In an earlier piece for the Daily Sceptic, the case was made for the creeping Sovietisation of modern Britain across its social, cultural and institutional life: the management of speech, the bureaucratisation of dissent, the steady preference for administrative sanction over argument, and the increasingly theatrical quality of public discourse. It was, in essence, an examination of tone and behaviour: a system promoting ideological conformity while speaking in the vocabulary of diversity, equality and inclusion: an idiom in which meanings have a habit of travelling in the opposite direction.

That argument described the atmosphere of a system, the habits it rewards and the debased instincts it cultivates. When one digs deeper, however, the Soviet parallel does not end with culture or administration. It becomes even more discernible when one turns to the economic sphere.

Ordinarily, one would not think of Britain as a command economy. There are no quotas for steel (not least as Britain doesn’t produce steel anymore, or in fact much of anything). There are no ceremonial declarations of over-fulfilment in biscuit production. The language of markets remains intact.

The more you look, the more It looks Soviet

However, if we shift to the measurement of Britain’s economic performance, we can detect distinct features associated with late Soviet systems: income compression without genuine equality, administrative insulation from economic reality, the emergence of parallel systems of access, the increasing substitution of reported performance for actual delivery. These are not cute historical analogies. They areshowing up in the data.

The question, then, is not whether Britain conforms exactly to the Soviet analogy. The question is whether the British economy is becoming, in key respects, uncomfortably similar.

If the first essay examined the management of thought and language, this one examines the management of resources. The earlier piece explored how dissent is contained. This one turns to the economy itself, where the resemblance to the USSR stops being rhetorical and starts being statistical.

Sovietisation without the shortages

The temptation with any Soviet analogy is to overindulge the imagery: meat queues, party slogans, portraits of men with impressive eyebrows. It is more instructive to begin with the numbers.

Income dispersion offers a useful starting point. The Office for National Statisticsreports that, after taxes and transfers, the ratio between the top and bottom quintiles of household income in the UK sits at roughly 3.1–3.3. That figure is not merely low by contemporary Western standards. Reconstructed estimates of late Soviet income dispersion typically place comparable ratios somewhere in the range of four to six. On that basis, Britain’s post-tax income distribution is at least as compressed, and on some measures more so.

One’s first instinct is to assume a misprint, or at least a statistical sleight of hand. It is neither. The directional point holds. Through taxation, benefits and regulatory compression, the British state has produced a distributional outcome more tightly equalised than that of a system explicitly designed to abolish inequality.

The various researchers from England, Germany and Poland, who analysed these figures use the phrase “egalitarian inequality”, to describe how incomes are compressed, while advantages reappear in forms that are harder to quantify. The Soviet version operated through party privilege. The British version operates through institutional position.

Consider how this works. A mid-level official in a regulatory authority, a university, or a large public body may earn no more than a private-sector counterpart. The difference lies elsewhere. Employment in these sectors is harder to lose. Pensions are more secure. Upwards only salary scales based on time served provide guaranteed yearly increments on top of annual pay awards. Promotion depends on internal criteria rather than market performance. Holiday entitlements, study leave and sickness benefits are all more generous in the public sector.

Within such institutions, decisions are made through committees, working groups and intra-organisational consultations in which staff themselves participate. Those inside these systems are therefore involved, directly or indirectly, in shaping the policies that will later apply to others. They do not wait to discover regulatory or administrative changes after the fact; they help draft them, review them or are briefed on them in advance. This is a form of insider advantage.

The advantage is practical rather than dramatic. So, for example, when funding criteria change, when hiring rules tighten, when access to services becomes constrained, those already embedded in the system understand how those rules will be interpreted and applied. They know whom to contact, how to navigate procedures and which requirements matter in practice rather than on paper. None of this appears in income statistics. All of it, however, affects outcomes.

The resemblance to late Soviet arrangements, in these respects, is far from tangential. They reflect the same informal advantage that accrued to members of the Communist Party. Thus, while income differences narrow across the population, advantages re-emerge through position, access and security. The result is a system in which equality is measured in earnings, but inequality is experienced in everything that surrounds them. Exactly as in the Soviet Union.

The result is the relocation of inequality into forms that are less visible in official data. Such inequalities are more difficult to contest because the underlying advantages are opaque and can therefore persist without ever being acknowledged as inequality at all.

Temporary measures, permanent deficits

If income compression points to the structure of the system, public debt points to its sustainability, or rather lack of it. Here the comparison takes an awkward turn as even the Soviet system begins to look fiscally restrained.

Britain’s public debt now sits at roughly 95-100% of GDP (the IMF assesses UK debt to GDP in 2026 as 103.6%). Contemporary Russia’s, by contrast, remains below 20%. The Soviet Union, for most of its existence, carried little meaningful external debt. This is not a claim that either Russia or the Soviet Union represent models of economic rectitude. It is an observation about fiscal posture. A state like the UK, frequently described as advanced, stable and well-governed now carries a far heavier debt burden than the one routinely dismissed as backward.

This matters because debt is not an abstraction. It is a claim on future output. A system that depends on sustained borrowing, with debt service payments currently running in the region of £130 billion to £140 billion per annum just to maintain present budget arrangements is one that has begun to defer its problems rather than resolve them. The economic historian Niall Ferguson has identified that states spending more on debt interest than defence have a tendency to decline. Given that the UK annual defence budget for 2024-25 was £60 billion, the implications are obvious.

The sequence is well-known to anyone who has followed British economic policy with even mild attention. Public spending rises. Growth disappoints. Revenues fail to keep pace. The gap is filled with borrowing, each instance accompanied by assurances that it is necessary, temporary, and entirely under control. After a while, the reassurance remains, but the borrowing does too. Recent suggestions that necessary additional expenditure on defence could be funded by issuance of war bonds testify to governmental inability to control the national finances.

The Soviet system faced a different constraint. It did not rely on external borrowing to the same extent, but it exhibited the same underlying problem: an inability to generate sufficient productive growth to sustain its commitments. The response, in both cases, is to maintain the appearance of stability while the underlying imbalance remains stubbornly persistent.

The comparison is not exact, but it does not need to be. What matters is the direction. A system that cannot fund itself through its own productive capacity, and instead relies on continued expansion of debt, begins to resemble one that has lost control of its economic footing.

Like the USSR in its final decades, economic inefficiency is not the harbinger of immediate collapse, but of prolonged strain: slower growth, reduced flexibility and increasing dependence on financial conditions that cannot be guaranteed. The edifice struggles on, but on terms that become progressively less forgiving.

The tractor factory model of care

If macroeconomic indicators suggest Sovietisation, the internal workings of major institutions make the comparison even harder to dismiss.

If we look at the National Health Service, Britain’s health outcomes now lag behindNorth America, Australasia and much of Western Europe on several key indicators, including cancer survival rates, waiting times and general mortality, many of which are getting worse by the year. Yet within the system, the dominant activity is often not the delivery of care but the management of metrics.

Hospital managers spend extraordinary amounts of time aligning reported outcomes with centrally mandated targets, often through techniques that would have been instantly recognisable to a mid-level planner in 1970s Minsk. The aim is not to deceive in the crude sense. It is to ensure that the numbers conform to expectations, even as the underlying reality deteriorates.

The Soviet joke about tractor production figures – factories meeting quotas by producing unusable machines – was not really about tractors. It was about a structure that rewarded compliance with targets rather than competence in function.

The NHS increasingly exhibits the same logic. Performance is measured through indicators that can be managed. Managers are promoted for achieving those indicators. The system optimises accordingly.

Patients, like tractors, are incidental to the process. The objectives of NHS management have become dislocated from the core function of the organisation.

This is not failure in the ordinary sense. Just as in the Soviet Union it is “success”according to the system’s own criteria. The problem is that those criteria bear little relation to the purpose the institution was created to serve.

Two tiers, No waiting (if you know the right number)

Officially, Britain operates a universal healthcare system. Unofficially, it operates a layered system of access in which outcomes depend increasingly on one’s ability to navigate, influence or bypass the formal structure.

This, too, has precedent. Late Soviet healthcare, developed a parallel economy of access. Official provision, like the NHS, was universal and free at the point of delivery. Actual provision depended on connections, favours and informal payments.

Britain has recreated this arrangement with characteristic politeness. There are no envelopes discreetly exchanged in corridors (not that we know of, at least). Instead, there is private provision, co-payment and the determined deployment of social capital. The well-connected secure expedited referrals. The well-off, the well-informed, the articulate, the pushy middle-class, negotiate waiting lists with unusual dexterity. The rest wait.

The language remains egalitarian. The experience does not.

The arrangement preserves its moral narrative while altering how it functions in practice. Equality is maintained in principle, but inequality returns in ways that are harder to measure and therefore harder to challenge. What changes is not the language of egalitarianism, but the forms through which advantage is secured.

Anti-kulak policies for the hardworking classes

The Soviet system was animated, at least rhetorically, by hostility to the kulaks: those who owned a little property, produced a surplus, and had the temerity to operatewith a degree of independence. Britain has not revived the terminology. Although Britain has no equivalent term, the instinct is readily recognisable.

Taxation, regulation and compliance burdens now fall disproportionately on the economically active middle strata: small business owners, professionals, and those who cannot easily relocate or reclassify their income. Meanwhile, large segments of the population in the public sector, and those sustained by welfare transfers, are either insulated from market pressures or supported directly by the state.

As Alexis de Tocqueville noted, democratic systems carry a persistent temptation to distribute benefits broadly while concentrating costs on those least able to resist. But what is striking is how closely this arrangement now mirrors the Soviet approach to economic management. The productive classes are squeezed, not eliminated. Their output is required. Their independence is not.

The result is a system that relies on precisely those it constrains, while offering them diminishing reason to continue producing. It still functions sub-optimally, but with weakening incentives and increasing inefficiency at its core. This too is showing up in the statistics as workers reduce hours to avoid egregious levels of marginal taxation at certain income levels.

GDP and the art of looking large

Britain remains, by aggregate GDP, one of the largest economies in the world. This fact is repeated with the regularity of a party slogan. Taken on its own, though, it is misleading.

Measured in GDP per capita, the UK now sits closer to the lower tier of advanced economies, with income per head barely on a par with the poorest U.S. state, Mississippi. Adjusting for purchasing power does not rescue the picture. On a purchasing power basis, which accounts for differences in cost of living, the UK still trails peers it once comfortably matched or exceeded,  leaving many householdscaught in what is now commonly referred to as the cost-of-living crisis.

This is not a statistical quirk. It reflects a shift away from productivity growth toward redistribution and administrative expansion. Large-scale immigration adds to this dynamic, increasing the population while diluting output per head. Aggregate output is sustained, but individual incomes are held down, and pressure on public servicessurges. Prosperity, at the level of the citizen, shows little sign of advance.

The Soviet Union also reported impressive aggregate figures. It produced steel, coal, cars and aircraft in quantities that appeared formidable. What it struggled to producewas prosperity that registered in everyday life.

Britain has not quite reached Soviet levels of economic stasis. It is, however, moving towards a situation where aggregate scale obscures individual stagnation. The headline number remains large. The gains attached to it are increasingly slight.

Headline figures sound impressive and serve a certain propagandistic purpose. They can be reported, reiterated and defended. But they also flatter and conceal, even as the substance beneath them becomes harder to detect in ordinary life.

The Lanyardklatura

The Soviet system relied on the nomenklatura: a class of administrators, almost all members of the Communist Party, who controlled access to positions, resources and advancement, deriving their authority not from market success but from institutional placement.

Britain has developed its own analogue in what has been termed the lanyard class or lanyardocracy. In short, this consists of the managerial state – civil servants, regulators, compliance officers, diversity leads and policy specialists. It forms a self-reinforcing group, protected from many of the pressures that affect those outside it. Much of its activity produces little or nothing of real value. They are “bullshit jobs” as the late David Graeber put it.

The rise of the managerial, or regulatory state, as theorists from James Burnhamonwards have noted, does not depend on conspiracy or design. The steady expansion of administrative functions creates, as a matter of course, a constituency with a direct interest in its continuation and extension.

The ubiquitous rainbow lanyard is not merely an accessory but a signal of inclusionwithin this system, indicating proximity to decision-making and a degree of insulation from the uncertainties that govern other forms of employment.

The significance of this British translation of the nomenklatura lies in the conversion of power into polite processes of guidance, compliance and “consultation exercises”. Decision-making and institutional authority shift away from price signals and dispersed knowledge toward administrative process and bureaucratic yardsticks. Rules multiply, not because they are needed, but because the production of rules becomes the system’s primary activity.

In such an environment, success is defined administratively. Targets are met, compliance is recorded, processes are followed. Whether these correspond to improved outcomes or productivity becomes a secondary question, as the target itself becomes the criteria for success, not its real-world effects. The system thus becomes legible to itself, even as it becomes less responsive to those it is meant to serve.

The Soviet nomenklatura functioned within an explicitly ideological order. The British version operates under the language of confected institutional neutrality. The result, though, is similar: a governing layer that answers upwards, maintains its own procedures and measures success by its ability to reproduce them.

Five-year plans, fifty-year projects

The Soviet economy was characterised by central planning that was all-encompassing, yet chronically inaccurate and inefficient. Targets were set, revised and missed. At the same time, what it lacked in precision, it compensated for by actually getting things done. Canals were dug, railways laid, and factories built, often inefficiently, but built, nonetheless.

Britain does not operate a formal planning apparatus of that kind. It has, however, come to rely increasingly on not dissimilar central targets, strategic frameworks and regulatory interventions. The Net Zero Strategy is a prime example. Taken together, they approximate to a form of indirect, and of course unceasingly inept, planning.

Across housing, energy and industrial policy, the same sequence repeats itself. Targets are announced and missed, policies are introduced and revised, strategies are launched and then replaced. Each initiative arrives framed in the language of coordination and purpose. Each runs into the same difficulty: the constant failure to translate intention into delivery.

Here, ironically, even the contrast with the USSR is unflattering. The Soviet system,rightly criticised for coercion and inefficiency, was at least capable of bringing large projects to completion. The British version, operating through regulations, review and procedural constraint, exhibits the opposite tendency: delays, endless consultations, slow-moving planning processes, endemic cost overruns, often before a brick is laid.

The record speaks plainly enough. A third runway at Heathrow has been under discussion for more than 50 years without resolution. High-speed rail between London and Birmingham has absorbed tens of billions – now exceeding £30 billion – while proposing to deliver only a portion of what was originally promised.

The British version of Sovietisation produces a patchwork of interventions administered by overlapping authorities with shifting priorities. This is not planning in the Soviet sense. It is something more diffuse: a system in which targets multiply, outcomes recede and intervention continues without conclusion.

Soviet planning was inefficient but productive. Ours is efficient only at preventing production.

Fix the symptom, create the shortage

One of the more revealing developments in recent years has been the reappearance of price controls, usually introduced under more agreeable names.

In the UK, the energy price cap has become a permanent feature rather than an emergency measure. Rent controls, long regarded as economically illiterate, have returned to policy discussions and political platforms. Proposals to limit food priceshave surfaced periodically in response to inflation, particularly during the recent cost-of-living pressures. These are no longer fringe ideas. They are part of the policy mainstream.

The effects are neither novel nor difficult to trace. Rent controls in Scotland have coincided with a contraction in available rental supply and a withdrawal of landlords from the market. The energy price cap has required repeated adjustment and, at points, large-scale public subsidy to prevent supplier collapse. In each case, the initial intervention has required subsequent correction. Government tinkering with social pricing and renewables indexation have been described as “redistribution by stealth”.

The Soviet system relied on administered prices as a matter of course, with predictable results: shortages, misallocation and the growth of parallel markets. Britain’s measures are more limited, but they operate under the same constraint. Prices transmit information about scarcity. When they are suppressed, that information does not disappear. It reappears elsewhere, in reduced supply, delayed investment, or fiscal cost.

Sovietisation, by other means

To sum up: the Soviet economic system is often described as dysfunctional. In fact, it delivered what it was organised to deliver: administrative control, reported output and a degree of stability, even as the underlying economy weakened.

The British system exhibits a comparable divergence. It is effective at generating compliance, sustaining administrative structures and redistributing resources. It is less effective at producing growth, improving services or raising productivity.

The explanation lies in incentives. Organisations respond to what is measured. Individuals respond to what is rewarded. As the late Charlie Munger used to say: “show me the incentive, I’ll show you the outcome”. When advancement depends on meeting targets, targets are met. When performance is defined administratively, effort shifts toward what can be recorded rather than what must be produced.

The same incentive structure explains why such systems continue long after their shortcomings are understood. Soviet institutions reproduced themselves because they defined success in their own terms and allocated advancement accordingly. There was no internal mechanism that compelled correction, even when the gap between reported performance and actual output became obvious.

Britain now exhibits the same tendency. Administrative systems expand, define their own metrics and validate themselves against those measures. Programmes are revised, targets adjusted and results reported in forms that remain legible within the system, even when the underlying outcomes do not improve.

The targets are met, the figures are reported, and, as ever, the grain harvest looks excellent on paper, comrade.

Eddie Chaloner is a retired consultant surgeon, currently undertaking postgraduate studies at King’s College London. Michael Rainsborough is Professor Strategic Theory and Director of the Centre for Future Defence and National Security, Canberra.