The poisonous prescription of socialism
The UK must say 'No' to the dreadful diet of socialist policies prescribed by Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party, warns John Redwood.
Some socialists start with the best of intentions.
They say, let's pass a law to cut the prices of basics so people can be better off.
If they do it too much businesses stop providing the goods and supermarket shelves empty.
They say, let's tax the rich more to give money to the poor.
If they do that too much the rich take their money and their businesses, their jobs and their ideas, to a country which taxes less.
They say let's take over profitable businesses, so we can use the profits to pay for public services
Once they've taken them over they usually starve them of investment and talent, driving great industries into loss and sacking employees to balance the books
They say let's just print some money to give more to the poor
That way leads to more inflation, often leaving the very people they wanted to help worse off, unable to afford the basics.
This is something we can learn from our history books
Labour's great nationalised industries sacked hundreds of thousands of people, lumbered taxpayers with huge losses and failed to serve the customer well.
Labour's big spending sprees led to too much borrowing, to sterling crises and to high inflation
The final ignominy came when their policy meant the UK had to beg for a loan from the IMF, an organisation designed to help poor countries, as the country struggled from recession to recession
Labour's tax assault on success led to the brain drain, as energetic and able people moved abroad.
This is also something we can learn again today by looking at poor Venezuela.
Mr Corbyn heralded the government of Venezuela as a new way, an alternative to the capitalism he hates in free western societies.
Thanks to laws cutting prices, to nationalisation, printing money , high taxes and state control, the economy is in collapse.
The rich and the not so rich are rushing across the border to get away from the regime that torments them
The nationalised oil industry produces precious little oil despite the huge size of the reserves, starved of capital and good management
Supermarket shelves are largely empty, with companies unwilling to make and trade in such a damaged economy
The poor have been given large increases in benefits, only to end up worse off as inflation soars to make their money almost valueless
The state keeps spending money it does not have, so inflation surges making trading almost impossible.
The UK must say No to such a dreadful diet of policies.
We can offer a much better alternative.
John Alan Redwood, Baron Redwood, is a British politician and academic who represented Wokingham in Berkshire as Conservative Member of Parliament from 1987 to 2024. Born on 15 June 1951, he served as Secretary of State for Wales under John Major and twice stood unsuccessfully for the Conservative Party leadership during the 1990s. Following his ministerial career, Redwood held positions in the Shadow Cabinets of William Hague and Michael Howard before spending his remaining parliamentary years as a backbencher. Prior to entering Parliament, he earned a doctorate at All Souls College, Oxford and served as Director of the Number 10 Policy Unit under Margaret Thatcher.
A veteran Eurosceptic described in 1993 as a pragmatic Thatcherite, Redwood has been particularly known for his work on economic policy and European matters. He co-chaired the Conservative Party's Policy Review Group on Economic Competitiveness until 2010 and serves as Chief Global Strategist of investment management company Charles Stanley & Co Ltd. Redwood was a prominent supporter of Brexit in the 2016 EU referendum and was a member of the pressure group Leave Means Leave. He writes commentary for Comment Central.
