This piece is a response to Robert Colvile’s article for CapX (05/06/26) entitled: The Responsible Society: What Thatcher can still teach us.

See link: https://capx.co/the-responsible-society-what-thatcher-can-still-teach-us

I will begin by stating that I do not disagree with Robert Colvile, merely that he does not go far enough. He is absolutely right that we are trapped in a high-tax, low-growth doom loop where the state has ballooned and the individual has shrunk, a bit like sharing a jacuzzi with GK Chesterton and William Howard Taft. I would not disagree that another Thatcher Moment is imminently required.

I thought we might have had one with Liz Truss, but she proved to be merely a Thatcher manqué – a flawed, superficial imitation. Yet she deserves an odd sort of credit for being the only modern Prime Minister to explicitly identify the structural stagnation holding Britain hostage. Her rhetorical crusade against the “anti-growth coalition” may have been a bit obtuse, but it certainly was not ridiculous. She correctly identified the network of institutional gatekeepers, risk-averse regulatory bodies, and entrenched NIMBY interests that comprise the new corporatism we find ourselves under.

Truss recognized what a decade of managerial Conservative administrations chose to ignore: that maintaining a hyper-inflated welfare state and protecting an insulated, asset-owning electorate on the back of a choking tax burden is mathematically unsustainable. Whatever one might think of her blowing-the-doors-off the UK economy, she grasped a foundational truth – without GDP growth, all public policy degenerates into an almighty bunfight over how to ration national decline. The tragedy of her failure is that it accomplished the exact opposite of her intentions. By collapsing so spectacularly, Truss did not merely destroy her own government; she scored an own goal for Supply-Siders FC. Her collapse handed an unearned victory Technocrats United, leaving its gatekeepers far more unassailable than they were before she entered Downing Street.

Colvile’s proposed remedy is a swift injection of Thatcherite moral clarity. He asserts that a state which systematically crowds out private initiative is “actively immoral,” and calls for a politics centred on personal agency and for politicians to summon the Norman Tebbit-like on your bike! ideological grit of the 1981 Conservative Party Conference. But I would argue that responsibility is not merely a behavioural choice, but a question of epistemology.

The capacity of an individual, an institution, or a market to act responsibly depends entirely on the availability of accurate, real-world signals. When the state systematically isolates actors from these signals, irresponsibility ceases to be a moral defect. Instead, it becomes an entirely rational cognitive adjustment to a distorted informational field.

The grouchy German thinker Arthur Schopenhauer gave us the image of a lame man sitting upon the shoulders of a blind giant, which demonstrates how the conscious intellect is not the master of our actions, but merely a passenger driven by a raw, unreasoning Will. When applied to the modern British state, this metaphor demonstrates the origins of our current crises, revealing why both Colvile’s call for moral rejuvenation and recent attempts at radical executive shock have failed.

The modern administrative state – locked in place by a defensive alliance of asset-rich homeowners and formula-protected welfare beneficiaries – is the blind giant. It possesses immense fiscal and coercive weight; it can reallocate trillions of pounds and freeze entire cities through planning edicts. Yet, by systematically suffocating prices, liabilities, and feedback loops, the state has rendered this giant entirely blind to economic reality, resource scarcity, and mathematical trade-offs. It does not move by logic; it moves by the insatiable democratic demand to be permanently insulated from risk.

Perched precariously upon the giant’s shoulders is the political class: the sighted dwarf. Whether it takes the form of a technocrat staring at a Treasury forecasting model or an ideologue waving a supply-side pamphlet, the dwarf invariably mistakes its altitude for control – possessing only an abstract cognitive map of where society ought to go. It believes that, by issuing executive mandates from its high vantage point, it can dictate where the monster steps.

This explains why the Truss experiment was the worst political misjudgement since Galba marched on Rome. Truss and her architects behaved as an exceptionally dogmatic dwarf, violently jerking the reins to force a bloated, out-of-shape giant into a sudden supply-side sprint. They possessed a theoretically coherent map for growth, but they completely misread the beast lumbering beneath them. The British state was not an agile market athlete waiting for a starter’s pistol; it was a hyper-leveraged colossus dependent on suppressed interest rates and weighed down by a fragile pension ecosystem.

When the dwarf attempted to force a dash toward unhedged tax cuts without first dismantling the giant’s structural insulation, the giant did not run. It tripped over its own off-balance-sheet liabilities. The gilt market crisis was the precise second economic gravity reasserted itself, flinging the passenger into the dirt.

To understand why the giant is blind, we must look to F. A. Hayek’s classic essay, The Use of Knowledge in Society. Hayek explained that the fundamental economic problem is not merely about moving resources around based on fixed data. The critical data of a society are never neatly summarized on a single desk in Whitehall. True social and economic knowledge is naturally fractured; it exists exclusively as scattered bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory information that people possess only within their unique, day-to-day contexts.

By attempting to manage everything centrally, the state attempts an epistemic impossibility. It has pushed its bureaucratic reach into highly complex, non-linear systems—such as housing distribution, healthcare rationing, energy optimization, and generational wealth transfers—where facts change by the minute. When the state relies on central mandates, rigid formulas, and political guarantees to run these systems, it creates an artificial environment characterized by signal suppression.

Responsibility cannot exist within an informational vacuum. Individuals and institutions only learn how to navigate reality when they are forced to deal with the immediate friction of price, scarcity, liability, exit, and failure. These are not merely economic carrots and sticks; they are instruments of communication. They convey the true cost of our choices directly back to us. When the state uses its power to muffle these signals, the trade-offs do not disappear. The system simply goes blind, leaving society completely unable to read its own condition.

This nationalisation of consequence, if we can call it that, operates through specific institutional shock absorbers the state uses to shield preferred demographics from reality.

1. First, consider the town and country planning framework. By granting local veto power over land use, the state insulates existing property owners from the immediate consequences of development scarcity. The homeowner who successfully blocks a local housing development experiences this intervention as a preservation of environment and asset value. However, the real-world consequence of that obstruction—expressed through artificial scarcity and inflated land values—is redirected down the demographic ladder. It manifests as a steep penalty on younger households and mobile workers in the form of elevated rental costs and constrained geographic mobility. Because the planning system prevents the true social and economic cost of development refusal from confronting the veto-player, the decision-maker remains insulated from the casualties of their choice.
   
2. The state pension triple lock operates on an identical logic of informational insulation. By linking annual expenditure increases to an automatic, formulaic ratchet that selects the highest of earnings growth, inflation, or a 2.5 percent baseline, the policy deliberately detaches a massive area of public spending from any contemporary evaluation of national productivity or fiscal capacity. The political utility of this mechanism is the avoidance of recurrent political responsibility; it transforms a highly contingent electoral promise into a permanent legal claim on future production. The demographic cost of an ageing population is not confronted or calculated through annual statecraft; it is silently transferred onto the working-age tax base, detaching the immediate benefit enjoyed by a protected voting bloc from the long-term liabilities imposed on future taxpayers.
   
3. Similarly, the structural stasis of the NHS demonstrates how a protective moral narrative can be used to suppress institutional feedback loops. Public discourse treats the health service as a secular emblem rather than an administrative delivery mechanism, effectively shielding its operational models from structural reform. Yet this moral insulation cannot override the realities of resource constraints. Because the system lacks price signals, plural financial structures, or meaningful mechanisms for patient exit, the tension between rising demand and fixed capacity cannot be mediated through normal resource discovery. Instead, the suppressed feedback re-emerges through non-price rationing: elongated waiting lists, treatment delays, and the physical exhaustion of frontline clinical staff. The moral image of the institution is preserved at the political level, while the physical consequence of its administrative inertia is borne by the waiting patient.
   
4. This pattern of displacement extends into public finance and the regulatory environment. Through the state monopoly over currency and macro-prudential intervention, monetary policy has frequently been deployed to suppress the true cost of capital, inflating the entry costs for those without inherited wealth. Simultaneously, the regulatory state operates under an asymmetric incentive structure: regulators are rewarded for enforcing total risk-aversion to prevent highly visible, isolated failures, while remaining entirely unaccountable for the dispersed macroeconomic costs—such as choked capital investment and administrative delays—that their compliance burdens impose on enterprise. In each instance, the state intervenes to protect a specific actor or institution from immediate risk, while moving the resulting liabilities into the wider economic system.

This systematic evasion of consequence explains why the post-2010 Conservative administrations failed so miserably, leaving a legacy of a record tax burden and relentless intervention. I would argue that this is not merely a failure of political willpower, but the inevitable result of trying to use the outmoded assumptions and policy tools of the 1980s on an economy that has completely transformed. The old corporatism that Margaret Thatcher dismantled was centralized, visible, and structurally concentrated: powerful trade unions, nationalized industries, and formal wage-bargaining frameworks. One could line up those monopolies and break them with direct legislation.

Today’s constellation of irresponsibility, however, is decentralized, defensive, and buried deep inside civil society itself like an Highland tick. It is a new corporatism: an unwritten, powerful compact of asset-rich homeowners, formula-protected welfare beneficiaries, risk-averse regulatory bodies, and a public culture that demands first-class state services while refusing to acknowledge or finance their actual cost.

The historical reality of the 1980s was never an unmediated transition to pure laissez-faire; rather, it involved a complex and radical putting-about of the state, utilizing the machinery of central administration to construct and enforce market-oriented behaviours. Thatcherism succeeded politically by building a property-owning democracy through council-house sales and popular capitalism, intentionally aligning the material interests of the electorate with the preservation of capital markets. However, this project relied on a permanent tension between the free economy and the strong state, using centralized power to dismantle the old institutional obstructions.

The crisis today arises because the constituencies created by that first wave of market reforms have transformed into the principal obstacles to modern economic dynamism. The property-owning democracy has matured, accumulated immense unearned equity, and mutated into a veto-owning democracy. This constituency uses the regulatory and planning powers of the state to shield its assets from market exposure. They have built a defensive perimeter around their privileges and expect the state to nationalise the macroeconomic fallout of their inertia. A nostalgic recital of 1980s sloganeering will not suffice; the interests strangling British productivity are not the shaggy barbarians outside the gates, but the rosy-cheeked and chubby-limbed children of the original market settlement, using the defensive mechanisms of the state to secure permanent insulation from competitive exposure.

There is an inverted Marxian irony here. The bearded and carbuncled upturner of Hegel argued that the dawn of capitalism required an act of primal accumulation (ursprüngliche Akkumulation) – a process where the state deploys its coercive authority to dismantle old, non-market protections and forcefully engineer the baseline conditions for a commercial economy. Thatcherism executed its own right-wing variant of this project, using central decree to carve a property-owning democracy out of the ruins of the post-war social democratic settlement.

Primal accumulation is supposed to unleash a restless, dynamic capitalism that constantly revolutionizes production. Instead, Britain’s state-engineered asset class performed an immediate ideological about-face. Having acquired their capital through a state-backed settlement, they spent the subsequent forty years using the planning and regulatory apparatus to pull up the ladder behind them. By using the state to freeze the physical landscape and insulate their unearned equity from the friction of new competition, they have effectively converted their original stake into a form of modern feudal rent.

To insulate this argument from free-market dogmatism, one must concede that market signals do not function with immaculate clarity under conditions of radical uncertainty. A romanticized view of the price mechanism assumes that markets spontaneously generate perfect informational transparency – they do not.

While prices remain our irreplaceable instrument for coordinating decentralized knowledge, they are not infallible reflections of objective reality. Under conditions of genuine uncertainty, market prices can be deeply distorted by dominant narrative monocultures, collective emotional swings, and the short-termist herd behaviour of financial markets.

Markets can, and do, misprice risk over prolonged periods. However, this qualification deepens rather than diminishes the critique of the modern state. The recognition that market signals are imperfect makes the total suppression of those signals by administrative decree exceptionally dangerous. The presence of narrative distortions within markets does not imply that an insular bureaucratic committee or an automated spending formula possesses superior, more durable knowledge.

The critical distinction between a decentralized market and a centralized bureaucracy is not that the market is flawless, but that it contains an automated mechanism for error-correction and institutional learning. In a decentralized system, when your assumptions are false, you face liability, lose capital, and are forced to adjust.

Conversely, when the state nationalises consequence, it hardcodes its analytical blunders into law and fiscal commitments. By shielding preferred sectors from reality, it ensures that institutional errors are protected from correction, forcing them to persist until they manifest as a systemic crisis. The response to imperfect feedback loops must be the diversification of signals through institutional pluralism and clear liability, not their total substitution by political illusion.

If the state has become a vast insurance machine for a defensive vetocracy, technocratic adjustments will not save us. We must systematically strip the state of its capacity to act as an insulation shield. We require an institutional redesign that restores the Hayekian mechanisms of price, liability, scarcity, and exit. Four core reforms offer a practical blueprint:

1. First, dismantling the vetocracy via zonal planning. The discretionary planning system must be replaced with an abstract, rules-based zonal planning framework. If a project meets pre-established environmental and density codes, it must receive automatic statutory approval, entirely removing administrative and political discretion from the process. To complement this, “street votes” should be deployed to internalize local externalities. By giving hyper-local micro-communities the power to vote on suburban intensification while retaining the direct tax and capital upside of that development, veto-players are transformed into equity-holders. If they wish to block density, they must explicitly vote to make themselves poorer, reintroducing authentic trade-offs to local land use.
   
2. Second, abolishing formulaic entitlements and codifying generational accounting. The triple lock must be retired. In its place, parliament should establish a legally binding framework of generational accounting. Every budget must be statutorily required to publish a generational balance sheet, making explicit the long-term liabilities being transferred onto younger workers by current expenditure choices. Furthermore, Britain’s easily manipulated fiscal rules must be replaced with an independent, constitutional debt-brake mechanism—similar to Switzerland’s Schuldenbremse. This would legally tether the growth of welfare and entitlements to a rolling average of private-sector productivity and demographic dependency ratios. If the productive economy stalls, state commitments automatically scale down, ensuring the public experiences the immediate material consequences of economic stagnation.
   
3. Third, restoring choice and pluralism to public monopolies. The cataracted giant that is the NHS cannot be cured by injecting more cash into an insulated administrative monopoly. The state must transition from a single-payer monolith to a decentralized social insurance system, mirroring successful European models like those in Germany or the Netherlands. Universal coverage remains guaranteed, but funding is detached from the bureaucracy and attached directly to the citizen via competing, non-profit insurance funds. This structural shift introduces the vital mechanism of exit. When patients possess the freedom to move their state-backed funding away from a sclerotic hospital trust toward superior public, private, or charitable alternatives, institutions are finally exposed to the consequences of operational inertia.
   
4. Fourth, enforcing a hard regulatory budget. The regulatory apparatus cannot continue to operate within a vacuum. The government must introduce a strict regulatory budget. Parliament must set a hard financial cap on the aggregate compliance costs any single regulator can impose on the private sector within a given year. Any new regulatory constraint must be legally offset by the line-by-line repeal of existing burdens. Regulators must be given a statutory growth duty, forcing them to balance the obvious, visible risks of action against the hidden, compounding consequences of administrative delay and choked innovation.

To paraphrase Churchill, the responsible society is not the end, nor even the beginning of the end, but the end of the beginning: the moment where we cease to recite historical slogans and begin the systematic work of exposing our institutions to the Schumpeterian-cum-Savonarola bonfire of vanities by creative destruction. Margaret Thatcher’s great insight was that a free society requires a foundation built on accountability. But the modern administrative state has discovered that it does not need to explicitly preach socialism to achieve central control; it merely needs to nationalise consequence, quietly absorbing the friction of reality on behalf of its preferred voters.

The Trussian interlude demonstrated that the Snorlax that is the British state cannot be shocked out of its torpor by an ideological Pokémaster shouting attack commands from its rounded shoulders. The blind giant will simply stumble over its own off-balance-sheet liabilities and retreat deeper into technocratic insulation. More than on-you-bike-ism, true renewal requires all the piss and vinegar, gall and wormwood, that can be summoned. By shifting from a discretionary planning system to rules-based zones, replacing spending ratchets with generational ledgers, breaking open state monopolies through patient exit, and binding regulators to strict compliance budgets, we can restore the feedback loops that make social learning possible.

To quote T.S. Eliot’s Little Gidding:

What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from.