Private Island: Why Britian Now Belongs to Someone Else Read Free Page B

social security was established, state education was expanded, coal, rail and steel nationalised, yet despite all the planning this required, millions of private businesses, small, medium and large, carried on merrily competing (or co-operating) with each other, flourishing or going to the wall as the market determined. Private doctors kept their clinics on Harley Street, young aristos still ruggered their way across the playing fields of Eton, the private shop windows of Harrods still blazed forth at Christmas time. Bankers and stockbrokers thronged the City, and the farmers owned their land. No one was forced by the government to live in a particular place or do a particular job. Indeed, by abolishingconscription and, albeit rather hypocritically from a male point of view, endorsing greater rights for women, Britain seemed to be coming up with new forms of individual freedom that hadn’t occurred to Hayek. There was an argument to be made about how much tax people and businesses paid, and how much of that money government would have been better letting them choose for themselves how to spend. The argument was made, and will always be made; in the end neither the Gestapo, nor the English Hitler, nor the English Politburo appeared, or looked like appearing.
    Hayek’s work, the work of a frightened refugee in wartime, in the blackouts and shortages of a besieged island, had been superseded by the 1970s. A better framework for understanding the Britain of the time would have been the American Daniel Bell’s masterful introduction to his 1976 book
The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism
, where, though he spoke in general terms, he seemed to capture the actual contemporary problems of the UK:
    A system of state capitalism could easily be transformed into a corporate state … a cumbersome, bureaucratic monstrosity, wrenched in all directions by the clamour for subsidies and entitlements by various corporate and communal groups, yet gorging itself on increased governmental appropriations to become a Leviathan in its own right.
    Thatcher, however, never stopped seeing the world through a Hayekian prism. After she defeated the attempt by Britain’s coal miners to stave off mass redundancies and pit closures by downing tools, she wrote: ‘What the strike’s defeat established was that Britain could not be made ungovernable by the Fascist Left.’
    Putting together the words of Walters, Lawson and Thatcher, then, the ostensible aims of the programme to privatise Britain were diverse. Privatised companies, it was said, would be forced to do without subsidies, and wouldn’t be bailed out if they raninto trouble. Competing for business and profits with other firms in the marketplace, they’d be forced to cut superfluous workers, invest in new technology and try new ideas. Competition would bring new clarity to the finances and prices of the privatised companies, whose managers, set free from the shackles of political interference and union intransigence, would skip over tired, increasingly socialistic Europe and strut their tigerish entrepreneurial stuff in the wider world. Meanwhile the cuts in subsidies to the privatised firms would mean income tax could be cut, too, so ordinary British people would be better off. No longer would they be subject to the burgeoning control of state central planning, confining them to a faceless bureaucrat’s idea of how they should live. They’d select their preferences from the choices in the marketplace – a marketplace whose success they’d have a direct, personal stake in, since millions of them would be shareholders in the privatised firms. ‘Privatisation,’ wrote Thatcher, ‘was one of the central means of reversing the corrosive and corrupting effects of socialism … the state’s power is reduced and the power of the people enhanced … privatisation is at the centre of any programme of reclaiming territory for freedom.’
    About ten years ago, I began to investigate what