SUCKING IN THE SEVENTIES: Back to the ’70s in Burnham’s Britain?

He has talked positively about introducing a land value tax (LVT) to replace the local government council tax, which is levied on an outdated valuation of real estate, and stamp duty on house sales. But LVT would create losers as well as winners. It would also be complicated and costly to administer and might raise little in the short term.

Britain’s fundamental problem, everyone agrees, is the lack of economic growth. Increasing GDP is the only way to pay for better public services, reduce welfare dependency and increase remuneration for those in work. But we have yet to discover where this wealth creation is to come from under Burnham’s not-so-new deal. The public sector is maxed out and the private sector is flatlining, thanks to the recent increases in corporate taxes, the national minimum wage, and employers’ National Insurance.

Meanwhile, the cost of servicing Britain’s £3 trillion of public debt remains an immense burden. Commentators on the right say that Burnham is taking Britain back to the 1970s, when a previous Labour government had to go cap in hand to the International Monetary Fund to manage a sovereign debt crisis. We are not quite there yet. But keen observers of fashion trends may have noticed that flared trousers and wide lapels are coming back.

In his recent appearance on the Triggernometry podcast, Peter Hitchens, age 74, had this exchange with his much younger hosts:

HITCHENS: Predictions are easy in general, but they’re hard in terms of how it’s going to take.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: What I’m getting at something else, which is my hope, and I only express it as a hope, not as a belief about what’s likely to happen, is that the inevitable cataclysm can produce the conditions for recovery. Not necessarily recovery, but the conditions from which recovery is possible.

HITCHENS: That’s very Marxist.

KISIN: Tell me more.

HITCHENS: All my comrades in the late 60s and early 70s were rather hoping for a collapse out of which might arise the longed-for revolution with the leading role of the party and the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat. That was the theory. It was all going to go wrong. And I have to say, Ted Heath in the early 70s made it look very much as if we were right. Kept trying to shut the country down, pick huge fights with industrial unions and so nothing worked. Blackouts? Fantastic! He was great; I remember that the recruits pouring into the international socialists in the early 70s about that time. Ted Heath was a great recruiter for Marxism and Leninism, but in the end, he let us all down, by losing an election.

KISIN: I mean, I am not hoping for [this].

HITCHENS: No, no, no, I know. I’m just telling you, this is the formula. I don’t myself believe that the catastrophe is justifiable, Or desirable or even, or even, conscionable. I think you have to say, if it looks as there’s going to be a catastrophe, do whatever you can to prevent it and warn against it.

KISIN: But Peter, you and I have to be honest, we have all been making these arguments. We’ve been trying to say, we’re heading towards a cliff. No one wants to listen because they’re much more comfortable spending money we don’t have. So they’re not going to listen to us — we are going off the cliff.

HITCHENS: I very much doubt whether catastrophe will produce at the end of it by some kind of baptism of a fire a better world than the one that was before.

Speaking of which, just as leftist New Yorkers yearned for the bad old days of Fun City in the 1970s during the reforms of Rudy Giuliani and Mike Bloomberg (and thus, hizzoner Mamdani), leftist Brits like Andy Burnham want to take their entire nation back to its postwar nadir in the 1970s. True socialism has never been tried before!