Labour has left the nation sleepwalking into a welfare state that punishes work
Daily Telegraph 24/05/26
How far have we travelled down the British road to socialism?
We now live in a country where a family living on benefits in London can be better off than a household earning £70,000 per year, according to analysis by the Centre for Social Justice.
For much of Britain, the link between how much you work and what you can afford has been broken.
If Labour has a core ideological belief, it is that fighting inequality is a moral crusade that trumps everything else. Economic growth must play second fiddle to this sacred cause.
Conservative politicians of recent decades have been too frightened to challenge this mantra, for fear of being seen as heartless.
There was, of course, the Thatcherite interregnum in the 1980s, when wealth creation was openly celebrated, and rising inequality was seen as a price worth paying for the country becoming richer. But that was an aberration from the post-war egalitarian consensus.
The fact that, for many, work does not pay may thus even be seen as an achievement. Karl Marx, after all, extolled in his 1875 Critique of the Gotha Programme that in a future society the guiding principle would be “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”.
And is this not what our current regime of subsidised housing and myriad handouts for those on benefits is achieving in practice?
The real socialism that is found in Britain is not that of the original British Road to Socialism, the programme that our own Communist Party adopted in 1951, having received the explicit approval of Joseph Stalin. This was much more interested in mass nationalisation and smashing monopoly capitalism.
But it, too, was interested in reassuring the public that economic transformation could be achieved in a friendly, none too bloody, even consensual British way.
Out went a Bolshevik-type revolution to be played out on London’s streets, as previous incarnations of the Communist Party’s programme had envisaged. Instead, a parliamentary majority would be built around socialist aims and the comrades would work towards an alliance of Labour, Communist, and progressive MPs to build the promised nirvana.
One could argue that this plan is a progenitor of what many on the Left hope will emerge after the next general election – that a coalition of Greens, Labour and nationalists will be able to command a majority.
As with so much of the Marxist superstructure, The British Road to Socialism has been revised again and again over the years by its supporters. Today, it remains the programme of the Communist Party of Britain. But what it represents in essence is an attempt to detoxify Marxist-Leninist dogma for a British audience, to bring us to full socialism by increments.
And this is where the similarity to Britain’s benefits regime comes in. A truly radical transformation of our society has taken place in the name of being caring and kind.
It is true that Britain is a more unequal society than it was in the 1970s. The economic dynamism and tax-cutting of the 1980s did mean that many more grew rich and this inevitably meant that income differentials grew. In the 1990s, inequality went down modestly and it has since remained fairly constant.
Those on the Left will thus argue that yet more needs to be done to fight inequality. But the rise in inequality is almost entirely a phenomenon of the richest 5pc or so of the population becoming richer. Take this relative elite out of the picture, and the socialist dream of rewards not being a reflection of effort is almost upon us.
What will disappoint socialists is that most people do not regard this as a happy or just state of affairs, quite the reverse.
It is indeed a very hard sell to explain to those who can barely afford their monthly market rent of £2,500 or more for a modest London flat that only a few doors away non-working families on benefits will be living in a similar council-provided space for a fraction of this sum.
Perhaps the perversity of this situation was brought home last week when it emerged that the first lady of Sierra Leone, Fatima Jabbe-Bio, is still in possession of a Southwark council flat despite living in the presidential palace in Freetown.
As the obvious unfairness of the current tax and benefits regimes becomes ever more apparent, there is perhaps an emerging hope. Eventually our leaders may realise there is less to fear from reforming tax and welfare than keeping the status quo in place.
It is unlikely that Labour politicians will ever grasp this nettle; it would be too much of a rejection of their whole world view. But Tory and Reform leaders may come to realise that being radical is their best prospect for electoral success. And the British road to socialism could finally run out.
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