Andrew Roberts
The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War
Harper, 2011
768 Pages
ISBN 978-1907773044

For an historian to attempt to document the blood-soaked entirety of the Second World War in a single volume is an ambitious, perhaps foolhardy task. Andrew Roberts has both the talent and the ego to match it. The biographer of Lords Halifax and Salisbury counts George W. Bush among his fans, and won praise and ridicule in equal measure for his grandiose History of the English Speaking Peoples Since 1900. One of the most skilled historians of his generation, Roberts flavours his work with his firm neoconservative views, which in this book surface in the form of admiration for Winston Churchill and a conviction that the war was a struggle of good versus evil.

This volume is a masterwork, combining detail with concision and condensing the terror of those six years into a gripping 600-page narrative. Roberts sets out to discover why exactly the Axis lost the war. His answer is simple enough: the Nazis lost because they were Nazis. A command structure that brooked no dissent and was therefore immune to constructive feedback sowed the seeds of failure. A murderous obsession with Jews diverted resources from defeating the enemy to conducting genocide.

With the historian’s gift for measure, Roberts tackles the grim task of probing the motives that propel men to commit acts of barbarity. The mindset of ogres such as Himmler, who spoke coolly about reducing the population of Eastern Europe by expulsion or mass murder, is dissected with care, seeking explanations while leaving no doubt as to its wickedness. The Holocaust is treated with the combination of outrage and sensitivity it deserves.

With admirable vigour and not a trace of gloss, Roberts goes on to defend actions of the Allies that, when exposed to full daylight, are not pleasant to behold. The obliteration of Dresden is defended valiantly, as is the use of atomic weapons in Japan. There is an excoriation of armchair generals, and it is not unfairly pointed out that the circumstances were extraordinary and the enemy singularly frightening.

And yet, for all his undoubted skill and bold defence of civilised Western liberal democratic values, Roberts fails to convince that this was a just war. Some of the most harrowing writing is found in the chapters dealing with Operation Barbarossa, Hitler’s insane invasion of Russia and Stalin’s brutal retaliation. This is no struggle of good versus bad but a clash of monstrous behemoths, machine versus machine. The picture of mass killing, famine, and total destruction is unbearably bleak.

Total control was the only way to rally Russia to fight its Great Patriotic War. Stalin’s barbarity saved his country from defeat, and in keeping Hitler busy in the East, was instrumental for the Allies. Roberts criticises the means, such as the brutality with which commanders such as Marshal Zhukov treated their own troops, but stops short of criticising the ends. There is little consideration of the misery endured by Poland in exchanging one set of inhuman oppressors for another or of the eventual imprisonment of millions of Eastern Europeans behind an Iron Curtain. Ultimately, he avoids the uncomfortable truth—that the Nazi tyranny was only defeated because it was stopped by a tyranny as bloodstained as itself. Unable to justify this, Roberts describes it pithily as the “giant and abiding paradox” that lies at the heart of the war.

A fascinating and counterintuitive comparison arises between Nazi and Soviet systems of command. Those who challenged Hitler were given no more severe punishment than demotion. It is puzzling that so few spoke out against the disastrous leadership of their Führer. Some, like Field Marshal Model, instrumental in the Battle of the Bulge, were ideological Nazis who believed in the cause. Many were simply cowards. On the other hand, commanders who disagreed with Stalin were often killed (one unfortunate soul was executed in 1950, having been sentenced in absentia). Comparing Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia does little to reinforce the author’s view of the Allies as an unmitigated force for good.

Roberts’s main claim, that the Nazis were destined to lose, stands up well. A compelling aspect of the book is its collection of character sketches and the study of Hitler’s character explains a great deal. Hitler’s great fault militarily, as shown in disaster after another, was his total inability to comprehend the value of a tactical retreat. His perennial order was to move forward, despite entreaties from seasoned generals such as Rommel that a temporary withdrawal and regrouping might be a better idea than mindless attack. During the first part of the conflict, momentum was the Nazis’ friend. The blitzkrieg tactic of highly coordinated and fast-moving armoured assault was brutally effective in knocking France and Poland, amongst others, out of the war. But as the tide turned, Hitler’s insistence on movement was his undoing. The book describes the stream of “stand and die” orders issued by the Führer; commands to perish rather than retreat and preserve strength. During the battle of Stalingrad, such an order resulted in the slaughter or capture and eventual murder of hundreds of thousands of Germans. The myth of Hitler’s tactical genius is comprehensively debunked.

In the gallery of rogues and heroes, the author’s own idol, Churchill, features heavily. His decency evinced by the genuine concern he showed for his troops is complemented by his cheerful enjoyment in belittling his foe as “Corporal Hitler”. Montgomery is shown to be a vain self-publicist whose heroic mastery of desert warfare never goes unnoticed, thanks to his own efforts. There is also a portrait of Patton, a borderline psychopath for whom the theatre of war was a natural home.

The test of a good history of the Second World War must be whether it adds anything new to the existing works about that conflict, which compiled would fill several libraries. The Storm of War does this partly by presenting a wealth of newly unearthed material, but primarily by focusing on the inevitability of Nazi defeat. If Roberts’s Manichean world-view does not quite stand up to scrutiny, his examination of Nazi incompetence does. Moreover, the achievement of documenting the whole war from Atlantic to Pacific in a single, readable book is a magisterial one. It will be a brave historian that attempts to better this feat.

Nobody trusts politicians. A poll conducted in 2009 found that less than one in five Britons believed politicians told the truth. Even journalists were more trusted.

And yet when it comes to the economy, many Britons have a reverential faith in politicians. They are encouraged by the Labour party and others on the left. We are told that, in the absence of Government spending, the economy will collapse. Without ‘investment’ from the state, the country cannot grow. Without politicians watching over our economy like guardian angels, no prosperity can ensue.

It is this fear-mongering that explains in part the difficulty the Coalition is having in convincing the British public of the need for fiscal retrenchment. Britain is a nation of sensible, hardworking people. Most accept that spending more on debt interest than on defence annually is unsustainable. But many fear that as the Government retreats, so too will the economy.

Here the Coalition needs to assert some economic truths and dispel some falsehoods. An economy does not grow because bureaucrats command it to. It grows when wealth is created by entrepreneurs and businesses, leading to new or more efficient technology and better, cheaper goods and services. As businesses expand or are started, jobs are created.
Tax receipts flow to the exchequer. Living standards rise.

Without a robust, healthy and profitable private sector, the public sector simply cannot exist. Libraries, schools, hospitals and six-figure council chief salaries are dependent on a steady flow of money from the productive part of the economy. Government does not have money of its own. Every penny the Government spends has been taxed, borrowed or printed. The lavish promises of politicians are underwritten by working men and women. However, in a brilliant inversion of the truth, left-wing commentators suggest that without public spending there can be no growth – a clear case of wanting to put the cart before the horse. This idea must not go unchallenged.

It is not sufficient for the Coalition to explain the scale of the fiscal crisis, or to point out that the bond market will punish viciously a country thought to be unable to put its finances in order. There must be an explicit encouragement and celebration of profit-making and enterprise. Ministers must make the intellectual and moral case for free market capitalism, and not shy from the fiery debates this will involve.

To choose the battlefield is to have a natural advantage. Conservatives succeeded in forcing a national debate about our dire finances. We must now turn our attention to the growing divide between those who welcome private enterprise and those who look upon it as a necessary evil; good only for producing the money needed to fund public spending.

It is essential that the simple, positive facts underpinning the effectiveness of the free market are used to counter the pessimistic untruths promulgated by those whose answers to our problems are the stale old solutions: bigger government, more taxation, more borrowing and more bureaucracy. The rich diversity – and yes, inequality – of the human race, with each individual leveraging his or her unique skill set in pursuit of self-interest, drives the dynamism of the economy.

The British people will need a positive reason to vote Conservative come the next election. In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan wooed American voters with an upbeat campaign: it was “morning in America”. They responded by re-electing him in an historic landslide. The choice for the British people is not between rampant Government spending and poverty, but between stagnation and prosperity. Conservatives need to make this clear, and be confident that voters will choose prosperity.

On a frosty morning in January 1965, a carriage bearing a coffin left Westminster Hall and proceeded to St. Paul’s Cathedral through London. On a route lined by thousands, a dignified silence reigned, interrupted by a thunderous 19-gun salute and a fly-past by the Royal Air Force. Inside the coffin lay Sir Winston Churchill, the great warrior, making his final journey home to Oxfordshire.

In 2000, a BBC poll returned Churchill as the greatest British Prime Minister of the twentieth century. Two years later, another BBC poll found that most Britons thought Churchill to be the greatest of their countrymen in all history. Post-war British Prime Ministers are said to look to his ghost in times of stress; his rough, cheerful face greets all occupants of 10 Downing Street from his portraits hung there.

135 years after his birth, he is still regarded by most Britons as the embodiment of all that is great about their country. To many Americans, who made him an honorary citizen, he is the man who stopped the barbarians from breaching the gates of the West.

The pivotal year in his long and eventful life was 1940. It was the year, he is said to have insisted in his twilight years, that he would re-live over and over given the chance. It was the year that Britain stood alone. Rejecting Hitler’s offer of peace, Churchill rallied the country to war. Presiding over the miracle of Dunkirk and the furious Battle of Britain, he was in his element. By holding the Nazis at bay until the Americans joined the war, Churchill surely saved Europe from Hitler.

But would a Nazi flag have flown over Buckingham Palace had peace terms been agreed in 1940? There is little evidence that Hitler wanted to occupy Britain. His admiration for the British Empire was widely known. He considered Oxford a bastion of Aryan achievement. He was friendly with the Duke of Windsor, formerly Edward VIII. Hitler’s ambitions lay east, to the lebensraum of Poland and the Soviet Union. From Britain, he desired friendship.

The question is worth asking because 1940 is the year on which Churchill’s reputation rests. His political career appeared over when in 1931 Ramsay MacDonald did not invite him to join a National Cabinet. Militarily, he was better known for Gallipoli than anything else. Had he not risen to the role of dux bellorum upon the outbreak of the Second World War, we might remember him only as a fascinating but failed politician. But history bent to Churchill’s will. As the Reich crumbled around Hitler, Germany was once again crushed. Europe was divided by an iron curtain. The war over, the old warlord’s reckoning seemed vindicated. He had taken action – and stopped fascism.

Victory in 1945 was met with jubilation. Britain had shown incredible bravery and deserved its moment of triumph. Several years would pass before the uncomfortable truth became apparent. The fall of Singapore in 1942 had been a disaster and Indian independence in 1947 was something Churchill had long fought against. Rebellions in Kenya and Malaya during his peacetime premiership proved intractable. Yet it was the debacle of Suez in 1956 that finally forced Britain to face facts – The age of British supremacy was over. Churchill had presided over its demise.

To the public who threw him out at the war’s end then voted him back into Downing Street afterwards, Churchill appeared to be the man with whom the future could be trusted. He would preserve the British Empire, maintain British strength and protect tradition at home. But the war made decolonisation inevitable and left Britain financially dependent on America. Churchill himself failed to challenge the advent of radical socialist economic policies. Within a decade of his grand funeral, the country was in the grip of seemingly irreversible decline, wracked with self-doubt and on the verge of obscurity. Churchill walked, talked and dressed like a guardian of the old order. But behind his back the new Britain, torn between America and Europe, subordinate to the former and suspicious of the latter, uncertain of its place in the world, was taking shape. Not until the arrival of Mrs. Thatcher would Britons enjoy a rebirth of self-confidence.

Queen Elizabeth offered to make Churchill the Duke of London. He refused. He was, to the last, a democrat, who chose to die a commoner. Perhaps the original neo-conservative, he believed in human rights and the primacy of Western values. His method was intervention: abroad, at home and wherever it was needed. He was a Whig imperialist whose curriculum vitae rang with the names of the Empire: Malakand, Omdurman, Ladysmith and London. He was simultaneously an aristocrat and a man of the people.

Churchill’s leadership during the war can never be forgotten. He was the man of the hour, who deserves to be immortalised as the leader who inspired his people to stand firm against fascism. But, as the wreckage of interventionist policies in Iraq and Afghanistan will confirm, valour in war cannot by itself bring prosperity. The Second World War was almost a catastrophe for Britain. Even in victory, it took a heavy toll. It cost Britain her position and her independence, to say nothing of many of her finest men and women. Churchill continues to be lionised as a great Briton. Deservedly so. But were he alive today, celebrating his 135^th birthday, we must wonder whether he would not lament the loss of the grand, imperial Britain he led and loved.

An infectious pandemic of hand-wringing has broken out across the globe. Mostly afflicting politicians of a leftist persuasion, symptoms include incessant talk of a ‘new capitalism’ or a sinister-sounding ‘new world order’.

Conspiracy theorists must be having a ball. They have been warning for years of a new world order, comprised of power-hungry politicians and corporate leaders, forming an ominous world government to control us all. What makes their theories unlikely is that the notion of Gordon Brown ruling the world is more laughable than terrible.

The more sober reality, as touted by many a policymaker and opinion-former, is that in the long run, the rise of the East will trump everything the West does, leading to a fundamental shift in the global balance of power from Washington to Beijing and from London to Bombay. Already, we have witnessed the unprecedented visit of the US Secretary of State to the Chinese government to implore the Chinese to continue investing in American debt; effectively a plea from a debtor to a creditor to keep the money flowing. We have had several thousands of jobs ‘offshored’ to India, as ambitious young people from that country compete ferociously for employment.

The global recession has slowed all this down, but the process continues. Chinese growth is slightly depressed, but it’s still growth. And the long-term bets seem still to be on countries like India to emerge as economic superpowers. See, for example, the recent G20 gathering, which only a few years previously was the G7. Certainly, many American Republicans would have us believe that the election of Obama heralds the end of American hegemony, and they may yet be proved correct.

But is it too early to sound the death-knell of the West? After all, what made Britain and the US great was freedom – the liberty to innovate, create wealth and form businesses. As Milton Friedman pointed out, there was nowhere in history a greater advancement of the condition of the ordinary man than in the US in the 19th century.

It might be simplistic to say that freedom is the only guarantor of long-term national greatness. But history seems to indicate that the freer a people are from the interfering hand of their government, the better they are able to build prosperity, and it is prosperity, rather than military strength, that underpins a nation’s power.

In other words, as long as we in Britain regain the liberty that is our birthright and as long as Americans can maintain their constitutional freedoms, there is no reason to believe that a permanent decline is inevitable. And conversely, if China does not permit its people the liberty they deserve, it may see the fruits of its growth squandered by upheaval, and its stability upset by the kind of political turmoil that Britain suffered in the Victorian era. India, meanwhile, enjoys a delicately balanced democracy, but one that has the potential to fracture badly along lines of caste, class and religion. Its own business practices are still badly held back by corruption and bureaucratic interfering.

There are other factors at work stopping the New Eastern Order from taking shape. A study from 2004 indicated that China’s population may simply get old before it gets rich. The by-product of an authoritarian one-child-per-family policy may yet be a disastrous demographic time-bomb, whereby there is eventually a shortage of productive young workers. If this happens it would be the law of unintended consequences writ large – an anti-liberty government policy that leads, decades later, to a youth crunch.

Conversely, while population ageing is also a major issue in the West, we are likely, according to the US Census Bureau, to retain a healthy percentage of young people well into the 21st century. This is not the result of a specific policy but of simply the freedom to reproduce and raise families.

The key, it would seem, is to react to the economic crisis with restraint, prudence and an eye on the future, rather than knee-jerk regulation and the kind of government control that will merely stifle innovation and growth. The lesson of history is that free people are more than capable of organising their own affairs and producing their own triumphs of wealth and technological advancement, while people constrained by the dead hand of the state can only achieve what their masters permit them to.

A free China and a well-functioning India are things we should all hope for, as they will add to global prosperity. But as long they remain distant dreams, we in the West should at least appreciate how lucky we are to enjoy freedom, and fight to retain it. It will ensure our continued survival and preserve an imperfect but valuable Old World Order.

There was a time when the Cameroon project to reinvent the Conservative party (and ultimately Britain) was organised around an existing blueprint. That blueprint was California: socially liberal, entrepreneurial, environmentally friendly and with Scandinavian-style efficient public services. If Cameron could not bring the golden weather to Britain, he could at least import the optimism and feel-good factor.

Today, priorities have shifted. An incoming Tory administration would be less focused on California dreaming than on jolting Britain awake to the reality of our awful fiscal situation. This is as well, for the blueprint state in question is now going bust, and has its own horrible reality to deal with. With a budget deficit of over $24bn, the reign of Arnold Schwarzenegger looks set to end in misery. A law requiring the budget to be balanced will force savage cuts in public services and potentially tax rises, though these are being vetoed by Republican politicians. Tens of thousands of prisoners are set to be released. The welfare state faces a massive cutback. School’s out for longer than summer, as teachers will be fired.

While Democrats blame the collapse on the wider economic crisis, it is plain to see that California’s mess is a disaster of left-wing making. Taxes in the state have systematically hammered the rich, many of whom have simply fled to other states in the US, taking jobs with them. A Brownite debt-fuelled spending splurge in the boom years led to Californian bonds having their ratings slashed, meaning investors could get better yields elsewhere.

The world’s eighth-largest economy is now groaning under unserviceable debt and mindlessly high taxes. It is not difficult to draw a parallel with the US as a whole. The Obama administration has already committed to spending truly staggering amounts of money on various projects from bailing out bankrupt automobile manufacturers to fighting ‘climate change’. Added to this are a raft of tax increases and a vast intended mass of regulation. It is clear that Barack Obama is determined to leave office with an expanded State, higher taxes and a record national debt.

If the US goes the way of California, the implications for the world economy are terrifying. But as far as we Britons are concerned, we must at least stop our country from emulating the Golden State in its present form. There is much to hope for in California: a truly entrepreneurial culture, a tough justice system and world-class universities to name three examples. If the Tories really want to bring California to Britain, they should bring the things that made it worth living in in the first place, not the things that have destroyed it.

When a government says it is not going to take away your freedom, you can bet your last penny that that is precisely what it is setting out to do. Just as Labour ministers sneered at accusations that they were creating a semi-totalitarian state with their sweeping powers for police and the executive, so they are now taking great pains to reassure parents who school their children at home that proposals to ‘better regulate’ this sphere of human activity are not an attack on those parents.

A review to be published soon will no doubt call for closer scrutiny of children schooled outside schools. The pretext for this is that such children are open to abuse, an accusation that is a terrible slur on parents who choose to home educate, often because their children have been bullied or are disabled. Certainly, the State should take action against abusers, and those who have been found guilty of such evil should be severely punished. But as with the ‘anti-terror’ laws, we are moving once again from a presumption of innocence to a presumption of guilt, so that all home educators will be under suspicion.

Now we should not be so naive as to assume that this attack on the fundamental right to educate your children away from the State, spearheaded by the great Ed Balls, will be conducted openly. Rather, it will be done in an incremental manner, with each successive concession representing a step towards the loss of parental freedom. This is why it is so essential to fight the government at every step, no matter how trivial it may seem now. Governments given an inch will not hesitate to take a mile, especially where matters of children’s education is concerned.

So what motivation could a Labour government, or the State in general, have for attacking home education? For the answer, one needs to look at the extraordinary effectiveness of home schooling. Research has shown that home educated children tend to have better social skills and to perform as well as, if not better than, their school-educated peers in examinations. This is especially true of children from disadvantaged backgrounds. The numbers speak for themselves: the population of home schooled children has risen rapidly in the UK over the past decade, to well over 50,000 today.

Parents who pull their children out of school are exercising the ultimate protest against the British school system, which has since the 1960s been the subject of a gigantic and failed experiment in social engineering. The collapse of standards and discipline, and the replacement of academic selection with selection via postcode or daddy’s wallet, has massively damaged British education. Add to this the incessant targets and bureaucratic interference of New Labour, plus the rise of politically correct curricula that deny British history and promote underage sex, and it is no wonder home schooling is rising in popularity.

In short, home education is an embarassment for the government. It represents the part of society that its bureaucracy-obsessed managers cannot wield control or influence over. Just as the left has always viewed ambitious working class people with suspicion, so it dislikes parents who do not need its magnanimity or ideologically-driven programmes. And to add insult to injury, there is no evidence that home schooled children are worse off; in fact the opposite.

It was therefore only a matter of time before Labour sought to stick its interfering nose into the lives of parents who bravely flout the system by educating at home. It is imperative for liberty and for the continued success of thousands of children, that home education is defended all the way. There may come a point, many decades hence, when State control over schools will be viewed as an unfortunate abberation, and parents who today home school their children will be lauded as being ahead of their time.

The common wisdom is settled. Bankers made a terrible hash of the financial system. Greed, recklessness and immaturity triumphed over prudence, caution and responsibility. Never before, have so many despised so few.

If the common wisdom had a track record of getting it right, it would be as well for us to take heed and follow its various prescriptions. But alas, the signs are not good. Just consider that a mere five years ago the common wisdom was also firmly settled, but on a different set of errant assumptions – that property prices would rise forever, that inflation was a thing of the past and that the cycle of boom and bust was ancient history.

As the New York Times columnist David Brooks has noted, there appears to be more going on here than a bunch of laissez-faire regulators asleep at the wheel.One needs only look at the phenomenon of the ‘Greenspan put’ – the US Federal Reserve Bank’s policy of averting economic crisis by lowering real interest rates and pumping cash into the economy – to realise that the great and good people of government and policymaking had their fingerprints all over this one.

From the 1987 Black Monday crash, through the first episode of unpleasantness with Saddam in Kuwait, to the 1997 Thai meltdown to the 2001 double-impact of the dotcom slump and 9/11, Alan Greenspan abandoned his previously staunch monetarist credentials in order to turn on the water-cannon of credit instead. Put plainly, this means that for over a decade, the USA’s central bank flooded the world with cheap money.

It all has to go somewhere. Because the markets were awash with dollar-denominated debt, added to by the explosion in sterling that took place under the auspices of Gordon Brown from around 2000 onwards, asset prices rose massively. Ordinary consumers discovered that they could take out multiple mortgages and use perpetually rising property values to finance profligate lifestyles, while private equity firms used truckloads of leverage (debt) to buy healthy companies and strip them of their cash flows. As long as the bubble kept expanding, prosperity was there for the taking – provided one was a reckless speculator and not a prudent saver. Never before, have so many owed so much.

If the story of 1990s America was one of the world’s most powerful republics placating its plebeians with iPods and shoes, the story of China is very different. China, the world’s oldest empire and one of its most magnificent, treats economics as a matter of state, to be decided upon by the mandarins in their ivory towers. Ever since Deng Xiao Peng issued his edict of 1978 – ‘to get rich is glorious’ – the Chinese government has been busy turning that country into a giant exporter of goods, selling cheap products to the West on razor-thin profit margins. The profits from this exercise have mostly been invested in US dollars, so that China has played the role of a giant department store to America’s consumers: buy our products and we’ll extend you credit at the same time.

The result is a gigantic symbiotic relationship turned sour. Cheap goods from the East kept inflation low in the West, while cheap credit in the West provided a safe haven for the profits from China’s mercantilist growth. Getting one’s head round this problem is a not inconsiderable challenge, and when the billions-upon-billions scale of the macroeconomic factors is realised, the diagnosis is made harder to explain.

It is far easier to blame bankers. They play the same role that witches played in the Middle Ages – they personify problems beyond the control of individual humans and therefore become an outlet for frustration. Sir Fred Goodwin, grinning inanely as he collects his undeserved pension, becomes the vampire of nightmare, sucking blood from the economy as he gorges himself. But the truth is that Goodwin was a bit player in a drama that involved the whole world, and was written by Governments and Central Banks.

As with all bubbles, the free market got this one. The market has not failed in recent months. It is working exactly as it should, to reverse an insane expansion of credit and bring prices crashing back to earth. It is restoring some sense of balance to the system of money and credit. It is a painful process but harsh medicine is sometimes the only thing that works.

Thomas Hobbes, in his Leviathan, famously said that the life of man is ‘nasty, brutish and short’. So it is with recessions; they are indeed nasty and brutish. But we must let them run their course, so that at the very least, they are short.

If one were superstitious, the timing would be positively fortuitous. Alistair Darling’s next budget is to fall almost exactly a century after one of David Lloyd George’s most controversial and hard-fought bills.

The year was 1909. Three years previously, the Liberal party of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman had swept to power in a landslide election victory, embarrassing the Conservative party with its success. By 1909 the Liberal administration, boasting such giants as Asquith, Churchill and Lloyd George, had joined battle with a recalcitrant and reactionary upper chamber, dominated by Tory old lags that ultimately rejected the government’s radical plans to redistribute wealth by taxing the rich. By exercising its prerogative to veto a budget, a step unprecedented since the 17^th century, the Lords induced their own destruction: 1911 saw the Parliament Acts, which broke the power of the House of Lords forever.

Today, the government faces no similar uphill struggle. The Lords, half-reformed and stuffed with appointees, tends not to act as the ‘watchdog of the constitution’ as Lloyd George wished it would do – though it would be churlish to deny the upper chamber’s achievement in, for example, rejecting the 42 days’ detention legislation.

Why, then, ask many commentators on the political left, does Alistair Darling not take a leaf from the book of the Welsh wizard, Lloyd George, who introduced in 1909 for the first time, old-age pensions, higher taxes on higher incomes and increased inheritance taxes? Similarly, conservative commentators extol the virtues of spending cuts. What unifies both sides is that they call for boldness, but know full well that they will get blandness.

For a start, the difference between then and now is stark. Then, Britain was in a relatively sound fiscal condition. Taxes were generally low. The size of Government was small. As historian A.J.P. Taylor has written: “(u)ntil August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state, beyond the post office and the policeman”.

The truth is that, for better or worse, the size and scope of Government has grown inexorably since the 1909 clash between peers and people. Two world wars and many decades later, we are in Britain heavily taxed, ineffectively regulated and ruled over by what journalist Peter Oborne has referred to as the political class: a caste of homogenous ciphers a world apart from the struggling middle-class families in many of the nation’s cities.

What does this mean for this week’s budget? It means that even though the supremacy of the Commons over the Lords is unquestioned, boldness is still a rare quality among our elected leaders. What we are likely to see this week is a safety first budget, tinkering at the margins with spending cuts while scrambling to appeal to all constituencies with ‘green’ investments and perhaps a limited tax cut of some sort.

Lack of boldness is perhaps endemic to our democracy. When Labour proposed its 45 pence tax rate for higher earners, the Conservatives quickly adopted the plan, as if to dissent would be a step too far. Where does this leave voters? On foreign policy for example, the Commons is more or less unified: to exit the European Union would be beyond lunacy but to go to war in a far-flung Middle Eastern country is justified. The ascendancy and strength of the Commons has made it uniform, not diverse. Debate is stifled rather than heated.

The old Parliamentary system was not wholly democratic. But it worked reasonably well at steering the ship of state and pushing steady reform into law. This system, with its titled ministers, its First Lords of the Treasury (never ‘Prime Ministers’, until Campbell-Bannerman) and its privileged MPs who kept racehorses rather than fiddled expenses, was perhaps always destined for destruction in a modernising world. And the extension of the franchise, particularly to women, was long overdue.

Ultimately, the People’s Budget of 1909 paved the way for true democracy: a Lords that has eventually to bow to the Commons if the latter so wishes it. This, surely, is the fairest approximation of a democratic system we can get.

And yet, the principles of those heady days from 1909 to 1911 – redistribution and people power – have not delivered the promised utopia. Instead they have created a disconnected and insular political bubble that has yet to burst, and laid the foundations for a welfare state that is far advanced but inefficient and poor at rescuing the poor. As we survey the wreckage of our economy and anticipate what will probably be Darling’s last budget, we ought not to reflect upon what was gained during the twentieth century, but on what was lost.

A Conservative Prime Minister once remarked at a party conference that he would define Conservative party policy as ‘the upholding of confidence’. The speaker was the Marquess of Salisbury, and he was speaking in 1889. Much has of course changed since then; including the Conservative party itself, but the idea of restoring and upholding confidence is still crucial, especially with regard to the current economic crisis.

Arguably the most vital task of the Conservative party in government, should it win the next election, will be to maintain investor and business confidence in the UK. Without this, the nation faces the very real and serious threat of permanent decline, as capital flies to other destinations and job creation grinds to a halt.

Bearing this is in mind, the Guardian’s latest crusade against ‘tax avoidance’ is as destructive as it is misguided. A word of caution is necessary. Nobody is accusing anybody – yet – of tax evasion, which is a crime. What is being alleged is that companies are exploiting loopholes in the law in order to pay as little tax as possible.

The Guardian is exercised over this because it has assumed that everybody has a duty to pay as much tax as possible (what is usually referred to as a ‘fair share’) to the State. The principle of private property, however, is completely ignored. If property is sacrosanct, as it should be in a sovereign democracy, then each individual or association of individuals is entitled to try and make their finances as tax-efficient as possible. This is only ‘avoidance’ if one considers, as many on the political Left do, that the redistributive affairs of State take priority over individual freedom.

Furthermore, to accuse a company – a voluntary and entirely consensual association of autonomous people – of avoiding tax is like accusing a football team of trying to score goals.