Free Stuff Socialism is the dominant populism in Britain

"A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury" Lord Woodhouselee

The conversation starts with; “why do young people just want free stuff”. It is a valid question except that, as we quickly realised, those young people use the term ‘socialism’ to describe ‘give me free stuff’. And we ask how they arrived at this shallow selfish ideology, who taught them that if they ask loudly and wave lots of votes around the government will give them free stuff? Was it teachers? The media? University lecturers with their cultural marxism?

Then we remember something. Yesterday the government gave us £500 for nothing. Or rather to pay for heating during the cold months. Free stuff. And better than that the government is committed - has locked in - that we get an escalating amount of free stuff in years to come. Not because we are especially deserving but simply because we have reached a particular age. Nobody asks whether we need the money, nobody peers into our bank account or values our assets to determine if we need £500 for heating. The government just writes out a cheque.

Imagine the young renter in London who is wondering whether she can pay next month's rent. She travels to see her grandma who, smiling, tells the hard up renter that the government has given her £500 towards the heating bills for her four-bed house worth two million quid. Obviously, as a dutiful granddaughter, our renter is delighted for her grandma but on the train home and thinking about that looming rent bill, asks herself why grandma gets free stuff she doesn’t need.

It was us - the boomer generation - that made the idea that government could hand out free stuff forever without there being any consequences. And made sure that they kept giving us that free stuff by threatening them with votes. We even made sure that they couldn’t use our assets to cover some of those costs by objecting to actually using our own money to provide care and support we are well able to afford. We taught our children and grandchildren well since they now see that the way things work is to demand free stuff or else we won’t vote for you. The Free Stuff Socialism of today’s younger generations demands free university, free childcare, rent controls, and cheap transport. All apparently paid for by Jeff Bezos and provided without changing any of the free stuff already dished out by the state - healthcare, child support, keeping old folks warm and so forth.

We could argue at this point that this is, as Lord Woodhouselee argued, a feature of representative democracy:

“A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship.”

Because Britain didn’t really have a democracy until after the first world war (if you accept the idea that a universal franchise is a prerequisite of democracy), the point at which the electorate began to vote for Free Stuff Socialism came later - after the second world war when the first Labour government arrived promising sunlit uplands and lots of free stuff to the heroes who had defeated Naziism. Since then, with few exceptions, elections have become contests where parties outbid each other with offers of free stuff to the voters. This is moderated by a process of arguing that all this is ‘fully costed’ and that the opposing party is frivolous and spendthrift in their offer of free stuff.

There is no going back on Free Stuff Socialism or on the idea that only the government (despite all the evidence to the contrary) can run utilities, trains, buses and the financial system. We look on as political parties explain that their energy or water policy involves there being more investment in the system while making your bills cheaper. Plus lots of high paid new jobs, the cost of which will also, of course, make your bills cheaper still. And nobody questions the logic of Free Stuff Socialism because to do so might reveal that the magical source of the money is a little old man behind a green curtain and Scrooge McDuck is a cartoon character, there is no swimming pool filled with gold.

In Europe, including Britain, we are chewing our way steadily through the money that our economy generated before we invented Free Stuff Socialism. People ask why there is no productivity growth, why economic betterment has dropped off, and why (despite the billions thrown at higher education) we seem to have given up on innovation. We play a bizarre game of comparison with our European neighbours over growth without realising the sad reality - there isn’t very much economic betterment in any of these countries. And the reason, a reason we refuse to even consider, for this sclerosis is Free Stuff Socialism and the associated idea that we can tax ourselves to wealth and success. Or rather, tax other people so we can have free stuff and pretend we have wealth and success.

A recent example of Free Stuff Socialism is the Two Pound Bus Fare where the government hands over £800m or more to bus companies if they cap their fares at £2. This was introduced as a temporary scheme to help during the ‘cost of living crisis’ caused by the government giving out free money to nearly everyone during the Covid 19 pandemic. As the expiry date of 31 December 2024 approaches we can expect to hear calls for the scheme to be extended - these will explain that it is variously saving the planet, preventing abject poverty or creating jobs, so therefore a further lump of government cash must be paid to the bus companies to I can travel more cheaply. Of course for the elderly they already get free off peak travel on the bus - another bit of Free Stuff Socialism that can’t be abolished. It is likely that the government will be paying nearly £2 billion every year to sustain concessionary travel schemes. For some context here the 2021 Transport Survey saw a huge 3% of journeys made by bus.

Wherever we look we see demands for Free Stuff and it all seems very reasonable. A think tank or charity publishes a report showing that the reason lots of women don’t go back to work is childcare costs. The solution - free childcare. A different think tank or charity shows that the cost of domiciliary care puts people off employing home help. The solution - more free domiciliary care. And on and on - children need books, so free books, students need to go home from university, free travel, some kids don’t get enough food, give every child a free school dinner. Each turn of the ratchet takes us nearer to Lord Woodhouselee’s prediction as national debts climb, taxes rise and the demands for free stuff get ever more shrill. I’m not sure if we’ll end up with  a dictatorship but the logic of Free Stuff Socialism dictates that entitlements - all that Free Stuff - take up an ever growing proportion of total spending. 

Free Stuff, all those entitlements, is what is breaking English local government. There are no solvent top tier authorities in England but historic reserves and cuts to non-statutory services puts off the evil day when they join Birmingham, Croydon and Nottingham issuing what amounts to a bankruptcy notice. National government, of course, is protected from this predicament because it can borrow money (or, in extremis, just invent more money). But this doesn’t mean we can afford Free Stuff Socialism, it just means politicians can lie to the public about the fact that we can’t afford all that free stuff, usually while talking about fiscal prudence.

The malign effects of Free Stuff Socialism are not apparent to most people. We all seem to be OK. People have jobs, cars, food on the table and foreign holidays. The telly is filled with attractive people doing exciting things (it is, of course, part of the free stuff economy too), looking glamorous and generally living the good life. But we can only do this because of Free Stuff Socialism:

“...more than half of households – 36 million people – get more from the Government than they pay in tax, according to a study by Civitas. But this definition includes the amount individuals receive from 'benefits in kind', such as use of the NHS and state education. This is up from 24 million, or two-fifths of households, when Tony Blair was in power at the turn of the millennium.”

The number of ‘state dependent’ people is not going to fall. We can expect more Free Stuff in the form of childcare grants, restructured student loans and subsidised energy or transport bills as a result of the next round of Free Stuff Socialism (usually called a ‘general election’) where politicians promise to give other people’s money to other people in return for their votes. All while simultaneously insisting that taxes won’t rise, inflation will fall and the national debt will disappear. And because we want the free stuff, the public will ignore any Cassandra who mentions that just maybe we can’t afford so much free stuff.

We probably have a few more decades sustaining ourselves on the corpse of past greatness but eventually we will run out of sustenance and face a terrible reckoning. Approaching 100 years of Free Stuff Socialism will have left us not only broke but socially unable to do anything to fix the problem. All those years of lies about free stuff means we absolutely believe that not only is there a money tree but that it is somebody else’s job to go and find that tree so we can keep all the free stuff. Democracy will either die or else we’ll be voting to take next door’s cat so we have food on the table.