The problem faced by the first Thatcher government was a conglomeration of nationalised industries, associated unions, and the civil service. The problem today is different, though there is obviously some considerable overlap.

The civil service is a common thread, but the unions are less important (in large part because of changes to union law made by the Thatcher governments), and there are now, thankfully, few fully nationalised industries. But instead of the latter we have private industries and businesses that are so dependent on the state for their income, either because they provide goods and services to the state, or because they provide goods and services that are mandated by state regulation, or because they provide goods and services on the state's behalf. All are interesting, and the latter particularly so since the category encompasses the Private Finance Initiative (PFI), which is often thought of as being a type-specimen of the sacrifice of public interest in disadvantageous contracts with private capital. But seen in the larger context these contracts are revealed in a different light, namely as high risk acts entailing submission to state authority, and therefore paid at above market rates. In effect these are acts of self-nationalisation.

This process of absorption, typified by the PFI, is the heart of the so-called Third Way, and has resulted in an extension of the state that is in many respects more thorough and potentially more damaging than the transparent nationalisation of the Attlee period. No compensation payment is made in a lump sum, as was made for example to owners of coal mines, and self-nationalisation is much harder to unwind since the private capital thus in the process of being dissolved into the state's organism will actually defend the state even as it is being digested.

"Goodbye Ipswich!"

And leaned from the train as it stood at the platform.

Then later, suddenly, he said:

"Where's the baby?";
    "Downstairs";
"Why don't you bring him up?";
    "'cos I 'aven't eaten him yet".

His dark skin was covered in grime
But light grey against it his exquisitely neat hair
Moved in soldierly ripples from nape to front,
Carefully combed but never washed.

Excellent.

Stephen Belltree

Well, it could be worse,
There are reasons to be thankful;
And our duties of course, those hang,
How does Cowper put it?, 'on us', if it was Cowper.
What do you think of him? I’ve always rather liked his poems,
There’s something very attractive about him. Hard to say what.
Have you read that new book by, by, Peter Bu Ba, Bath? No, I haven’t either,
But I’ve got it here somewhere; it’s on my list.
I’ve so many things to do this year, though
And my history to write, of course.
Well, it’s part of the job.
I never imagined, I come from the hills and there’s lots there,
When I was a little boy playing in the snow, that I’d end up here,
Making my living in the city; no I never thought that would happen.
No, I never could have imagined that, not in a dream, a nightmare,
Impossible.

Lois Sedgepool

It’s a tricky situation, but I rather enjoy it;
Like working in a mental hospital,
There’s always the reassuring feeling that,
Whatever, there’s some space left between you and the worst.

I mean, there was a little gap the last time I looked,

But recently, you know, I’ve been feeling that it's
Narrowing.
Tea?

I’ve written some more poems, by the way,
Seven hundred since last Tuesday in fact, but they’re only limericks,
So, they don’t count do they?
I’m going to advertise myself as strippalimagram, what do you think?
It’s the body I’m not sure about,
Quite a problem.
And my mother, of course, she won’t approve.
Is that really your advice?

I see.

We often speak of the harm done to 'consumers' by the impositions of a state that sometimes works in conjunction with commercial corporate bodies. (If Smith were alive and writing today he would surely revise his famous remark to the effect that whenever public servants and men of business meet they are sure to conspire against the consumer.)

But if we were to try to identify this 'consumer' we would struggle, for it is very rare to come across a person who is a 'consumer' of the purest type, that is to say a private individual who is a net taxpayer, not in receipt of benefits, and a person whose income is independent of policy-induced industrial levies and regulations. Thanks to the extension of the state's activities, I would wonder if there are more than a handful of such people in the 60 million strong population of Great Britain.

Thus it is that politicians advocating liberty find themselves rousing not a subset of the population, but attempting to persuade one element in a person's mind to rebel against another. Of course, those arguing from the other side face a similar task, but their work is easier in that they play upon near universal guilt at self-assertion, and the strong tendency to feel safe when sacrificing personal advantage to the 'collective' interest, since we are persuaded that our most dangerous competitors will be compelled to do the same.

Collectivist theory springs from a selfish urge to restrain the success of others, for fear that they may secure resources sufficient to out-reproduce the self concerned. The matter is not represented to the mind clearly or in terms remotely like this, but in practice it has characteristics that are consistent with this account and with no other and certainly not with the rhetoric of collectivism. Perhaps the most striking of these is that collectivism is actually less able deliver collective goods than individualist societies.

No one should doubt that that most people prefer societies marked by low levels of inequality. It is also true that those same individuals simultaneously strive to maximise that between themselves and those below them, but this does not change the fact of their preference for equality, which is manifested in political choices and also everyday morals and custom. Introspection will confirm this. In fact, more remarkably, individuals will actually prefer equality to absolute wealth. In other words, if offered a choice between a lower income in a flat society and a higher income in a very unequal society, they would choose the former. Indeed, they will prefer the flatter society even if that society has a lower aggregate wealth. This last point is remarkable since it shows, as clearly as one could wish, that in spite of its claims egalitarianism is selfish. That is to say it will countenance lower collective wealth, implying reduced ability to withstand external threats, if that puts the self in a less relatively disadvantaged position. The continuing romance of the post-war socialist experiment – The Spirit of '45 – demonstrates this point.

Collectivist rhetoric, then, is a sly means to, a cover for, egalitarianism, which is the actual aim, not the common good. Indeed, insofar as there is a common good this is better served by a less equal society, since such societies are vastly more effective at generating wealth. Of course collectivism claims that an equal society is in the interests of all in terms of wealth and resilience, but this is obviously false since such societies deprive individuals of motivation, and eventually, as Mandeville foresaw, generate nothing but poverty. Nevertheless, the substance of the common good is in the last analysis very limited in extent. The terms 'common interest', or public interest' or 'common purpose' are hardly ever used in their literal sense, namely with the connotation that everyone feels the benefit equally, which is hardly surprising since in practise such an outcome must be vanishingly rare. Some only, and perhaps not even an absolute majority, may feel the benefit of an action deemed to be in the 'common interest', but these individuals themselves may not feel it with equal force, and there will nearly always be a gradient of benefit even within the category of winners. It is hard to see how it could be otherwise.

However, while in the vast majority of cases one may reasonably suggest that a claimed common good is in fact sectional and probably to the benefit of only a fraction of that section, there is a common good, even if it is very narrow in extent. Human populations can and do pool resources for the purpose of a) defence, and b) recovery, prospective or actual, from natural disaster. Even staunch individualists recognise the value of the armed services, the police, and the fire service, and as these examples show, it is quite wrong for collectivists to suggest that unequal societies will fail to provide resources for common purposes, for, as witness the responses of the democracies in the First and Second World Wars, they do so willingly and much more effectively than nominally collectivist societies since they have more resources to pool. Paradoxically, then, it is collectivists who are the enemies of collective endeavour, and the individualist, abused as vicious and selfish, who delivers what public virtues may actually be had.

Laissez faire, laissez passer: Let people do as they please and go where they please. Are there nobler sentiments in politics? Yet the first is everywhere reviled, and the second is forgotten, which is all the more remarkable since it is far and away the most important of the two; without going about the earth in freedom all other actions are limited in their scope and kind.

Indeed, if this most crucial of the principles of liberty is forgotten one of the most far-reaching impositions of the state passes almost unobserved. Indeed, most would think that freedom of travel was obvious and secure, and some would cite the restriction of, for example, the 16th Century as a comparison. Certainly, relative to that time people are not only very much more able to be mobile but also at greater liberty to exercise their mobility; they have cars, bikes, access to planes and trains, and they are not restricted to their parishes or beaten back into them when they stray beyond those bounds.

But the access to mobility and the relative freedom masks the fact that because of taxes on transport fuel and vehicles people are vastly less mobile than they could be. The loss of opportunity and thus of wealth is unlikely to be small. Laissez passer, laissez faire.

When I buy £80 worth of diesel for my car, 60% of that expenditure is tax, and constitutes an implied purchase of government services. In other words, I have just spent £50 or so on something from government, though not necessarily for me, personally, or directly, and in all probability to be predominantly consumed by others.

The extraordinary thing is that this transaction is quite opaque. The good is not only sight unseen, but unspecified; the identity of the provider is unknown; I have bought 'blind' in the most extreme way. Is it any wonder that state services are so poor?

The criticism of selfishness, or the closely related term of disparagement, 'arrogance', is generally aimed at a person who does not need to cultivate the goodwill of those that criticise them. Hence, social association is usually between those of similar economic means, where there is sufficient need for such cultivation as to preserve social calm. By contrast, when there is disparity, the richer party will tend to neglect the poorer's interests, resulting in justified resentment issuing in accusations of selfishness (and, or, arrogance).

In any section of the wealth gradient, I would hazard the guess that there is more variation in wealth from richest to poorest as you move up the wealth curve, with the result that accusations of selfishness are more common than amongst sections lower down the curve. Hence increasing degrees of solidarity are found as you move down the income gradient. Poorer people aren't intrinsically nicer; they just have to be.

What's Wrong with Recent Poems?

Dismal profundity;
Melancholy self-satisfaction;
Preening humility;
Condescending appeals for pity;
A lazy attention to detail;
A laboured wringing of great significance from tiny amounts of damp matter;
A social and political gradient of cartoon simplicity, and always viewed from the same perspective (la bas);
Pompous leaning on great names from other countries;
A cheapening of death and disability by over-use;
The weird assumption that dirt, or suffering, or deprivation is news to the reader, to the world of reading;
A monotony of tone, a low drone;
Ambulance-chasing melancholy;
Predatory compassion;
History on the pattern of the Hovis advertisement;
A half-concealed, half-advertised contempt for uneducated family relations in conventional careers;
An obsession with excretion;
Gloating over the deaths of failed lives;
Never less than very important (except when self-consciously eschewing significance in the name of still greater meaning);
Identical emotional material projected onto a little-varying set of props;
Maps, inscriptions, glyphs, decodings, graffiti;
The implication that all the lives depicted would pass away in vain were it not for this poet;
Tension and failure, with compensating joy only in a sordid and polluted form;
Slave romance;
Overburdened childhood vignettes;
Superstitious omni-significance;
Christ! (the poet suffers to save the reader, and are you grateful?);
Illness and insight;
Contempt for health;
Explaining too much lest something fine slips by (the ‘clock on the golden section: ten to three’), or too little lest the vacuity of the situation becomes apparent;
Solipsism;
Objects usually broken and old;
Lassitude, made flesh in the rhythms of the verse (if any);
Insistent demands for attention;
Sensitivity speaking in the language of a dictator;
Tired nihilism;
World-weary knowing all;
Sombre colours of decay enlivened only with flesh tints;
A world in which to flourish is failure; and failure is the sole merit;
Single point perspective;
Hushed tones in church (the world a convenient altar for self-worship);
The easy romance of spatial dislocation (translation; travel);

Overworked thesaurus;
Bleating, but crying wolf;
Sanctity of the sordid;
The authorities are always bullies;
Misery memoir, mirth as contrast only;
Bleeding hearts are worn upon the sleeve this year (and all years);
Moaning;
Brand names, particularly for alcohol;
Curiously irresponsible (no children?);
Jaded;
A supersensitive soul denied better fare;
A ‘prisoner’ begging through imagined bars;
Self-harm;
Disorder preferred;
Litter adored;
Public transport;
And a natural world that achieves reality only through the speaker's gloom.
That's what.

Laocoon’s a beauty but
My neighbour wrapped in tubes is not;
Her dog agrees, and seems to think
His god-provider needs support.

No catharsis here, high rage,
A patriotic will to act,
Convulses all his parts at once,
In apoplectic tip-toe dance.

She sneers perhaps at this mistake,
But errs herself in thinking that
His rippled swags of angry fat
Are mobilized on her behalf.

An ancient native visual map
Sees snakes embrace a fellow tyke;
His leader, pack, extended self,
As men would feel in smaller groups.

And with unerring common sense
He savages the serpent's head,
And not its rumbling metal gut,
Which lies, neglected, some yards off.

The dog assumes that he and she
Confront a common enemy.
Their social frame is under threat,
A relative, perhaps, attacked.

And thus the shock when Mum, for fun,
Assists the beast in trouncing him;
Reproachful eyes are made at her,
Whose causal agency is clear.

The laughter gives it all away,
His frowns are risible, and tears
Of high perplexion stand
To say I’m honest Pug betrayed.

This terrifying bafflement,
A breach in his domestic dream
Revealing possibilities
Too numerous to undertake

Or choose between, amuses us;
The incapacity and fear
Confirming like a nervous joke
That stern dulotic mastership,

Which took a pup and made it drunk
Upon a propagandous love
Diffused throughout the human nest
To sterilize our slaves and maids.

We farm these helpers ruthlessly,
With iron hand and chocolate bone,
And sculpt their features over years
Producing strains of inquile beasts

To serve our lordly purposes
As sleek and hairless instruments,
Or live as tolerated fools
Upon a dandling woman’s knee;

While dimmer hounds provide a girl
With model lovers, strong and warm,
Devoutly tractable yet fierce,
As melancholy harem guards.

Our moral calculations fail
To generate a clear result
From this confused ecology
Where none is Justice, none is thief.

A dog is but an acid’s egg,
A million sterile eggs the price
The twisted speculator pays
That one may blossom millions more.

And carried out upon our tide
The canine gene-bag ripples, bobs,
And is disfigured on the swell
Of man’s now overblown success.

The revolution is at hand,
And all such lackeys, running dogs,
May soon be free to mate and die
Beyond this court’s oppressive law.