Peter Oborne writes with insight when he says: "The Attlee Government engineered a new settlement: massive state ownership underpinned by a dogmatic belief that the Treasury could manipulate the economy in order to secure high employment and low inflation.Even after Attlee himself lost power, the Conservative governments which followed accepted these basic tenets.
It was only in the late 1970s that this progressive consensus (accepted by Labour and Conservative governments alike) collapsed, with the emergence of stagflation (an economy with no growth but high inflation), permanently high employment, widespread industrial failure and the catastrophic breakdown of public services in the winter of 1978/9."
State interference leads to the dependency culture which has been increasingly debilitating to our nation in the last 40 years or so.
When you have basic jobs which so many of the streetwise but uneducated in our society are permitted NOT to take but who are then allowed to remain on benefits as an alternative, it is an inevitability that many low grade jobs will not get done. Indeed the culture is further encouraged with those who are basically prepared to work but cannot justify doing so if they are only to gain a paltry £15 per week extra.This latter group can hardly be blamed for their attitude.
The insane government response is to import workers from other countries to fill the gaps!
This short-termism is utter madness as it puts enormous stress on to the infrastructure of the 9th most crowded country on the planet. It has further deleterious knock-on effects into: education, health, housing, crime and so much more.
It is inevitable too that those under-skilled who have been encouraged in unemployment will become effectively unemployable for life on the rather obvious basis that you are unable to teach an old dog new tricks.
