Under Thatcher, Britain rejected the politics of envy. And under May?
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The British are less envious than the French, Germans or even Americans, according to a new survey. They are more relaxed about the “super-rich”, less prone to schadenfreude and less likely to favour penal taxation on executives in order to redistribute wealth to their workers.
These results apparently astonished Rainer Zitelmann, the German economic historian who commissioned a poll of 4,000 people in Britain, the US, Germany and France. His “social envy coefficient” placed the French and British at opposite ends of the spectrum — a conclusion that he found “extraordinary”, but not one that would have surprised Tony Blair. It might, however, surprise one of his successors as leader of the Labour Party: Jeremy Corbyn, who has sought to reintroduce what Margaret Thatcher called “the politics of envy” into Britain.
Mrs Thatcher first introduced the phrase even before she replaced Edward Heath in 1975 to become first Leader of the Opposition and, four years later, entered Downing Street. In an article for the News of the World (now defunct but then the biggest circulation newspaper in Britain), she wrote: “I reject vehemently the politics of envy, the incitement of people to regard all success as if it were something discreditable, gained only by taking selfish advantage of others. I do not think it is in the character of the British people to begrudge a lion’s share to those who have genuinely played a lion’s part.”
It is rare to hear such sentiments from Conservative politicians today. The idea that entrepreneurs who have worked hard and risked much should be rewarded for their efforts plays almost no part in the rhetoric of Theresa May or her Cabinet. There is an assumption that taxpayers can somehow make up for the unfairness of life. But society does not create wealth; only individuals do that. And politicians do not enable the wealth-creators to flourish by redistributing their profits to the rest of us. This is as true today as it was when Mrs Thatcher uttered the notorious words “there is no such thing as society”. She did not mean that society had no obligation to support the less fortunate, but that individuals have a prior obligation to support themselves and their families.
The politics of envy have never prospered for long in Britain. During the brief period in the late 1970s and 1980s when it looked as though the hardline socialists led by Tony Benn might take over the Labour Party, Mrs Thatcher won three successive majorities. A young Labour MP, Tony Blair, drew the right conclusion from these defeats. He rejected the politics of envy and the Marxist assumptions that underlay such politics. He also embraced the patriotism that had saved Mrs Thatcher’s first government after the Falklands War. It was during that war that Blair lost his deposit in a by-election and realised that the Labour Party had misunderstood the mood of the country. He saw clearly at that moment that there would never be another Labour government unless it embraced the market and the nation.
All of these insights have been jettisoned by Corbyn and his colleagues. We now have an Opposition that openly advocates the politics of envy and displays contempt for the symbols of patriotism. Now that Mrs May is reaching out to Corbyn over Brexit, the possibility looms that Labour’s far-Left leader will be brought back in from the cold. Polls show that Corbyn is deeply unpopular except among his band of brothers, for whom he can do no wrong. But there is a real danger that by making common cause with Corbyn to get her deal through Parliament, Mrs May could help to make his approach to politics respectable in the eyes of voters.
Consensus has a place in politics, but it should never become an end in itself. Margaret Thatcher described consensus as “the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values and policies in search of something in which no one believes, but to which no one objects”. A consensus over Brexit based on a customs union would be just such a process, and it would signal the end of the Conservative government. Why? Because it would mean abandoning opposition to the politics of envy, represented by Jeremy Corbyn. If Dr Zitelmann’s survey is correct, the British people rejects the politics of envy. Mrs May would be wise to bear that in mind before she enters into a Faustian pact with Labour.
