The making of a one-party state

The following are excerpts from the Daily Telegraph editorial of 5 August 2003. That's SEVEN years ago.

Under Labour, the public sector has become a Moloch, to whom the lifeblood not only of the present generation but that of posterity must be sacrificed. The public sector has employed an additional 354,000 people since 1997, and is due to grow by more than 200,000 over the next three years. It now employs 5.3 million, one in five of the working population, a proportion that is bound to grow as the productive sectors of the economy shed labour in the face of prohibitive regulations and costs. While the Guardian’s ‘Society’ section is now the size of a telephone directory thanks to the number of public sector jobs advertised, manufacturing industry has lost 11 per cent of its workforce. Whitehall has more than half a million civil servants, about as many as the City of London. The greatest engine of growth in Europe is carrying the burden of the largest bureaucracy in Europe.

It is not only a question of size. The new ruling class has privileges that most people working in the productive sector can only dream of. Generous state-funded pensions, guaranteed against fluctuations in the stock market; jobs guaranteed against fluctuations in the labour market; and subsidised housing reserved for public sector workers. Half, at most, of the new staff are nurses, teachers, police officers and other front-line professionals; the rest are administrators. Public sector inflation, though hard to measure, is running far ahead of the private sector at 19.6 percent over the past two years. Almost all the new money pouring into health and education is being spent on salaries: £2.45 billion out of £2.7 billion of this year’s increase on schools, for instance. Public sector pay is now rising faster than ever before, but efficiency is some 16 per cent below that of America. We are spending a third more on the NHS, with hardly any improvements.

Meanwhile, economic growth has slowed to a mere 0.5 per cent so far this year. According to the Treasury’s own survey, economists expect government borrowing to exceed its estimates next year by about £10 billion, causing the Chancellor to tell the last Cabinet meeting that, in the words of one minister, ‘we are sailing close to a waterfall’. Taxes to pay for the burgeoning public sector have cost the average household £4,000 a year, to which must be added the cost of lost growth: some £2,000 a year. April’s National Insurance rise has caused average incomes to fall by 1.2 per cent for the first time in recent memory. Yet taxes are due to rise by another £95 billion over the next three years. There is political method in this economic madness. Half a million new bureaucrats will form part of the payroll vote: they owe their jobs to Labour. John Prescott announced yesterday that 200,000 new houses would be built east of London, many of them reserved for public servants. Over time, such colonisation will cost the Tories seats. This is gerrymandering on a national scale.