Road to Serfdom, The - Hayek, F. A. & Caldwell, Bruce [35]
Since I cannot here examine the effect of these policies in detail, I will rather quote the summary judgments of other observers who may be less suspect of preconceived opinions. Some of the most damning, in fact, come from men who not long before had themselves been members of the Labour party. Thus Mr. Ivor Thomas, in a book apparently intended to explain why he left that party, comes to the conclusion that “from the point of view of fundamental human liberties there is little to choose between communism, socialism, and national socialism. They all are examples of the collectivist or totalitarian state . . . in its essentials not only is completed socialism the same as communism but it hardly differs from fascism.”24
The most serious development is the growth of a measure of arbitrary administrative coercion and the progressive destruction of the cherished foundation of British liberty, the Rule of Law, for exactly the reasons here discussed in chapter 6. This process had of course started long before the last Labour government came into power and had been accentuated by the war. But the attempts at economic planning under the Labour government carried it to a point which makes it doubtful whether it can be said that the Rule of Law still prevails in Britain. The “New Despotism” of which a Lord Chief Justice had warned Britain as long as twenty-five years ago is, as The Economist recently observed, no longer a mere danger but an established fact.25 It is a despotism exercised by a thoroughly conscientious and honest bureaucracy for what they sincerely believe is the good of the country. But it is nevertheless an arbitrary government, in practice free from effective parliamentary control; and its machinery would be as effective for any other than the beneficent purposes for which it is now used. I doubt whether it was much exaggerated when recently an eminent British jurist, in a careful analysis of these trends, came to the conclusions that “in Britain to-day, we live on the edge of dictatorship. Transition would be easy, swift, and it could be accomplished with complete legality. Already so many steps have been taken in this direction, due to the completeness of power possessed by the Government of the day, and the absence of any real check such as the terms of a written constitution or the existence of an effective second chamber, that those still to be taken are small in comparison.”26
For a more detailed analysis of the economic policies of the British Labour government and its consequences I cannot do better than refer the reader to Professor John Jewkes’s Ordeal by Planning (London: Macmillan & Co., 1948). It is the best discussion known to me of a concrete instance of the phenomena discussed in general terms in this book. It supplements it better than anything I could add here and spells out a lesson which is of significance far beyond Great Britain.
It seems now unlikely that, even when another Labour government should come into power in Great Britain, it would resume the experiments in large-foreword scale nationalization and planning. But in Britain, as elsewhere in the world, the defeat of the onslaught of systematic socialism has merely given those who are anxious to preserve freedom a breathing space in which to re-examine our ambitions and to discard all those parts of the socialist inheritance which are a danger to a free society. Without such a revised conception of our social aims, we are likely to continue