Can Right-wingers win the argument over inequality?
Can conservatives win the debate about inequality? Seriously.
Yesterday I posted about the spread of a revived egalitarianism winning new supporters on the back of the 21st century Das Kapital, The Spirit Level.
Once, the idea behind egalitarianism – in the sense of believing in equality of outcomes, rather than equality of opportunity – was that human beings were shaped by nurture and that inequalities were due to society’s faults, rather than genetics or personal morality, and so therefore government could make us equal.
This idea now being discredited by science and experience, egalitarians now claim that inequality should be dramatically reduced because it affects a whole load of other aspects of life, and even harms the rich.
This idea is popular because differences in wealth are so outrageous; this is especially so in London, a city that has almost fulfilled HG Wells' prophecy, except that the Morlocks sit around watching TV rather than toiling underground, and they don’t eat Eloi either (not enough saturated fats).
And yet on the equality issue the Left has two massive Achilles’ heels, for they will never achieve any measure of equality so long as they continue to espouse radical ethnic diversity or the social liberalism of the 1960s, both ideas that accentuate class differences. This is where conservatives have a better chance of narrowing inequality levels.
New Labour spent record amounts on redistribution and keeping millions of (mostly Labour-voting) people on welfare, and yet inequality got worse. The failure is not just down to the excessive wealth of bankers (who, after all, helped to fund the whole thing) but the social policies that have helped to keep the poor in their place for so long – child-centred education and tax breaks for broken families being two good examples.
And while poor Brits rotted on welfare, Labour found it economically beneficial, ideologically correct and politically expedient to find new workers elsewhere.
Over the weekend it was revealed that only 62 per cent of children are now born to “white British” mothers, a legacy of Labour’s revolutionary immigration policy. Now even Polly Toynbee admits that Labour’s immigration policy drove down the level of wages, an economic reality that the Left ignored for a decade. But what about the long-term effect?
The Spirit Level rather skirts around this issue, even though there is a clear correlation between diversity and inequality in the US.
In their conclusion the authors cite New Hampshire and Vermont as ideal egalitarian states, pointing out the contradiction that one is a libertarian paradise and the other a high-tax state, yet both are very equal. Why? They don’t say, but I will – relative homogeneity.
Greater equality is achieved not through socialism but social capital, greater trust within society, trust which begins to break down when a society becomes too diverse, and incomers are not given time to integrate. That is what happened in the US after they opened up their borders in the late 1960s, and that’s what is happening here.
Two Spirit Level disciples are currently cycling around Sweden to explore what makes that country so equal. And yet do the Spirit Level followers really believe that in 40 years' time, when even the most sober-minded demographers project that country will be 20-25 per cent Muslim, Sweden will be so egalitarian? Well yes, they probably do, because their attachment to equality and diversity is not based on rational thought, but on blind ideological belief.
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