One blinks, until the explanation comes that the boost would be to ‘local farming and food businesses in the south-east [reviewer’s italics] of over £3 million a year’. Well, the south-east is not London. If London is entitled to import food from the south-east, one must ask where the south-east begins and ends. The south-east could include Peterborough. If so, why shouldn’t hospitals in the south-east corner of Cornwall import food from the south-western part of Devon, since the distance between them is a fraction of that between London and Peterborough? And on what basis is the south-east to be preferred as a NHS food supplier over East Anglia?
Does Goldsmith really sincerely believe that calculating the number of ‘food miles’ provides all the answers when bureaucrats have to decide how to spend this part of the NHS budget? Does it in fact provide any meaningful answers at all? Shouldn’t the decisions instead be taken according to supply (relative cost) and demand (patients’ preferences), even if supply and demand — those much maligned market forces — are difficult to evaluate in the public sector? Market forces have many faults, but allowing the multiple and isolated responses of numerous individuals to these forces is the best way of organising an economy that has so far been devised.
Both Goldsmith père and Goldsmith fils are rural romantics. Theirs is a form of conservatism that has been both sinister (in its contribution to German fascism) and quaint (in Joseph Chamberlain’s ‘radical programme’ of the 1880s). Despite its fallacies and confusions, this sort of nostalgia for a greener, simpler, easier past has been such a durable tradition on the European Right that it cannot be dismissed as mere crankiness. Rural romanticism has been given a new pertinence by the global warming debate. Zac Goldsmith’s The Constant Economy is a readable and interesting statement of a deeply flawed, if currently very fashionable set of beliefs.
