The growth of UKIP has prompted some interest in what is being called the Revolt on the Right (see Ford and Goodwin's book of that title), and though understandable in the circumstances such terms distract from those features of the current situation that are truly unusual and might well be the cause of or at least the satisfaction of key preconditions for major political or social change. That is the revolt is not necessarily on the right, or in any particular location on the conventional political spectrum. The growth of UKIP is part of a much broader destabilisation. That is to say, while Ford and Goodwin may be correct in suggesting that the bulk of UKIP's supporters are not educated professionals, that is not the end of the story. As anyone with a slight knowledge of the party will know, the leadership and local executive is drawn from a disaffected pool of people who are literate and numerate in no ordinary measure, and this is a symptom of a more general and important social fact, namely that a considerable part of the educated population is losing respect for the established order, and indeed for the rule of law in the current instantiation, because they no longer feel that their interests are well served. A chance conversation gives me evidence to support this. A benefits fraud investigator told me that the middle classes (her term) were the worst of the lot. I replied that they were so heavily taxed that would resort to such measures in self-protection. She responded that they were just immoral. However, I think that, in spite of the apparent disagreement, we were actually saying the same thing.

This disaffective inclination creates a trend, a tendency that passes out well beyond the graduates and others that compose the bulk of the professional, administrative and education sectors of the population. (It would be interesting to know more of the views of the armed service officers, and the police, but they are a small part of the population, and in any case quite opaque to casual investigation.) Consequently, changes of opinion within this body are not to be underestimated. At least twice in the last century or so a shift there has produced evolutionary change of great magnitude.

Firstly, without a decisive shift in educated opinion towards collectivism, the Labour movement could never have succeeded in forming the transformational Attlee governments, the outlines of whose programme continues to define the character of modern British politics. Indeed, that redefinition has been challenged only once, by Margaret Thatcher, and that was largely unsuccessful. This collectivist shift is detectable everywhere in literature, and other cultural output from the 19th Century onwards, but it gained political salience and force only after the First War. The causes are various, but a fear of revolution, or at least progressive taxation at punitive levels, seems to me likely principal candidates.
Secondly, the moral transformation of the 1960s took place because the educated aided and indeed encouraged the shift rather than resisting it. Mary Whitehouse was a figure of fun to sophisticated minds in a way inconceivable even in the 1920s. Again, the causes are doubtless numerous and diverse in character, but in this case the main drive seems to spring from the perception that traditional sexual morals no longer served their reproductive interests, and that these codes were more restrictive than protective, or had become so. That they were in fact protective should be obvious, and that their collapse did expose some to extreme sexual predation is clear from current scandals. But such outrages were not, I think, the main core of the sexual revolution; rather they were a correlated minority activity made possible by the expansion of sexual choice for the majority of population, an expansion that was and remains popular, suggesting that it still is broadly beneficial and all parties benefit.

Both of these shifts, the emerge of socialism as the common ground of British politics, and sexual liberation, were substantial but gradual changes, and in spite of differences (the Attlee period was still morally conservative) both moved beneath the banner of progressive modernism. The current situation is all the more curious because it lacks any clear focus or legitimising ideology, let alone a pragmatic justification; it is an expression of dissatisfaction, an indication of anger at the disadvantage being thrust upon the individual. It has not yet found a remedy and fixed upon it as an outlet for its energies.

Writing on Christmas day, 1753, Chesterfield observed that "all the symptoms which I ever met with in history previous to great changes and revolutions in government now exist and daily increase in France". We are not in quite that situation, and we do not yet have a 'revolutionary middle class', but the evaporation of the sense of shared endeavour, of public service, and an obvious weakening of respect for the civil, though not yet the criminal law, gives a clear indication of the general direction of travel.

It is a common charge that classical economists, and more or less individualist or right leaning politicians think the worst of human behaviour, and that left-leaning, more or less collectivist or socialist politicians have more faith in human nature's fundamental benevolence.But this cannot be true, indeed on the evidence it must be the other way around. For it is the left that believes that charity cannot be left to private kindness and must instead be institutionalised within the activities of government; while the right, broadly speaking, believes that much less need be done by government because individuals will, from whatever motive, willingly give up some part of their wealth to fund others or fund activities that benefit others.

Everything in our cultural record and in our own experience tells us that human beings are spontaneously charitable. They need no prompting to help others, they need no help from religion or from any other source. Indeed, all such sources are reflections, sometimes distorted images of the charitable manifestations in the contemporary population, though they track inclinations that are both antique and profound. As it happens there is little variation in these manifestations over time, and even less in what we can discern of their drive.

Real though they are, such donations of resources are limited by our sense of duty towards our own families, and our own interests, which for those that have families are closely bound together. This sense of graded philanthropy is enormously powerful, though frequently discouraged by centralised authority and its supporting religions, which aim to strengthen the individual's sense of obligation towards persons outside the family range, and to do so at the expense of the family, which is otherwise a disruptive and centripetal force. No wonder that Christianity, with its curious and little regarded injunction to love thy neighbour as yourself, has been popular with authority throughout Europe.

The strength of family feeling needs no external support; it is invariable and reborn with every generation; but the extent to which it limits external charity depends on the available resources. In good times we can afford to be generous to those well beyond the family circle; in hard times we may struggle to feed our own.

Even in good times, our kindness, by which we mean actions similar to those proper to our own kind, our relations, but extended for some reason to others, will be limited by a sense of what we can afford to give without reducing our ability to provide for our family and others, including potential objects of our charity in the future. Our sense of what is reasonable to give in any circumstance is very firmly calibrated against our experience and knowledge of what present circumstances indicate about those likely to obtain in the future. In other words, in an undistorted situation our charity will always tend to the optimal level, and be as great as is compatible with duty to one's own dependents and our ability to provide for them in the future. At the societal level of aggregation, at the level of the overall economy, this will manifest itself as altruism that tends not to exceed the long term prospects of the economy.

In both cases it will be seen that the cumulative charity over time is optimised, that is to say a person who does not harm his own interests can continue his charity and does not become a need case himself. An economy that does harm its long term prospects can continue its social policies, rather than being obliged by sheer necessity to rein them in for lack of resources.

We are, as individuals, as kind as we can be. Or at least we would be if taxation did not compel us, on the spurious grounds that we are intrinsically uncharitable, to give more than we can actually afford in any given situation. That is, we are compelled to harm the interests of our families, to impair our own capacity for self-support. At the macroscopic level, the economy is obliged to harm its long term prospects to serve short term charitable objectives; in other words, that resources that should be redeployed as capital and capital maintenance are consumed in charitable dispensation.

In both cases the coerced and imprudent charity results in an increase in short term spending at the expense of total charitable giving over the long term. Charity is no longer optimised; it is reduced in the medium and longer term.

The motivation behind this terrible error is opaque, and while it is tempting to attribute it to self-serving state employees and politicians, I suspect that the practical effects of the policy are in truth attractive to the wider democracy for reasons that I have discussed in an earlier comment on envy ("Give and Take"); namely, that the population-wide taxation required to support state charity is itself the attraction, because it reduces wealth differentials that we perceive, perhaps correctly, as threatening our own long term reproductive success. Thus, charity is indeed the victim of selfishness, though not in the way that we might have imagined. Voluntary and long term charity is replaced by a coerced form that is inferior in quality and unsustainable over the longer term; and we do this because the sequestration of wealth that funds the activity produces a levelling effect that is agreeable to our sense of personal advantage.

It is a common complaint that there are too many people in parliament that have little or no experience of anything other than politics. It is hard to disagree with that criticism. But alongside this line of attack a parallel positive recommendation is frequently offered to the effect that what is really required is people with some experience of business, with actually running something. On the face of it there seems little to quarrel with in such a suggestion, and the general public appears to share the view. At least candidates in local and in general elections seem to find it important to lay what claim they can to commercial experience, sometimes exposing themselves to criticism that their claims are tenuous, for example the recently successful candidate in the Newark by-election, Robert Jenrick, who apparently described himself as an "entrepreneur" in his campaign literature, only to be accused of having embellished his CV in this respect ('Newark by-election descends into class warfare over candidates' fortunes').

Part of this is doubtless intended to avoid the charge of inherited wealth, which is now generally seen as a disqualification since it indicates disconnection from the concerns of the electorate. Certainly this seems to have been a large part of the motivation in Mr Jenrick's case. However, the bulk of the credit to be gained from the association with commerce is positive rather than merely defensive. It is the suggestion that someone who has run a firm, even if not much larger than the proverbial welk stall, is competent and can be trusted with the affairs of state.

This is an interesting assumption, and it is not difficult to defend many aspects of the position. The experience of responsibility, a sensitivity to the importance of economic cost, and an ability to understand the difficulties that legislation can put in the way of a commercial organisation, all these, and many other characteristics of the businessman, are distinctly positive and desirable in politicians.

However, there is one major drawback, and it is by no means trivial. The experience of running a business or of being a significant decision maker or manager within a firm, is essentially despotic, since firms are in essence insular command economies, or at least have much more in common with such economies than with the population of competing agents that compose a macro-economy. Consequently, and entirely unsurprisingly, politicians with a business background tend to view the national economy as if it were a company, as indeed do the many others who happily use the term UK PLC as if it were a hard-headed and realistic reflection of the facts, rather than deeply misleading collectivist rhetoric, as it seems to me.

To put it another way, politicians with business experience are a mixed bag; on the one hand, yes, they have substantial virtues, but on the other they do not necessarily grasp or even appreciate the importance of distributed decision making in a free market. This seems paradoxical: surely business people understand the importance of liberal markets better than anyone? However, experience shows that this is not the case, and those successful in commerce are often enthusiastic statists of a paternalistic character, trying to transfer their monarchical behaviours from the company, where they have been richly rewarded, to the processes of national government and the oversight of the overall economy. For some reason I think of Michael Heseltine as the type specimen of this class.

The individual who succeeds in a business venture may well come away with the impression that it is possible for one mind, namely their own, to absorb sufficient information to plan an economy in the same way that a brilliant entrepreneur, such as themselves, might design a company's market strategy.

However, this is a delusion, partly because the volumes of information and the uncertainties in a national economy are of a different order of magnitude, and partly because the decision maker in a business may attribute his or her success to information or behaviour that is in fact irrelevant. – In such matters, as in everyday life, we often don't know quite why we succeed or fail. In a large population of decisions such as that in a liberal market the causal features become apparent on average and over time, and market participants can consequently learn retrospectively from experiences that were and perhaps still are relatively opaque to those who underwent the experiences.

A further problem arises from the fact that many businesses now succeed due to negotiating protected contracts with the state itself, and not through winning the favour of the free consumer by the provision of a desirable good at a competitive price. Notoriously, the state's purchase decisions are susceptible to careless inefficiency (the negotiating civil servants just don't care or know enough to make a good choice) and venal or well-wishing moral corruption. Of venal corruption it is unnecessary to say more; but bien-pensant moral corruption is a deeper problem that deserves further consideration. The state's decisions in such cases are motivated not, as a free consumer's would be, by reference to the strength of the desire for the service and the ability or willingness to pay, but by an abstract and often nebulously reasoned sense of its rectitude, of whether it is, in Mr Blair's now famous words 'the right thing to do'. This will frequently be contrarian; if ordinary people do or want one thing but not another, then the shunned behaviour or purchase will be that which the state undertakes, on the ground that this is a market failure in 'need' of correction. Business people with experience of this sort of negotiation who then move into government will bring with them a contempt for the wishes of consumer, and a sense that the producer not only knows best but that the consumer is ignorant and foolish.

This tendency it must be admitted, exists in all producer-consumer relations, since the producer is forever finding that their judgment of what the market will take up is not quite what the consumer wants, thus forcing the company to trim its course in order to stay in business. It is only human for the disappointed producer to rationalise their initial error by transferring the blame on to the consumer: "We made a stunningly good whatnot, but the bloody shopper didn't want it, so we had to offer them this piece of rubbish; they're buying heaps of it, the idiots." However, on calm reflection we should be able to admit that the population of customers is to be trusted to know better than any other party its circumstances and consequent needs and preferences.

On balance, then, while no one should wish to see commercially experienced individuals excluded from parliament, for they have many strengths, there is no reason to believe that they are uniquely fitted such positions. Indeed, on the contrary, when they have the power of the state in their hands, they are very likely to use that power to resolve the age-old dissatisfaction of the producer with the customer by forcing the market to accept what is offered. This is a recipe for error, waste and dissatisfaction, as we can see all around us.

... there are only individual politicians, civil servants, and public sector employees.

Too much individualist or liberal economic thought is vitiated by a tendency to hypostatise the state and represent it as an individual, an individual responsible for the oppression of the general population. Cobbett's reference to the "The Thing" may be taken as typical, indeed classic, but the error is pervasively present and embedded even in our metaphors, for instance in references to the "dead hand of the State", or in our casual reificatory references to Big Government.

This error makes it almost impossible to deal with that creeping loss of liberty, which is real and one of the great evils of our time, because the source is misidentified as an organism that has, in fact, no personal identity, consciousness, will, liability, or physically vulnerable being. A blow struck against 'it' disturbs the air but nothing else.

If the oppression is to be removed the sources must be identified in the real people who execute that coercion; that is to say in those that Cobbett coarsely and correctly referred to as 'tax eaters'. The focus should not be on the outline of abstract 'Leviathan', but on the real biological individuals within that boundary, on those that extract our taxes, and in return provide goods and services that are either wholly unwanted or wholly inadequate, as is inevitable within a monopoly protected by the law and by the police.

In other words we must trace the problem back to the politicians and their clients who tempt voters into an irreversible surrender of the power of choice on the strength of a false promise of services to secure our lives from hazards that cannot in any real world circumstances actually be banished, and the empty offer to provide centralised solutions to problems that, with the exception of those addressed (however poorly) by the system of national defense and the operation of the civil and criminal justice systems, are much better handled by distributed decision making.

In essence these people, for they are individuals with names and addresses and bank accounts and personal responsibility, these people have obtained unbreakable monopolistic contracts on false pretences, for they have asserted degrees of competence and disinterest to which no human being has any plausible claim. Members of the remainder of the population need, therefore, have no compunction in repudiating this unfair contract, withholding some portion of their taxation, and undertaking for themselves, as they did in the past, such matters as they think fit. 

It will be necessary to be extremely firm with those currently leading sheltered lives at our expense, but we cannot much longer afford either the cost or the opportunity cost of their support. Resistance will be vigorous, but most if not all of these people will benefit from a return to normal economic circumstances, where they trade their goods with those willing to purchase them, rather than forcing themselves upon those they 'serve' with inevitable loss of self- and public esteem. The revolution I have sketched above will make of them honest men and women.

But there will be those so threatened by these reforms that they cannot be reconciled, namely the political intermediaries, amongst whom I include not only politicians strictu sensu, but also public sector union officials and the upper bureaucracy. These are the great gangster rentiers of our time, and they stand to lose both wealth and privilege by a return to a liberal economy. Few of such would accept the transition with grace, and while we should treat them with decency, their surrender must be unconditional.

Socialist thought post-dates the emergence of the first proto-modern businesses, the larger enterprises of the mid to late 18th century, and its aspiration to administer society is, I think, modelled on those new companies, though the aim is justified both in terms of efficiency and morality. Indeed, it is curious that while mature socialist theory, particularly in the twentieth century, has declared capitalism to be unable to make full or proper use of the resources available, it has nevertheless remained dreamily in love with the idea of running society as a capitalist would run their company.

For, as Coase and other analysts of the firm tell us, companies are planned micro-economies, created and stable at certain sizes because the transaction costs can be minimised when conducted within the structure, rather than being left to deals struck between separate firms. Indeed, it seems possible that the degree of planning evident in the early Victorian firm was historically unprecedented even at state and military levels, and that this is why Engels and Marx were so interested in capitalist factories. They longed to run a society on the same lines. But such a project would only be sustainable in perpetuity if the society-as-firm had internalised all potential competitors and customers, otherwise it would be vulnerable as ordinary firms are, and would eventually go out of business. Thus, contrary to popular opinion, socialist states are inherently expansionist and intolerant (as one would guess from the historical record).

But even if that totalising ambition is realised, theory of the firm suggests that the resulting organism is unlikely to be stable, since sub-economies will form wherever the goods required can be delivered more cheaply than through the production and exchange planned by the society-as-firm. Evolving demand and planning error are both inevitable, and result in such opportunities, hence the vigorous efforts of the state to prevent one and deny the other. But the attempt is hopeless, particularly when there are free economies around its periphery generating new goods and services. The vast scale of the black market in the former Soviety Union is an extreme example illustrating a subtler and pervasive trend.

Perhaps Lenin foresaw this, and countered with the New Economic Policy. Perhaps Attlee understood the problem, and created the mixed economy, in which the state is forever though slowly pulsating in response to changing conditions, never quite too large to precipitate a crisis.

The local election results are not really as bad for the Labour party as some seem to believe (I am looking at a Daily Mail front page that claims his own shadow cabinet are now "savaging Red Ed"). Perhaps the outcome is not as positive as campaign managers would wish this close to a general election, but their party has over 300 more councillors, and the coalition parties have lost over 500 (the Conservatives being down in excess of 200, and the Liberal Democrats over 300). UKIP's gains, of about 160, are of course remarkable, but should really be accounted as Conservative losses, rather than Labour failures.

On this showing the Labour party will do very well at the general election next year. Nor is this result necessarily the beginning of a new age of multi-party politics, as some others believe. Indeed, the straightforward or general interpretation, that the Liberal Democrat migration has been towards Labour and the Conservative migration towards UKIP, suggests the contrary. In other words, it suggests that the left-leaning (broadly statist) vote is concentrating (on the Labour party), while the right-leaning (broadly individualist) vote is dispersing. There are two probable outcomes from this situation.

Firstly, if the trend continues this will result in a relatively large Labour party facing an opposition composed of a number of small and medium sized parties. This would give Labour a dominant position, even if weakened by Scottish independence, since the fragmented parties are very unlikely to co-operate.

Alternatively, the tide may turn, with the Conservative vote reconcentrating to a considerable degree, not least because property owning voters may realise that the Labour party now presents a real, indeed an unprecedented, threat. - Ed Miliband is an ideological socialist of a style, a European style in fact, that Britain has never seen before in a position of power; he will not be afraid to break with the milk-and-water Non-Conformist Christian roots of the Labour party; he will, not, in other words, be afraid to break eggs.

However, the tide returning to the Liberal Democrats would be much weaker, and they would be significantly diminished, perhaps to the point of evanescence. The two-party system would return, still stronger than it was before the Liberal-Democrat's slow climb to power.

I think this second scenario is the more probable, and though Scottish independence would be helpful, it is to a large degree contingent on David Cameron suddenly revealing a fresh character, or the appointment of a new leader capable of doing a deal with UKIP, or, to be more precise, with UKIP voters.

My own suspicion is that if Cameron remains leader the first scenario, in which the Labour party appears as the sole nationally dominant party, is very likely, particularly if Scotland votes NO in September. The problem for the Conservatives is that even when faced with the near prospect of an authoritative Miliband government many of their one-time supporters will find it emotionally difficult to vote Conservative so long as he remains leader. Cameron seems cursed with a negative aura, an anti-charisma, that makes contempt for him both easy and guilt-free.

In any case, the view sketched here suggests that the UKIP phenomenon is a prelude to a re-concentration of political power in either one or two parties, not refraction into a cozy long-tail rainbow with something tailored for everybody. On the contrary, we appear to be entering a period of political polarisation with a consequent monochromatic limitation of choice. The public recognition of emergencies often produces such reactions, in the face of external threats; in this case it will be a symptom of a hitherto undiagnosed and poorly understood internal emergency. Something is wrong; we will shortly find out what it is. With luck it will be nothing more than indigestion.

On and off, with some long dry intervals, I have fished since 1975, and really know what I'm doing, so there is no excuse for being as poor an angler as I am in fact.

I hardly ever fish in company, my oldest son excepted, and very rarely record my catches. But sometimes the details of the day soak through into a letter or an email. 

Somewhere in England, 8th March 2014

Like other compelling activities that are driven by undeniable forces, the interest is embarrassingly simple, which is why we frequently find ourselves driven to mystical and irrationalist explanations that load such delights with a significance that they can't bear (the case of music should be a ghastly warning; listen to the Radio 3 hosts if you doubt this point).

The truth is that the experience of catching a fish, especially a large fish, is just exciting. It seems to engage a larger part of our capacity for psychological attention, than, for example, filling in an income tax form. Often, when we do one thing we want to be somewhere else; but with fishing this isn't the case, we have landed where we want to be, are in equilibrium and very active but not leaning in any particular direction. The event of a catch does disturb this, but the state of calm returns, though with a feeling of still more complete engagement, partly resulting, I think, from the alleviation of the fear of loss.

Not leviathan, but a fair fish

Doubtless, this feeling that all is right with our world is an illusion, at least in part, but the strength and integrity of the experience is such that it lives long after the day has passed and draws you back to the water again and again.

A little further down the river

I'm fairly sure that this isn't an idiosyncratic view, and though the angling literature is not that rich in attempts to describe the matter in detail there are numerous hints and occasional descriptions that are unusually honest and open, like this from one of Britain's most successful pike anglers, Mick Brown, describing his feelings after landing an outstanding catch:

There was no doubt in my mind that this was a thirty [pound fish] but I was in no hurry to weigh her. I was at peace with the world and overflowing with a mixture of relief and contentment. It is at times like this that I enjoy the solitude. Piking is a very personal thing for me. I am not really all that interested in what other people are doing or catching. I live in a world of my own and find that the fantasy is often shattered when others are around. (Mick Brown, Pike Fishing: The Practice and the Passion (Crowood: Ramsbury, 1993), 164)

If there is anything more to angling than this I should be surprised, and a little disappointed. Indeed, if it proved to be some important step towards social, spiritual, or intellectual enlightment, I think I'd stay at home instead.

Not a lot, all told and given her purposes; the books sold well for a reason.

But they have a devastating fault, at least for any writing that hopes to last and be described as literature, as poetry. They are transparent. You always know what she meant. 

And of course there are real monsters, grotesque failures that don’t bear quotation (see “Two”, Poems (London, not dated), 296-7). Everything a nauseated first-time reader might report is probably often true in her pages, but there are virtues as well, and not mere saving graces, for the verse is genuinely well made. Indeed, if anything disgusts the sophisticated reader it is the simple ease with which the sentiments are revealed, leaving no room for the critic to pretend that they are otherwise than the well-trodden common ground of humanity.

Then again, who would, for example, think of this; describing the meadow (drearily, the archetype of woman) longing to be ravished by the mountain (words fail us… the archetype of man), but separated by a mighty and impassable river:

What could the meadow do but look and yearn,

And gem its bosom to conceal despair.

(“Attraction”, Poems (London, not dated), p. 63)

Perhaps it was obvious: at the front of the collected edition that I happen to have in hand, we find this:

Address at Event on 19^th September 2010 to mark

the bicentenary of John Constable RA’s painting for Nayland Church

This text is a very slightly edited version of a short talk given in Nayland Church to mark the return of the painting after restoration.

Thank you all for inviting us to be here tonight. We do in fact, come back to the Stour valley quite often, though we are, as Ronald has just reminded us that Constable was, very definitely river people, and we rarely stop in the villages, staying close to the river on foot or afloat, fishing as we go. So it is splendid to have a reason to see that these are also inhabited regions, and be with you tonight to mark this unique occasion with words and music.

It is particularly enjoyable for me because it is an opportunity to hear Ronald speak on the subject of this painting and my ancestor. It is an easy matter for a writer or a thinker to be striking, it is very much harder to be sincerely so, but Ronald makes this seem like a matter of course.

Indeed, sincerity is a curious quality, not simply a question of saying what you mean and meaning what you say, but finding something that you genuinely wish to mean and then saying it.

There is no bigger problem for a writer, or, I suppose, for an artist, and the available resolutions are not always true friends.

Somewhere in his early writings, in Daybreak I think, Nietzsche remarks that weaker personalities in the arts are drawn to greater subjects, because they need their support. Whereas, a greater mind, by which I take it he indicates one in confident possession of its knowledge, can afford, as he puts it, “to intercede on behalf of simple things”.

We may think of Chardin, or of Vuillard, but it seems to be quintessentially true of Constable, who preferred to paint the earth-born humble beauties of his home fields and water meadows, rather than those of re-manufactured history or Alpine tourism.

The strength required for such a preference is easily appreciated even today in any gallery where his paintings hang beside those of other great European masters.

And it is a contrast that goes on growing.

The humility of this approach is as distant as can be imagined from the theatrical transgression of moral boundaries or the aggressive rejection of simple personal and social pleasures that has characterized so much painting in the last hundred years.

For some, it seems, the world just isn’t good enough.

But whether any of us will or can ever know enough about ourselves, or the world, to be sure that the tree turning its leaves silver side up to the wind, the “ragged scoop and burst”[1] of a rain storm, the passing sparkle on the river glimpsed through trees, the everyday hedges, the dripping bankside plants, are not up to our demanding scratch.

However, I cannot say that the painting behind me is a humble subject. Indeed for a Christian there are few more significant. Nor is it entirely typical of Constable.

More familiar are those pictures of scenes still more familiar to you, the paintings of the river valley in which we now stand.

But there is a direct route from one to the other. Constable famously looked at the Elder flowers in the vale, and saw “the resurrection and the life”.

We, in our turn, can look at this depiction of Christ blessing the bread and wine and think of a world made up of simple and beautiful things that are by any measure a blessing.

Redistributionist inclinations dominate contemporary democratic politics, and show no signs of weakening. Ostensibly, the reasons for this are a desire for fairness, while its critics, and there are very few, tend to suggest that such claims are a cloak for self-serving envy. However, such criticism is easily deflected, since it is not hard to show that many, perhaps most, of those who call for high levels of taxation and public spending do not stand to benefit directly from these measures, at least not more so than any other member of the general public. Further, they may often be much affected by the measures that they demand. I can think of several well-off friends who honestly express the desire to pay more in tax.

Yet the charge of envy persists, perhaps because it seems to describe some part of the tone rather than the content of redistributionist demands, however moderate or self-wounding. Perhaps, in spite of appearances, there is something in it.

It is certainly true that only the most saintly do not experience a brief shooting sensation of distress at the achievements and success of others, particularly those close to us, whether friends or blood relations. We learn to suppress the outward and even the inward evidence of such feelings, but the traces are present nonetheless, though much easier to observe in others than in ourselves. I suggest that this envy is the emotional correlate of an awareness that another person has some degree of comparative advantage over us. We find this distressing because success in any endeavour matters much less than comparative failure. In other words, in any competitive situation, if we cannot exceed the achievement of our competitor, we prefer to see them on a level with us, even if that entails an absolute reduction in our own level of welfare. This is not careless spite, pure and simple, where we may harm ourselves very badly in order to hurt another. It is calculated spite, where we aim to reduce the comparative advantage enjoyed by another, and will accept a reduction in our absolute wellbeing as the necessary price.

A fictional example may demonstrate the concept. Imagine two apes beneath a large fruit tree that they cannot climb because of thick thorns round its base. The branches are high above their heads, and loaded with fruit, but with an athletic jump it is possible to pick some of the fruit, and this occasionally shakes other pieces of fruit from the branches.

One ape can jump rather better than the other, and succeeds where the other fails, though his efforts sometimes dislodge fruit that falls to the ground where it is taken by the weaker ape. Both are better off, but the good jumper obviously has the pick of the fruit, gets more, and is now at an advantage.

Conscious of his relative failure, the weaker ape surreptitiously snaps a few of the thorns and scatters them on the ground, so what when his friend lands after one of his attempts to seize some fruit he injures his feet and can jump no more or cannot jump as high or as often.

The weaker ape feels that this is beneficial, since though both are now fruitless, the stronger creature has no relative advantage. In addition, although it cannot be picked at present the fruit remains available, so the weaker ape has preserved his option of obtaining better access to the fruit at some time in the future.

The analogy with human politics should be clear. Politicians and economists might urge tolerance of the financially successful, the high leaping ape, on the grounds that a system which creates opportunities for such wealth disparities also creates general wealth and a higher level of average wealth. But such urgings are in vain; the rich are nonetheless resented.

It is tempting to suggest that this is an irrational response, and that we should recognise that wealth disparities bring about an increase in our absolute wealth (or at least so it is argued). However, I suspect that the emotion of envy is the product or at least the accompaniment of an accurate intuition of comparative disadvantage, to which we are extremely sensitive since our psychologies have been shaped by biological evolution driven by differential reproductive success. We are here today because of the relative reproductive success of our ancestors, not reproduction beyond an absolute threshold.

There is, I recognise, no certainty that these evolved psychological intuitions still reflect our reproductive interests today; we may be maladapted to current circumstances. However, we appear to be well adapted in many other respects, and given this it is not unreasonable to assume that the resentment of comparative advantage is still an adaptive response. At any rate, it appears to be a real response, adaptive or not.

I propose that this, probably rational and adaptive, resentment of relative success accounts for the powerful pressure in even very rich societies, and perhaps particularly in such societies, for the redistribution of wealth, largely through taxes on the rich, and benefits and public spending in the common interest.

On this view, the value of such taxes to those who advocate them is not so much in the redistribution or in the public spending itself, though doubtless there are some who gain much from both, but rather that the process of taxation erodes wealth differentials. Indeed, the fact that critics of tax-and-spend policies find it so difficult to turn to political advantage the manifest waste, gross inefficiency, and lamentable ineffectiveness of public services, indicates, to me, that the utility of the policy is elsewhere and beyond the reach of these attacks. That is to say, benefits to the poor and public services are beside the point, which is the punitive effect of taxation and the consequent economic levelling.

This, then, is the explanation of the otherwise very surprising erosion of economic liberty in democracies, a hallmark of the last two centuries. When we have our will, and we largely do in the democratic West, we wish for more equal distribution of wealth even at the cost of absolute wealth, and we do this not out of altruism, however much we may pretend that this is so, but out of a powerful and probably rational abhorrence for being at a comparative disadvantage.

In non-democratic systems the effects are reversed; force is employed to secure comparative advantage over others, and the compliance of the subordinate agents of force is secured by the offer of a compensating and ever growing sense of advantage, sometimes real and sometimes merely honorific, over those further down in the hierarchy. Each tier is allowed to feel itself an increasingly big fish in its own little pond. But this is inherently unstable since it requires constant growth in the perceived differentiations. This dynamic process is itself dependent on economic growth or the acquisition of wealth by conquest, for honorific tokens of hierarchical superiority, titles and gongs, are not in themselves sufficient or sufficient for long; some advantage must be economically real. Furthermore, without economic growth the lowest tiers in the system will be at a significant absolute disadvantage, lack of food for example, and this may be sufficient to provoke rebellion.

Democratic systems, by contrast, can be fairly stable and economically free so long as they are relatively poor in the absolute sense, since differentials in wealth will be low. With economic growth wealth differentials will also grow, and so will a corrosive sense of relative disadvantage, and with that a growing demand for taxation even at the cost of greater absolute average individual and aggregate wealth.

Growth and punitive taxation are, on the view I am currently arguing, closely linked, one actually leading to the other, since growth results in greater disparities of wealth, and these are perceived, largely correctly I think, as being genuinely threatening to the interests of those at a relative disadvantage. Since taxation acts as a brake on economic growth, an equilibrium results, with low growth and creeping taxation in balance, as it is in the developed world today.

Such 'fairer' societies may well be happier, as Wilkinson and Pickett seem to suggest in their strikingly popular study The Spirit Level (2009). But this contentment is bought at the cost of overall absolute wealth and, thus, in spite of a more cohesive or co-operative population, at the cost of long term security. For in spite of appearances, the desire for a more equal society springs not from altruistic or collectivist inclinations, but from an individually selfish and entirely rational insistence on low wealth differentials that as an accidental byproduct reduce aggregate societal wealth and sophistication and thus makes that society both less effective in competition with other groups and less robust in the face of natural disasters.

It is difficult to see any politically viable way of resolving this problem.