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Why Life in Brown’s Britain is Destined to Become Still Harder

Civitas, 3 December 2004

Despite all the manifold problems of rising levels of violent crime to have beset Britain since 1997, life has not been too bad for the vast majority of its citizens. In many ways, the period of sustained growth and rising living standards most of them have enjoyed was the legacy of sound public finance that the Labour Government inherited from the previous administration, plus its inspired early decision to place monetary policy beyond the remit of the Treasury.
Moreover, despite having vastly increased public expenditure and taxes to pay for it, Chancellor Brown so far has been comparatively prudent, managing to observe his self-denying ordinance, which he terms his ‘Golden Rule’, not to increase public borrowing over the course of the economic cycle save for purposes of capital expenditure.
Yesterday, Chancellor Brown delivered his Pre-Budget Report which most political commentators interpret as being his attempt to set out his stall as future leader to fellow party members. In announcing in it what he did, Chancellor Brown seemed to throw all previous monetary and fiscal caution to the wind.


For it sets out a highly ambitious and costly programme of public spending for the next decade the feasibility of which without increased public borrowing or taxes seems predicated on wildly optimistic assumptions about future rates of economic growth and hence future tax yields and employment levels.
Even if, as seems unlikely, Chancellor Brown’s economic assumptions turn out not unduly optimistic, and he therefore manages to implement his programme without needing to increase tax- or interest-rates, his plans seem unlikely to improve the quality of life for the vast majority of British citizens. This is because their supreme concern seems to be to increase the numbers of those in paid work.
In itself, such an objective need not be a bad thing, save in the case of one category of potential employee whom Chancellor Brown seems above all intent on seeing go out to work. This is mothers of young children.
To this end, he has undertaken to finance from the public purse a massively expanded programme of publicly provided child-care facilities. These include nurseries and greatly extended opening hours of schools at which children can be deposited.
If current levels of public sector provision are anything to go by, the standard of child-care these facilities are likely to provide will not be sufficiently high to prevent what studies have shown to be their all-too-frequent profoundly damaging psychological effects on the children who attend them. These are increased levels of aggression and anti-social behaviour.
The country thus seems likely to have to endure in future even greater levels of criminality and unruliness among young people than it has of late, and still more disruptiveness in schools.
Chancellor Brown could have chosen another way to create the ‘family-friendly welfare state’ he proudly boasted he was creating. He could have introduced transferable tax allowances for married couples, and other forms of inducement, to enable and even encourage those of them who wanted to look after their young children at home themselves.
Too many vested interests among Labour Party supporters, and doubtless not a little feminist ideology, stood in the Chancellor’s way. As a a result, we shall all be made to suffer. Pity.

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