Veteran lefty Ken Loach has new film out called The Spirit of ’45, a far from balanced documentary about the Attlee government.
In a thought-provoking post for the Royal Society of the Arts, Adam Lent takes issue with the idea that Labour’s post-war settlement is dead and buried, killed off by wicked Thatcherites:
The overall trend over the last fifty years is clear – public spending as a share of GDP is up and so is spending on health, pensions and welfare as a share of public spending.
The trouble is that while political support for the welfare state remains strong and broad-based, we’re finding it increasingly difficult to pay for it:
Lent argues that a new guiding principle is required, but what does he have in mind? Not the Big Society, that’s for sure:
He also point out that while Thatcherism changed a lot of things, it too failed to slay the “Beveridge behemoth”:
Indeed, the reduction in public spending as a percentage of GDP achieved under Margaret Thatcher did not last and most public services were barely reformed.
So what could replace the ‘spirit of ’45’ in British hearts? Lent begins by identifying what he sees as the fundamental flaw in the post-war settlement:
The result of this, he says, is “a state state that spends more on welfare than on education… commits only 2% of the healthcare budget to prevention and public health and spends £1.5 billion on a hotchpotch of benefits for better off pensioners.”
He therefore calls for a state that is “designed to generate success rather than ameliorate failure.” Most Conservatives would be agree with him on that. But what he doesn’t acknowledge is the possibility that it is the monolithic, top-down structure of the state that predisposes it to follow the failure model.
We will not have a “success state” until resources are radically decentralised and placed under the stewardship of those who see the state as a means of achieving the common good and not as end in itself.