The mythic world versus the real world
Because the real world of actual existence fails to correspond with their world view, many on the Left construct a mythic world in which the things that didn’t happen did, and where the things that did happen didn’t. Joseph Goebbels famously described the ‘Big Lie’ technique he used himself: “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” The Bellman in Lewis Carroll’s ‘Hunting of the Snark’ said, “What I tell you three times is true.” More prosaically, logicians have described it as the ‘argumentum ad nauseam,’ the supposition that simply repeating something somehow adds to its truth content. It doesn’t. But what does happen is that many Left-wingers themselves come to believe the myths.
They believe that UK manufacturing was destroyed under the 1980s Tory governments, whereas manufacturing actually rose by 7.5%. The service sector grew much more, so the proportion of the total economy taken by manufacturing declined. But it grew, not shrank.
The tax cuts of the 1980s were not paid for by the sale of state assets and the squandering of North Sea oil revenues, as the myth has it, they were in fact paid for by the tax cuts themselves. More money was raised for the Treasury from the lower rates than had been collected when they were higher. And the top 10% of earners who had been paying 35% of total income tax saw that rise to 48% of the total. In the real world, as opposed to the mythic one, the rich paid more of their “fair” share, not less.
The UK coal industry had been in decline for decades as North Sea gas replaced coal gas and oil, gas and nuclear emerged as cleaner alternatives to coal’s use in industry. And UK coal had difficulty competing with cheaper foreign coal. In the myth world Margaret Thatcher ravaged the coal industry, but in the real world Labour’s Harold Wilson presided over the closure of more pits than she did. Far from Tory governments “slashing the public services” over the course of the 1980s, spending on them rose by 17.6%. There were cuts to proposed increases, but core services were expanded, not “slashed.”
Precious public assets were not sold off into private monopolies. That’s the mythic world. The real one saw mostly loss-making state industries that needed subsidies turned into successful private companies that paid taxes into the Exchequer, and huge numbers of the general public bought into them when they were floated. In nearly all cases competition was introduced into industries that had never had it before. What Harold Macmillan called “selling the precious family silver to pay the butler’s wages” was in the real world mostly offloading the costly state junk.
Today’s myths are made no less wrong by repetition. It’s simply not true that poor people can only become richer by having wealth taken from rich people. What is true is that both can become richer together if the right policies generate economic growth. Nor is it true that reducing overseas aid harms the economies of poorer countries. It’s reducing trade with them that does that.
The myth of Brexit so prevalent in Islington and BBC circles is that it was the basic xenophobic racism of the foreign-hating British that reared its ugly head, whereas surveys indicate that the Brits are not like that, but made a rational decision to withdraw from what was clearly on its way to becoming a political union they wanted to be no part of.
Ah well, why bother with the real world if you can seek comfort and consolation from the mythic one? As the biographer of Wyatt Earp was told, “Print the legend.”