Educated Guess

Remember Michael Gove’s ‘experts’? The economic experts on all shores of the political quagmire that typifies this general election run-up have been crunching the numbers. Now, if there was any reliable way to slice up the financial cake in such a way that everybody got what they considered a fair deal surely these experts would generally agree. Not completely, obviously; some would favour a bit of top-down redistribution, others might go for a more laissez-faire, free market. But, on balance, if there was a way to conjure up the necessary funding to buy your votes you would think they would all stumble across much the same wheezes.

But no. Not only do these experts not agree, they outright refute each other’s projections. But it’s worse than that; if the competence of the experts is in doubt, what about the competence of the general public to understand the policies proposed? I’m guessing that if you go to work, pay taxes and spend all that is left to enable you to continue going to work you will be reasonably well-equipped to see beyond the Labour promises to pull financial rabbits from hats. On the other hand, if you have absorbed the lessons of comprehensive schooling you will believe that everybody can be rich by simply printing money.

State education is intended to produce reliable citizens, who can contribute something to society, not compliant voters, eager to cast their ballot in favour of the party promising free stuff. Those doing the promising seem to have so little regard for the recipients of the message that they are appearing in the media, making gaffe after gaffe and fluffing their prepared lines in the face of the mildest scrutiny. Their contempt it showing and they can’t even see it. If only they’d had a better education...

Enter more free stuff: Labour will renationalise railways, the Royal Mail and the energy industry. Free for all? Free-for-all, more like. All this, they reckon, will be paid for by increasing corporation tax, reversing inheritance tax cuts and, er, I’m guessing they will just borrow the other £trillion-per-annum. They will want to nationalise the already nationalised education system. They want to meddle even more directly in the manipulation of young minds, paying for this by taxing private education – that is a LOT of tax. I wonder what they have in mind for the history books?

Can you see how they did it?

Of course class sizes should de under 30. Ideally, they should be under 20. But they should also be taught by teachers with a genuine vocation and ability to get the best out of them, not driven by a need to churn out ‘cookie-cutter’ social justice warriors. Qualifications do not ensure competence; this is true in teaching as much as it is in any other arena – this brief Spectator article on MBAs is enlightening and rings oh so true. But as long as the educationalists are riddled with left-wing ideology, actually educating children will take a back seat to programming them and the costs of doing so will forever spiral, like the NHS, out of reach. Corbyn’s Labour manifesto wasn’t leaked – it  just escaped from the loony bin.

Anger, or Serenity?

So, the great Corbyn United National Treaty for the ‘reckoning’ he keeps mentioning but won’t define has been launched. When I say launched I mean given a bit of a push from the side of the duck pond with everybody holding their collective breath, wondering how long the newspaper ship of Corbyn’s imaginary state will last before it becomes waterlogged, blows over or gets retrieved by a big, wet dog. It has no compass, nobody is steering it and like Jeremy’s blowhard, tough guy “Ooh, I’m so angry!” speech, relies on nothing more tangible than hope to complete its journey. Being sodden by now it’s not even fit to line the budgie’s cage.

You wanted high spending, punitive taxing, excessive borrowing, road-to-ruin economics and here it is, writ large. “Blah, blah, blah... inequality. Blah, blah... fairer society. Blah, blah, blah... thirty days to save the NHS. Blah, blah Blair, blah...” It’s all there, all the naivety of a sixth-form ingénu on a platform to save everything from the clutches of some mythical status quo which, despite all the fear, is singularly failing to bring about the disaster he wants to save us from. It’s frankly insulting to imagine anybody could believe it yet, there they are, hands held out like welfare-seeking zombies, desperately short of brains...

Life is simultaneously both simple and complex. The simple part is that what actually matters to you is already largely under your control. You don’t like where you are? For all but an unfortunate few, the solution is in your own hands; work harder, work smarter, change your ways... or learn to accept what you have. It is nobody’s purpose in life to improve your lot; the best you can vote for is a government that gets out of your way. It might not be easy, but it is pretty simple and you only have yourself to blame... or to praise.

The complex part is way beyond your control and unless you are a latter-day Machiavelli, negotiating the shark-infested waters of society’s loosely interlocking parts is likely to get you nowhere comfortable. You want a pay rise? Far easier that you work for it within the bit of the system you can influence personally than try, somehow, to change the way an organisation operates. Meddling from the outside, as socialism always wants to do, is almost always ineffective and ruinous. The law of unintended consequences is an ever-present threat:

Raise wages by edict and employment falls, consumer spending falls with it, prices rise and a policy intended to help thousands adversely affects millions. Insist on diverse hiring quotas and competence suffers, industries fail and thousands lose jobs. Penalise fossil fuel users to artificially promote ‘renewables’ and throw huge amounts of national funding at foreign manufacturers of equipment, thereby literally giving our national money away. A vote for Corbyn is a vote for changes so fundamental you can’t imagine - nobody can - how potentially ruinous they might turn out.

But, hey, your choice. By all means campaign for a better world, but recognise what is within your purview. Just remember a couple of things; the Greek proverb ‘Physician, heal thyself’ applies as much today as it ever did in biblical times. And while we’re on a religious theme, believer or atheist, I've always found  Reinhold Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer a useful maxim: God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.