Welfare and the Luxury of Abstraction: A Polite Critique of Alex Zychowski’s “Britain in Decline”

A few days ago, I came across this posting on Facebook by Alex Zychowski, who is an activist with the Libertarian Party UK. This is an organisation that has no institutional or personal ties with the Libertarian Alliance. Even so, it is a fellow libertarian organisation. Therefore, if I strongly disagree with his general argument, I will try to make this a friendly critique.

I begin by quoting the whole of Mr Zychowski’s article:

Britain in decline- why Libertarians must step up

Returning to the UK from a winter-sun holiday on New Year’s Eve was a nasty shock to the system. The transition from 22°C and sunshine to a below-freezing Gatwick Airport was bad enough; having to wait 40 minutes on the tarmac because the electric stairs for disembarkation had failed “due to the cold weather” simply added to it. We were left with an extended opportunity to mull our impending return to work and taxation – to finance Labour’s bloated welfare state and the lives of the workshy and economically illiterate.

While browsing the web in the queue for passport control two news stories stood out. First, that 2025 was a record year for Channel crossings: 41,000+ people welcomed into the UK illegally and ferried to NHS appointments by taxi at taxpayers’ expense. Second, that Labour want to extend Digital ID to children at birth. Reading this news as a law-abiding taxpayer while waiting for an Orwellian facial-recognition scan as a condition of entry to the very country whose (selectively deployed) surveillance infrastructure we are forced to fund, it was little wonder smiles were hard to come by on the faces of fellow festive-season travellers. This general malaise is symptomatic of the decline of the UK – years old, and now accelerated under Starmer.

New Year’s Day was lunch with the extended family in a country pub. The venue was cold, the twelve of us huddled together, eating with our coats on. Uncle Mark’s sausages arrived undercooked and were promptly sent back to the kitchen; part of me felt sorry about the additional energy cost now incurred for the proper preparation of a portion of bangers and mash. A quick browse of Wetherspoon News reminds one that the hospitality sector effectively subsidises energy-intensive industries through the Energy and Trade Intensive Industries scheme, as government would rather prop up unprofitable industries at others’ expense than tackle the inflation-driving, astronomical energy costs that are now amongst the highest in the world – courtesy of net-zero zealotry – while punters in Beijing and Baltimore sit toasty and warm.

May 2026 was supposed to be an opportunity for the electorate to deal another blow to Starmer with the local elections. A whole raft of these are now slated to be cancelled, despite the protestations of the usually compliant Electoral Commission. Barely a peep on this assault on our democracy from the Bolshevik Broadcasting Corporation, which since Covid has become nothing more than a taxpayer-funded mouthpiece for state-approved narratives.

The year ahead may look bleak, then – but the LPUK are here and as active as ever, driving forward with our message of change and hope.

Join as a member for just £27.50 a year, and enjoy the privilege of proposing and voting on policy from the comfort of your own home as we update our manifesto in online sessions.

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Authoritarianism flourishes only where the people quietly tolerate the erosion of their freedoms. We must be the change we wish to see in the world.

Alex Zychowski

Beginning my critique, I will note that Mr Zychowski’s article is written in a familiar style. It opens with irritation at malfunctioning infrastructure, proceeds through anger at mass immigration and surveillance, and closes with an exhortation to political activism. None of this is unreasonable in itself. The country is visibly decaying, and the British state is increasingly authoritarian. The difficulty lies not with what the author observes, but with what and whom he chooses to blame.

From the opening paragraph, the target is clear. Britain’s malaise is attributed to “Labour’s bloated welfare state and the lives of the workshy and economically illiterate.” The reader is invited to picture a hard-working taxpayer, delayed on the tarmac at Gatwick and watching his earnings vanish into a moral sinkhole populated by idlers and bureaucrats. This picture is emotionally effective, but it is analytically careless. It mistakes the rhetorical presentation of state spending for its actual structure.

A truly libertarian society, I freely acknowledge, would have no state welfare. In such a society, there would be no compulsory redistribution, no tax-funded pensions, no government-run healthcare, and no legal obligation on one group of citizens to support another. That point is not in dispute. But it is also irrelevant to the present discussion unless we are prepared to engage in fantasy. Britain is not a libertarian society. It is not even moving in that direction. It is a highly coercive, heavily taxed, inflationary, managerial state, operating on principles almost perfectly opposed to libertarian ethics. To reason about welfare policy as though we were already living in a free society is therefore an exercise in abstraction so pure that it becomes a form of evasion.

The proper libertarian question in a country like Britain is not whether the state should do certain things in an ideal world, but which of the things it currently does are parasitic and destructive, and which are compensatory responses to its own prior parasitism and destruction.

Mr Zychowski’s article does not make this distinction. Instead, it treats welfare as both moral vice and fiscal cause, and thereby lets the real engines of state expansion slip quietly out of view.

The article repeatedly implies that welfare spending explains the scale of British public expenditure. The reader is told that taxation exists “to finance Labour’s bloated welfare state,” and that the country is being hollowed out to support the feckless. But this is assertion, not argument. It relies on a generalised resentment rather than a serious examination of where money actually goes.

Pensions for the elderly, basic disability support, and emergency healthcare do not explain a budget of more than a trillion pounds. They never have. Britain supported old people before the modern managerial state existed. It treated the sick before the rise of quangos and compliance regimes. The difference is not that these things are done, but how they are now done, and what has been attached to them.

Consider healthcare. Mr Zychowski mentions that illegal migrants are “ferried to NHS appointments by taxi at taxpayers’ expense.” This is a striking and scandalous image that is true, but it is also a distraction. The taxi fares of migrants do not bankrupt the state. What bankrupts the state is the conversion of healthcare into a managerial system whose primary purpose is no longer treatment, but risk management, ideological signalling, and institutional self-protection. The NHS is expensive not because doctors treat patients, but because armies of administrators exist to document, audit, supervise, re-educate, and legally insulate those doctors. To blame “free healthcare” for this is to blame the visible tip of an iceberg while ignoring the mass beneath the surface.

The same is true of welfare more broadly. Cash transfers to the poor and old are not where the money goes. The money goes into administration, into complexity, into systems designed not to help recipients efficiently but to justify the continued employment of those who administer them. Welfare is not the cause of the bloat; it is the moral camouflage beneath which the bloat advances.

This brings us to the central misunderstanding of the article. Welfare is treated as the engine of state expansion, when in fact it is better understood as its alibi. Every criticism of public spending is deflected with the same challenge: do you want to harm the vulnerable? Mr Zychowski implicitly accepts this framing by attacking welfare itself rather than exposing how it is used.

The modern British state does not say, “We tax you to fund consultants, regulators, diversity officers, climate tsars, and compliance departments.” It says, “We tax you to protect the poor and the sick.” Everything else is smuggled in under that banner. To attack welfare indiscriminately is therefore to attack the one part of the system that provides moral cover for the rest. It allows the true beneficiaries of state expansion—the managerial and ideological classes—to shelter behind pensioners and hospital patients.

This is not merely an analytical error; it is a strategic one. A libertarianism that cannot distinguish between parasitic expenditure and mitigatory provision will always lose. It will be portrayed, with some plausibility, as indifferent to human cost, while the state continues to expand untouched.

Mr Zychowski’s language about the “workshy and economically illiterate” gestures toward a moral distinction between the deserving and undeserving. Such distinctions are not illegitimate in themselves. In a free society, where individuals bear responsibility for their own choices and are not systematically plundered by the state, desert matters a great deal. But Britain is not such a society.

For decades, the British state has taxed earnings heavily, inflated away the value of savings, interfered in housing markets, and regulated private provision of pensions almost into insolvency. It has actively discouraged self-provision while promising, both implicitly and explicitly, to provide in its place. As a result, millions of people who might otherwise have accumulated adequate retirement savings have been prevented from doing so.

What follows from this? Are we now to tell these people that their already meagre pensions must be withdrawn in the name of libertarian purity? Are we to mouth slogans about self-help to those whose capacity for self-help was systematically destroyed by the very state that now proposes to abandon them? That position may be logically tidy, but it is morally gross.

In a non-libertarian society, some forms of welfare are not acts of generosity but partial mitigation. They soften harms caused elsewhere by taxes, inflation, and regulation. To abolish them while leaving the causes intact is not libertarianism; it is cruelty administered with a clear conscience. Or, to be more blunt: In a society already ruined by state action, the abolition of compensatory measures without the abolition of the causes is not liberty but sadism.

Mr Zychowski is rightly alarmed by the authoritarian drift of Britain. He notes the expansion of surveillance, the imposition of digital ID, the cancellation of elections, and the complicity of institutions such as the BBC. But here again, welfare is made to bear blame it does not deserve. Authoritarianism in Britain has not arisen because the state is too kind. It has arisen because the state has become a self-protecting managerial machine, hostile to scrutiny and allergic to responsibility.

Indeed, the most striking feature of recent decades is that authoritarianism has grown alongside rising spending and deteriorating services. If welfare were the cause, one might expect some correlation between redistribution and social peace. Instead, we have the opposite: more spending, less liberty, worse outcomes. This should suggest that the problem lies not in compassion, but in administration.

Welfare, in Britain today, is not the cause of decline. It is the excuse. To attack it as though it were the engine of ruin is to let the real engines continue to run unchallenged. That is not stepping up. It is missing the target.