UK Election: Will UK body politic shy away from Omnipotent Gov't?

Fire of Liberty

Gerard Baker has a good column in The Times on how the UK public is being led down The Road to Serfdom that Hayek predicted. Baker notes that during his travels throughout the UK during this election cycle, almost everyone he talked to always presented reason for voting via what government can do in their lives. One can garner from Baker's column that the people of the UK have become very comfortable living in a quasi-socialistic paradise but fail to realize that they have given up lock, stock and barrel all of their individual sovereignty to the government. Just look how Baker notes how people are willingly convinced to surrender their sovereignty:

The lack of serious fiscal choice on offer is only a reflection of a broader surrender to the principle that government has the answers and the people should stop worrying their little heads about it. Every conversation one has in this country seems to start from the premise that everything that ails us can be put right by government — whether it is obesity or the decline of classical music.

And what exquisite irony! The one thing in the past four years that the Government really did get right — the deposing of a dangerous dictator and the liberation of 24 million people from tyranny — is now regarded in the closed circle of serious political discussion as an act of pure evil.

Of course, underpinning, sustaining and nourishing this consensus is a new Establishment that holds the British people in thrall to its supposedly progressive ideas. Its stultifying and baleful influence is transmitted by the clammy grip of its three main tentacles: the universities; the “experts”, and, above all, the media.

Most university teachers regard their first duty of course as being to promote and nurture the principle that government has the answers. But spreading from that simple “truth” are a few others: that Israel and America are responsible for the bulk of the bad things in the world; that globalization is impoverishing; that British history is a matter, mostly, for shame, and that we would all be better off if we would just let Europe run things for us.

Though the voting public in the UK seems to be heading down Serfdom's Road, I believe that their is a large under-current of "classical liberalism" running through the body politic that is emmerging throughout the countryside. One only has to look at the adamant opposition to the upcoming EU Constitutional Referendum by the public. You can also see a growing distaste of the long NHS queues, high taxes, hunting ban (Big issue in Countryside), and other governmental intrusions on their lives. While the government seems to be in all facets of the UK people's lives, they seem to have forgotten their chief duty which is to protect people. Just open any paper in the UK and you'll read about yobs being out of control, rising crime in the streets, and a lackluster immigration policy and you'll see how government can become so wrapped up in intruding on law-biding citizens that it distracts them from fulfilling their terms of the "Social Contract."

Expect the 2005 election to be a precursor of change much like the years 1964 and 1976 had in US politics. We'll have to wait and see if this "silent majority" has been motivated from the government intrusiveness on their lives after the May 5 elections or sometimes thereafter. So in the meantime these people should read more of Hayek, Adam Smith, John Locke, Hobbes and John Stewart Mill.