Badenoch must continue to argue for a politics of imperfection

Boris Johnson confessed in yesterday’s Daily Mail that he has had private treatment for a kidney stone. He began by pretending to be embarrassed about this, and ended with a trenchant defence of private medicine.

The public mood is changing. Many of us know people of modest means who have chosen to pay for private treatment.

The assumption that the state should monopolise the provision of health, and of welfare more generally, is widely recognised to be untenable. We know we often have a much better idea of what we need than the bureaucrats of the public sector are able to form on our behalf, let alone deliver.

We are prepared on our own responsibility to take the risk of getting it wrong. Freedom is incompatible with helpless dependence on officialdom.

But for politicians, this remains perilous territory. For them, it is often safer to imply, however implausibly, that the state can do everything, or at least that it can do a vast amount.

Not infrequently some dreadful example of official incompetence comes to light. The minister plays for time by announcing an inquiry, to be followed by the payment of full compensation for the atrocious suffering which has been inflicted on innocent people.

On hearing an announcement of that kind, one may reflect that no amount of money will ever make up for the pain which has been caused, not least because some of the innocent people are already dead.

And won’t the inquiry take years, and redound mainly to the benefit of lawyers?

And can we really afford to pay the huge amounts of compensation which the inquiry will recommend?

The answer to that last question is almost certainly “no”, whereupon it becomes the duty of the bureaucracy indefinitely to delay the actual payment of compensation.

This delay becomes so notorious that it prompts demands for a fresh inquiry, stymied by assurances from whoever is now minister (there have been several since the whole wretched business began) that the question is being treated as a matter of urgency, and will be dealt with in the near future, with a further announcement to be made before the House rises.

“On the whole, modern man has no solutions,” Alexander Herzen warned his son in 1855. But our politicians feel obliged, whenever a problem is brought to their attention, to suggest they can solve it by spending more of our money.

We find ourselves presented with a politics of perfection. The National Health Service may not be be working well, but whatever is wrong with it is the fault of the previous government, and a new set of politicians will put it right.

The Welfare State may not be working well, but it too was damaged by the last government, and the new lot will put it right.

It is easy, as a commentator, to fall into this way of thinking, and to imply that if only the politicians were as perfect as the commentator, everything in the public sector would be fine.

Kemi Badenoch has begun the arduous task of developing a politics of imperfection. In her recent speech at the Centre for Social Justice, of which a transcript can be read here, she pointed out that earning one’s own living is “better for the soul” than a life of dependence on the state.

One should in justice concede that Sir Keir Starmer says the unemployed who have been classified as sick should whenever possible be helped back into work.

He seems, however, to have failed to persuade his own MPs of this view, and to have believed that by the simple act of replacing the wicked Tories with virtuous Labour ministers, he would render the Government efficient.

The contempt he expresses for the Conservatives implies an unselfconscious sense of his own infallibility, or at least of his own incorruptibility.

Labour knows taxes are unpopular: hence the promise at the last election not to raise them on working people. But it continues to believe the Government can spend our resources better than we can ourselves, and it has devoted no real thought to how to cut public spending and allow money to fructify in the pockets of the people.

“If men were angels, no government would be necessary,” James Madison warned in The Federalist Papers. One of the overwhelming arguments for limited government is that human beings are too incompetent, and too corruptible, to be entrusted with unlimited government.

How is Badenoch to get this argument across? With difficulty, one fears. But it is an argument with which millions of people on modest incomes already agree.