No going back

William Atkinson has an interesting piece in CAPX on the political stagnation implemented by the Attlee government which is still with us today.

Why Britain’s biggest problems are all Attlee’s fault

Happy NHS Day! Yes, the 1946 National Health Service Act came into force on this day in 1948. The 5th July may not yet hold the same resonance as yesterday’s Independence Day does across the pond. But with the current American passion for historical self-flagellation and the ongoing adoration for Aneurin Bevan’s monolithic monstrosity, it cannot be too long before we see Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum returning to biff up aliens in honour of our health service.

It isn’t only the NHS, but central planning generally which the Attlee government introduced and which still holds us in it’s inescapable grip.

Only 6% of Britain is developed. Yet we have around 4 million fewer homes than we do families and households, and prices have increased by 500% since the early 1990s. This housing hyperinflation is fundamentally baked into the 1947 act. But it is impossible to alter. As the creation of the NHS created millions of publicly employed voters who scream at the slightest hint of reform, so did the Planning Act create a permanent NIMBY class with an interest in preventing development or a fall in house prices.

This is because of the fundamental shift in mindset that the Attlee government enshrined in British politics. The First and Second World Wars had forced an expansion in the size and cost of the state as a necessary corollary to victory. But Labour, rather than rolling that back, ensured the state would remain permanently larger and more intrusive as a route to their vision of socialism in one country.

The whole piece is well worth reading as a reminder of how impossible it is to roll back the central planning ethos of a permanently over-large state. It probably explains the collapse on the Tory party into just another socialist party under Boris Johnson.