Rand-y Burnham

Today, it has become fashionable to argue that Britain, and much of the West, is a rapacious neoliberal wasteland. Communities, we are told, have been mercilessly hollowed out through deregulation and greed, all to line the pockets of billionaires. 

Andy Burnham certainly seems to believe this, drawing a line between his administration and the “40 years of neoliberalism” that “have not been kind to the North of England.” It is all wonderfully Ken Loach — nostalgic socialist talking points, defanged for the median voter.

I am amazed that such magical thinking survives prolonged contact with reality. Britain today is a social-democratic regime par excellence: the state consumes nearly 45% of GDP, with our ever-growing tax burden reaching the highest level since WW2.

In British politics, the default conservative position — defining conservatism very narrowly as an attempt to protect the status quo — is a sort of soft, mushy socialism

What’s more, our culture is thoroughly socialised. Our state bodies — chief among them the unreformed National Health Service— are treated with quasi-religious reverence, and our national character has become hopelessly risk-averse. Whenever there is a problem, the public cries out for state interference: Capital-S Something must be done! In British politics, the default conservative position — defining conservatism very narrowly as an attempt to protect the status quo — is a sort of soft, mushy socialism.

Readers of The Critic hardly need to be told this. What might surprise them, however, is just how accurately the insights of Ayn Rand, the unapologetically individualist Russian-American novelist and philosopher, apply to Britain today. 

The Adam Smith Institute has always been thoroughly empiricist, grounded in the observational tradition of the Scottish Enlightenment. Yet it is remarkable how often empirical reality brings us to the same conclusions as Objectivism, Rand’s powerful and uncompromising philosophy. It is an overlap that Dr Madsen Pirie will explore in his upcoming Annual Ayn Rand Lecture.

Impoverished and stifled by Bolshevik Russia, Rand escaped to America, which she boldly described as “the only moral country in the world”.  Here, she popularised Objectivism, an all-encompassing philosophy that provides a full-throated defence of rational self-interest and laissez-faire capitalism.

For Rand, the managerial state of the twentieth century was inverting freedom: government was becoming free to do whatever it pleased, while citizens could act only by permission.

If one doubts the relevance of such an argument to twenty-first-century Britain, look no further than Non-Crime Hate Incidents,  a designation given to legal but “harmful” speech. The label really is (cliché though it is to say) Orwellian, blurring the line between thought and criminality.

Cantankerous boomers posting ill-judged rants on Facebook aren’t always great fun (as I discovered first-hand after suggesting the over-60s lose their free bus passes). But defending them is vital. Logging controversial posts creates state-sanctioned categories of lawful speech and sets a corrosive precedent: that only what is explicitly permitted is safe —a complete undermining of the English common law tradition.

Supporting free speech is, of course, only one facet of Rand’s broader defence of freedom. A central theme of her work is the state’s near-constant encroachment on private property. And, contra Burnham, the state across virtually the entire developed world has become vastly more entangled in the economy. The current government, fired up with Fabian conviction, looks set to compound this problem: in the next Budget, John Healey looks set to announce that HMRC will be given direct powers to take from bank accounts.

In this regard, Thames Water provides a particularly telling example. For socialists and technocrats alike, Britain’s largest utility is held up as a cautionary tale of market failure, a convenient gotcha brandished against smug neoliberals. Yet this completely misunderstands the true source of Thames Water’s failings.

Since 1989, private investment has poured hundreds of billions of pounds into modernising crumbling Victorian infrastructure, cutting leakage by roughly 40 per cent. Yet the state made so much essential innovation impossible. Its sclerotic planning system has blocked every major new reservoir since 1992 while Ofwat, the state-backed regulator, continues to artificially suppress bills, starving the network of essential capital.

In short, state meddling pushed Thames Water into distress. Now, even with a private-sector rescue deal on the table, the state presents itself as the cure to market failure — teasing plans to nationalise the company and saddle taxpayers with an eye-watering £43 billion bill. Ayn Rand, buried under a six-foot floral dollar sign, would be turning in her grave.

Yet it is in the flight of wealth where the parallels between Rand’s fiction and modern Britain turn truly uncanny. Given her own desperate escape from Soviet Russia, Rand was understandably preoccupied with the impulse to flee. In an early sketch written around 1923, she envisioned a scenario where Europe’s finest minds abandoned collectivism for refuge in America. In Atlas Shrugged, this crystallised into John Galt’s famous call for the productive to withdraw from society and stop propping up a regime that vilifies them. It is an arresting idea — one now unfolding in real time, albeit in somewhat less operatic fashion.

Across the UK, wealth creators are packing their bags. Research by the Adam Smith Institute shows that our millionaire population has plummeted to its lowest level since 2008, with high earners and ambitious young entrepreneurs seeking out modern-day iterations of Galt’s Gulch (the mountain redoubts where Rand’s industrialists retreated). Today, that often means heading to Dubai with its attractive zero-tax regime, Switzerland, consistently best-in-class for sensible European governance, or even Italy with its shrewd flat tax lure for foreign nationals. 

Yet one needn’t be an offshore tax exile to feel the suffocating grip of the state. For those left behind, overreach is felt most keenly at the hands of the moralising nanny state. And it is here, oddly enough, that Andy Burnham and Ayn Rand might find common cause.

Successive governments, in the name of public health, have waged a relentless war on fun, taxing and regulating pubs and fast food. All this has culminated in the absurd generational smoking ban, set to take effect on New Year’s Day 2027, which makes a mockery of basic adult agency.

Here, Burnham’s carefully cultivated image as a bluff, straight-talking northern populist (I see him as a blend of Boris and Corbyn) jars rather delightfully against the instincts of the Westminster pen-pushers. He is entirely unashamed of his appetite for beer, chips and gravy, he names fish pie as his ultimate comfort meal and has proudly crowned the humble cheese-and-onion crisp butty as his go-to snack. Earnestly setting aside the PR aspect of this constant food commentary, it is clear that Burnham revels in the beige brilliance of British cooking — although cooking might be an overstatement.

Yet these are precisely the hearty, carby delights that public health tsars want to slap with calorie counts, or, à la Sadiq Khan, banish entirely from advertising. I wonder what Burnham really makes of this nanny-state puritanism?

His recent push to allow football fans to drink a pint in the stands, which met with a ridiculous outcry from the public health lobby, shows he clearly harbours a dormant, inner Randian impulse. As an Everton season ticket holder, he frequently complains that Westminster politicians simply do not understand matchday culture.

It is an excellent point. But it invites an inescapable question — if politicians, ensconced in the Westminster bubble, cannot properly understand football, on what conceivable authority do they presume to run our railways, our utilities, and our personal lives?

The King of the North intuitively grasps that the ordinary Brit often knows better than the whitehall mandarin. Coax him to apply that exact same logic to the wider economy, and Andy Burnham might just discover he was an Objectivist all along.