Left in charge

The worst of Britain’s post-war mistakes, ideas we thought long dead, are once more in the air. Yet again there are plans for ‘workers on boards’ (the govern-ment, of course decides who’s a worker), and for mandatory price caps, based on the delusion that government can make things cheaper by diktat. Intelligent people are once more agreed that British employers should pay the highest minimum wage in the developed world — a policy estimated to condemn tens of thousands to unemployment. The tax burden is at a 30-year high, yet many assume we should make that burden still heavier — as if the country can be taxed to prosperity.

The Labour party has been pontificating along these lines in Liverpool all week, but these are in fact Tory ideas. Yes, John McDonnell goes much further — but Theresa May is on the same path. It makes it very difficult for her to point out how very dangerous and damaging these ideas might be.

Labour’s proposal for confiscating one in ten shares held in large companies and handing them to an ‘inclusive ownership fund’ is nonsense. But it’s the sort of nonsense that would have fitted quite easily into the 2017 Tory manifesto. If British politics is shifting to the left, it’s the Conservatives, more than anyone, who have pushed it that way.

The Tory excuse, in last year’s election, was that these moves to the left were strategic. They assumed that by raiding Ed Miliband’s manifesto, they would somehow weaken Labour support and steal his voters. But voters are not quite that simple. We can see through political gimmicks and anyway, why wouldn’t those of us inclined to think that Britain needs higher taxes, more government spending and greater state interference, simply vote Labour?

As the Conservatives gather in Birmingham this weekend, they have a lot of thinking to do.