Britain 2023: A Shriveled State

The British do a nice line in big government dystopias. George Orwell envisaged a soul-sapping totalitarianism in Nineteen Eighty-Four, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World obeyed a global state and Anthony Burgess fretted about the abolition of free will in A Clockwork Orange. When we imagine the future, the state looms large. Yet the opposite vision is now more plausible. After three years of government cuts, Britain is not even halfway through its age of austerity, which will endure regardless of who governs. The tight spending round announced this week by George Osborne, the chancellor, approximates what even the Labour party says it would do far beyond the next election in 2015. And if forecasts for growth and revenue prove as erringly optimistic as they have been of late, deficit-reduction will, as Margaret Thatcher once aspired to, “go on and on”.