U.K.

I've long wondered when the European love affair with the welfare state will end. Thus far stagnant economic growth and growing fiscal problems have proven insufficient to prompt a re-think. Perhaps things have to get worse before they get better. Gerald Baker of The Times thinks that this deterioration has already begun:

The response of our once competitive political system has been not to offer an alternative to this long march to serfdom but, hemmed in by the tightening constraints of politically permissible debate, to produce feeble dissent around the margins of a vast consensus whose core no one dare challenge.

Take the silence on the most obvious and pressing case — the growing proportion of our national income that will be consumed by the state.

After years in which the UK actually managed to restrict the growth of government, a period not coincidentally that created the conditions for the best economic performance in a couple of generations, the tax take is set to rise sharply. Within three years, taxes will account for more than 40 per cent of gross domestic product, the highest level in 25 years, and beginning to close the gap again with the levels in sclerotic Western European countries.

It will get worse. The Government now backs a more or less open-ended commitment to pouring ever more resources into the demonstrably inefficient bureaucracy of the NHS. Pensions, welfare benefits and education will devour tens of billions more even than current projections suggest. Labour practises ambiguity on this — alternately taking pride in all that money that has been thrown on the NHS bonfire and promising “reform” through the introduction of more choice in public service provision. But does anyone really think that the party intends to reverse the slide towards Scandinavian levels of profligacy?

I particularly agree with this part:

The lack of serious fiscal choice on offer is only a reflection of a broader surrender to the principle that government has the answers and the people should stop worrying their little heads about it. Every conversation one has in this country seems to start from the premise that everything that ails us can be put right by government — whether it is obesity or the decline of classical music.

And what exquisite irony! The one thing in the past four years that the Government really did get right — the deposing of a dangerous dictator and the liberation of 24 million people from tyranny — is now regarded in the closed circle of serious political discussion as an act of pure evil.