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Labour’s evidence-free approach to policy is baffling

4 0
01.11.2025

Keir Starmer and business secretary Peter Kyle visiting pharmaceutical giant Astrazeneca's lab in Macclesfield (Photo by Jason Roberts/Getty Images)

Keir Starmer is often criticised for lacking an ideology, but his actions suggest a pathological belief in in restricting personal freedoms, impoverishing strivers and narrowing horizons of young people. Or socialism, for short, says James Price

A catchphrase I’m fond of reciting is that the best way to make God laugh is to tell Him your plans. It’s a colloquial way of expressing the great economist Friedrich von Hayek’s “knowledge problem”.

His argument is that in any developed society, it is impossible to collect and interpret the information, or knowledge, necessary for any central authority or state to efficiently allocate resources. As a result, it is better to leave this process to the dispersed, decentralised market – or the invisible hand as Adam Smith put it.

This is excellent advice. No system ever devised can be powerful enough to plan everything. Humility is best, then. This is a lesson that all politicians should heed, though few ever do. Despite this broad helplessness in the face of the........

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