The Tories raison d'etre. Where Are They Then?

Taxes Hit All-Time High

"An analysis by the accountants Ernst & Young, based on the Treasury’s own figures, shows the chancellor will match the record high for the tax burden this year [37.6%)] and rise above it next year [37.8%].

That means it will be higher than in the 1970s under Denis Healey, when the top rate of income tax was 83%, and the early 1980s, when it was 60%.

Treasury figures show tax revenues will total £490 billion this year, up from £271 billion when Brown took office. The £219 billion rise is equivalent to £9,000 for every household in Britain."

Didn't we learn the lessons of the past?

I have come to believe, aside from the obvious benefits of low taxation and limited state interefence, that the Tory Party only exists because there happens to be a Labour Party. This is the Tories raison d'etre; to correct the damage that the Left continually inflicts on Britain when it is in power - or so it used to be.

The empirical evidence suggests that the Tories always have the unforgivable task of presiding over Britain when it is clinically fed-up, and almost always this period of painful convalescence is followed by a desire by the electorate to excogitate over social democracy. Oblivious to the tergiversations of the Left, the British throw themselves with alacrity back into the arms of social democracy. After an initial period of consolidation, the Left becomes unable to restrain its inherent primal instincts and begins to engage in its favourite past-time of apocrypha and larceny; continuing the atavstic impulse to redistribute and interfere. The inevitable climax of this process is that of economic and social degeneration.

As a consequence, Britain will continue to mutate into the worst aspects of EUtopia. This means embracing French public-service ethics, Belgian foreign policy, Italian birth rates, Swedish tax rates and Greek state pension liabilities. And this is to say nothing of Britain's numerous afflictions.

Until a cogitative case is made for substantial tax cuts, and an assault on the iconoclastic adherence to state involvement in society, Britain, like the European Union, will continue to experience a slow and painful suicide. Only this time there seems to to be no pathology to correct Britain's malaise; there is no discernable Thatcher on the horizon, only a consensus to manage Britain's decline amongst the political establishment.

As Withnail once enunciated presciently: we are indeed drifting into the arena of the unwell.