The stripping away so many of our individual liberties means few understand what it means to be free anymore
07 July 2025
Daily Telegraph
The stripping away so many of our individual liberties means few understand what it means to be free anymore
The stripping away so many of our individual liberties means few understand what it means to be free anymore
The ground is being prepared for a wealth tax. Landlords will be stripped of their property rights, savers will lose control of their pensions, shops will control what we can eat, and even office banter will be monitored. Add it all up, and it is becoming alarmingly clear that Britain is accelerating down what the great liberal philosopher FA Hayek memorably described as the “road to serfdom”, with the individual sacrificed to the power of the state. And the worst of it is that it may well prove too late to turn back now.
The plans from both Labour ministers and their outriders for increasing the power of the government are piling up so quickly it is getting hard for even the most diligent of us to keep up with them all. Over the weekend, Lord Kinnock, the former Labour leader who still speaks to the soul of his party, argued for a wealth tax, with anyone with more than £10 million in assets forced to pay 2 per cent of the total every year.
Landlords will no longer be able to take their house or apartments back, undermining the right of ownership. The Chancellor Rachel Reeves wants to control your pension to boost investment in the UK, regardless of whether it improves returns. The supermarkets will soon face fines if some of their customers buy too many sausage rolls or Kit Kat’s. And the Deputy Prime Minister wants to control office chatter.
Taken in isolation each “reform” might have something to be said for it, but together they are nothing less than corrosive. A wealth tax means you don’t really own a company you have founded because it’s value has to be assessed every year, and you have to hand over a slice of it to the government.
If a landlord can’t take back a property, perhaps because they want to move back in, do they really own it? If your pension fund can’t invest the money you are saving for your retirement where the best returns can be made, it is no longer completely yours. If your shop is tasked with fighting obesity, ownership has been diminished, and if you are stopped at the till from buying what you want your freedom has been reduced. The office banter police may initially be tasked with clamping down on laddish “bantz” but will very quickly be checking you are not criticising the company’s management as well.
Even eighty years later, The Road To Serfdom remains the key to understanding where we are going. Hayek’s key argument was that modest, social democratic reforms might be well intentioned, and that might well be justifiable to solve one social problem or another. But when you added them all up, freedom was eroded to the extent that it no longer existed in any meaningful sense.
“Once you admit that the individual is merely a means to serve the ends of the higher entity called society or the nation, most of those features of totalitarian regimes which horrify us follow of necessity,” warned Hayek.
That seems even more timely for the Britain of the 2020s than it does for the immediate post war years when Hayek’s book was written. The Labour establishment and its allies in the civil service, the judiciary, the universities, and the Left-leaning think tanks, constantly put the individual at the service of the state. They impose extra taxes to pay for social services, regulations to improve our health, and controls to protect the poor or the vulnerable. Every time we have a little less freedom
The best of intentions, and the mildest of means, can still end up with a society in which we are the serfs of an overnighty state every bit as much as a medieval peasant was of the lord of the manor. At a certain point, a tipping point is reached, and it is too late to turn back. The freedoms that have been surrendered can’t be reclaimed.
“Nothing makes conditions more unbearable than the knowledge that no effort of ours can change them,” warned Hayek. If we are being honest, it may well be too late to turn back now. The state is too strong, too many people are dependent upon it, and its officials have accumulated so much power, and have become so arrogant in the way it is exercised, that it will be impossible to reduce it now. It might be happening a few decades later than Hayek expected. But Britain is now on the road to serfdom. And it may well prove too late to do anything about it now.
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