Larry the cat waiting at the door of 10 Downing Street in London, England. (Photo by Leon Neal/Getty Images)
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Britain, as it gets its seventh prime minister in ten years, he is going to learn that a pleasant personality is no substitute for sound principles and policies. The US, and many other democracies, should take note.
Never before in British electoral history has there been such a turnover. And it’s no wonder. The country remains mired in a sluggish economy, riddled with high costs and a dysfunctional, government-run health care system, not to mention a severe cultural and immigration crisis. Andy Burnham, the former mayor of Greater Manchester, may soon take over from the hapless incumbent, Sir Keir Starmer.
The Labor Party is in a panic. It won an overwhelming number of seats in the 2024 election, but is now extremely unpopular. In the recent local elections, Labor was crushed by the fledgling UK Reform Party.
Starmer’s wooden public persona and chronic indecisiveness aside, his successor has offered no plausible policies to turn around a deeply troubled country. In fact, some of Burnham’s past statements, such as seizing British companies, massively raising taxes on the rich – including wealth tax – and rejoining the hardening, regulated EU, sound like socialist Senator Bernie Sanders on steroids. At least, now Burnham manages the concept of the EU.
Burnham is a proven happy operator who knows how to charmingly chat people up. However, he showed no substantive ideas that would make the Sceptred Isle the economic dynamo it once was thanks to Margaret Thatcher’s no-nonsense reforms. In 1979, when Thatcher took over at 10 Downing Street, Britain was rightly labeled the economic sick man of Europe. By the time he was forced out of his own Conservative Party in 1990, the country was the most vibrant major economy in the EU. He curbed the crippling power of unions, slashed tax rates – the top income tax rate fell from 98% to 40% – returned industries to the private sector, which had been nationalized after World War II, and privatized large tracts of land. public housing. Millions of people in government flats could buy their homes at low prices with attractive mortgages. She was a fierce critic of what became the EU.
Since Thatcher, however, Britain has found itself in a situation that, in spirit, is not unlike that of the mid-1970s, when it had to turn to the IMF for an emergency bailout. He has become addicted to raising taxes and accumulating debt. A huge blunder has been made over the very expensive, so-called renewable energy sources, which have sharply and needlessly increased the cost of electricity. Equally foolishly, Britain severely hampered its North Sea oil production and refused to embrace fracking. Just a reminder, fracking allowed the US to go from being a huge importer of oil to becoming the largest producer of oil and gas in the world. The UK has also done little to curb mass and unpopular waves of immigration. In the name of cultural diversity, it turned a blind eye to scandalous attacks on women by immigrant gangs. Burnham shows no inclination to do what is really needed to change his country.
The lesson is clear: Sound principles and pro-free market programs do wonders for improving living standards and opening opportunities for all people to get ahead.
In the United States, Republicans are showing alarming signs that they are beginning to lose sight of this truth, as some party powers embrace big labor ills. They also despise the kind of tax cuts enacted by Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, which decisively reversed our own decline in the 1970s. A quick way to reverse such downward trends would be for the Trump administration to adjust capital gains for inflation—especially on housing—and push through a new, aggressive round of cuts in personal and corporate tax rates. commercial enterprises.
