Politicians need to recognise self-evident truths – or else we risk going deeper into poverty

The anchors of stability which have kept the world in balance over the past 80 years are fast slipping away: whether in politics, economics or culture. That’s not to say that they have provided a firm basis for building our future – wars, financial crises and social breakdown have all featured strongly in the decades since the end of the Second World War. The recent elections in England showed that challenges to old certainties are very much evident in the UK, with both established parties, Conservative and Labour, being literally taken to the cleaners by the rise in support for Nigel Farage’s Reform party.

It’s clear that the old political reasoning providing a choice between socialism and the self-interested ‘natural party of government’ (as people used to describe the Conservatives) is no longer acceptable. If the main parties cannot provide a logically-based and more egalitarian style of government, then voters will show their preference to demand their own ‘populist’ self-interest, whatever that means.

As the spending review will show, it’s economics which has brought down both Labour and Conservative parties. The public-finance piggy-bank is empty, and there’s no indication that Reform would do any better.

Read more:

• My middle-class, lifelong Labour-voting friends are turning to Reform UK
• Working class and young people are ditching Labour. ‘Aping Reform’ won’t bring them back
• What could be in Rachel Reeves’ spending review – and what should be?

The fact that so-called stealth taxes have pushed more than eight million people into higher-rate taxation is deeply significant. The freezing of tax thresholds was introduced by the Conservatives and has been locked in by Labour, and it has left huge numbers of people feeling worse off, even if they don’t understand the intricacies of the tax system. Meanwhile, Labour’s attempts to impose higher taxation on ‘those with the broadest shoulders’ has also failed dismally as a result of the exodus of wealthy individuals, both non-doms and ordinary citizens.

Then, as Trussell shows in its report, Cost of Hunger and Hardship, the nine million enduring poverty in 2024 continues to increase in number: a further 425,000 people are projected to face this situation in the next three years if nothing changes to reverse it. They estimate the cost to the Exchequer being £75 billion each year. Meanwhile, slashing overseas aid budgets while at the same time trying to hold back the surge of economic migrants from disadvantaged countries simply demonstrates the illogicality of government thinking.

For all these reasons, we need a fresh start for the principles on which Western democracies are based. Politicians need to understand why debt has reached such stratospheric levels if they really want to deliver the change they promise; and they have to be prepared to work in partnership, in particular with philanthropists, if change is to be delivered in the short term – that is, within the 4-5 year electoral cycle.

It’s helpful to re-visit those ‘self-evident truths’ of which Thomas Jefferson spoke 250 years ago: that all are created equal, with unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Then we should measure up these self-evident truths against the principles adopted by today’s political parties.

For example, socialism may claim to reflect that equality but has totally failed to deliver it – in fact, welfare universality has impoverished the ability for government to focus on the needs of the most disadvantaged. Its application over the past 75 years is the biggest single reason for today’s dire state of public finances.

Meanwhile the Conservatives may have claimed that ‘levelling-up’ would deliver ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for all’, but the huge swing to Reform in those ‘Red Wall’ areas has proved that it, also, has not delivered.

I would add three more basic principles to Jefferson’s self-evident truths:

• The need to embed inter-generational rebalancing to ensure that we think forwards across generations in developing policy – the failure to address the inter-generational cycle of deprivation is what I call the ‘Black Hole of Economics’;
• That care for the long-term future should be an integral part of the design of government, so that there is long-term democratic oversight of the short-term executive management provided by ministers and MPs; and
• A recognition that people can only feel responsible for the world in which they live if they have a sense of ownership – of participation – therein: while home ownership is an important component of this, it needs to extend into sharing the benefits, and contributing to the development, of automation.

These self-evident truths are not reflected in any of our current leading political parties: it’s time for them to go back to the drawing board. This may well result in a convergent realisation that the search for a more egalitarian form of capitalism embodying all these self-evident truths would lead to a more constructive and stable future for all.

We should also not lose sight of the need to deliver such change globally. Looking beyond parochial economics, most of our major long-term challenges are global in nature, including climate change and international conflict. It may be nearly 80 years since the formation of the United Nations, but it is still a talking shop between bureaucrats appointed by their member nations; it has no democratic legitimacy.

If the United Nations was endowed with those self-evident truths of which Jefferson spoke plus inter-generational rebalancing and widespread individual participation, it might enable us to deliver, and not just talk about, real change on a global basis.

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