or that we should not? It being an article of faith in parts of the left that the greater equality is worth everything else.
Everyone else looks at the mid-1970s and decides that no, we’d not like to have us some of that. For other than by that equality statistic - itself a dubious measure of glory - it was not a fun time for anyone at all. It was also something resoundingly - as Beckett admits - rejected by the electorate.
Even, perhaps, Britain just isn’t a country that longs for that state imposed equality? You know, could be true given how we didn’t like it last time around? So that insistence upon collapsing income differentials through truly swingeing taxes upon the middle class and above is not, in fact, what the nation collectively desires?
Which does lead to an interesting question. Why does the British left keep trying to impose upon the country a social structure the country just doesn’t like?
Answers on a postcard to King’s Place, London, N1.
Tim Worstall