Conservatives need to explain the problems with socialism

If is at least forty-one years since Britain had a government which could reasonably be described as representing, even in a moderate form, socialist rather than social democrat ideas. During the Blair period the word "socialist" was airbrushed out of Labour literature in favour of words like "progressive."

Labour under Jeremy Corbyn, who really was a socialist, specifically rejected the policy of the Blair/Brown New Labour governments which were in office from 1997 to 2010: Labour's party political  broadcasts and other literature during the Corbyn era were scathing about the way the country had been run for decades in a way which was effectively as critical of the New Labour period as it was of Conservative-led governments.

In consequence anyone younger than myself - I am in my late fifties - has no adult experience of anything remotely resembling a socialist government. And it is absolutely no accident that when pollsters looked at voting intentions by age the strongest opposition to Jeremy Corbyn's Labour party at the last two elections came from people who are actually old enough to remember living in Britain when this country last had a socialist government. 

Hence I selected the quote from Margaret Thatcher which I put up this morning as today's quote of the day, "You may have to fight a battle more than once to win it," because of the relevance to this post. There was a time when the political battle in favour of the mixed economy, and for the principle that capitalism, however imperfect it is, does a better job of running most parts of the economy than giving control of everything to the government does, appeared to have been won. If that is ever true, it is no longer the case: the argument needs to be won again with a new generation who have no memory of living under a socialist government.

My memories of what socialism did to this country when I was a teenager are central to the way I think about politics.

• I remember a Labour government which lost control of the economy to such an extent that they had to go to the International Monetary Fund to bail Britain out. 

• I remember that the price for that bailout was savage cuts in spending, including the biggest cuts in NHS funding in the history of the British Health service - real cuts in spending, not just failing to increase spending as fast as people would like (which is what had actually happened every time in the last forty years when a Tory government has been accused of cutting the NHS)

• I remember that because of those Labour cuts to the NHS, combined with laws favourable to the trade unions, NHS unions, whose position I sympathised with but not their tactics, went on strike, and one of their leaders explicitly said "If someone dies, so be it."

• One of the people that shop steward was talking about could have been my father.

• I remember that because of those strikes my father was rung up on the morning he was due to go into hospital for a heart operations which doctors considered an emergency, as shop stewards representing porters and cleaners had decided that they knew better than doctors what an emergency was and withdrew cover.

• I remember that at the same time the dead were left unburied and rubbish piled up in the streets because of strikes against labour cuts.

• I remember that large swathes of industry were nationalised and were abysmal failures, losing vast sums of taxpayers' money while delivering terrible service. You think that today's railway system is annoying? Yes, it can be, but I remember how much worse on almost every measure the nationalised British Rail was.

• I remember people talking about "The British disease" and about this country being "the sick man of Europe."

All governments are incompetent: I'm a small government Conservative because I believe that a government which tries to concentrate on doing the essentials and doing them properly is likely to be less incompetent than one that tries to run everything. And although I have seen stupid mistakes by every political party I have never seen incompetence by any of them on the scale of the nearest thing to a genuinely socialist government I had the misfortune to experience in 1974-79.

I found an article today which is two or three years old and rather US-centric but still makes point which is relevant today, called "College Students Love Socialism … But Don’t Have a Clue What it Means."

It's because they didn't have a clue what it means that the people who were interviewed liked the idea.

But nobody can be expected to magically be aware - when someone from Momentum comes along promising them lots of free stuff, and peddling ideas which sound radical, new, exciting and different - that all those ideas were tried forty years ago and failed disastrously, unless we tell them.

We cannot expect those who were not born when Britain last had a socialist government to remember bow bad it was, we need to make a positive case for the mixed economy, for a government which does the important things well but does not try to run every aspect of people's lives.