I’m coming to the depressing conclusion that democracy itself is broken and the only thing that keeps it hanging on is that it’s the least bad of all systems we have.
Everywhere I look there are vested interest groups which make reform impossible. Pensions, social care, housing, welfare, civil service reform, education, immigration, birth rates, the NHS, all have significant voting blocks which are increasingly difficult to form a government or run the country without but make any sort of reform next to impossible. We’re like a car that has lost its breaks and has its accelerator jammed to the floor. The only way to stop is to crash.
As someone whose formative political years were spent railing against the ideological graveyard which the end of history seemed to have inaugurated, I’ve always been opposed to technocratic governance but the system seems to lost all ability to self correct. As one of my least favourite people, Jean-Claude Juncker candidly said “We all know what to do, we just don’t know how to get re-elected once we’ve done it.” I fear now he may have been right. We have accumulated rights far beyond the merits of our responsibilities but this does not matter when we can vote out anyone who would have the temerity to point this out to us.
I dislike the notion of rule by treasury spread sheet and mathematical formula determining our worth but I don’t see how we can continue with a system where we continually vote to take out more than we put in but are enabled to do so by an electoral system which incentivises us to demand precisely that. We are far poorer than we believe but this revelation will only become apparent once our debts become un-payable, likely to those who played very little role in accumulating them. Our political parties are designed only to win elections, not to competently govern.
I once laughed when my mother in law suggested the best course of action to secure yourself against the future was to buy gold and bury it in the garden. Now I might just go get my shovel.
Can you imagine any politician in Europe today being this honest with the population, never mind the population being adult enough to realise that some serious decisions had to be made ?
We’ve all become like ‘Les Froggies’ who invariably vote for radical change and then go on the rampage to stop any of it happening.
The only thing people want to hear is more and more, faster and faster, while half the population in fact gets poorer and less secure anyway.
I think you’re right; the whole system will have to crash for anybody to take any of the difficult decisions that would be required.
It’s like an end-of-life patient that’s constantly kept alive for just that bit longer to no great purpose, guzzling more and more of the dwindling resources. MAID, anyone ?
That’s exactly what will happen and we will be back in 1979 by the end of their term. I was 15 when Margaret Thatcher was elected and from the perspective of a teenager her message of change looked better than any other option, who will be the new Thatcher and from which party?
I was a bit behind you but thought the same (horrors of the miners strikes aside). My Dad was put out of work by endless strikes and secondary picketing in the 1970’s and had to do a career change to get away from it. I think the UK is on a path to severe failure that will maybe be worse than the 1970’s, and this time we have nothing to privatise in order to pretend to still be wealthy. Whether there will be a Thatcher type of revolution who knows. I’ve this month been contemplating that with the income to house prices ratio I might have to change my pension plans and work to 70 to help the children out. Times like these I stick the middle finger up or laugh when I hear the MOD Walt’s in the media wittering on about conscription lately. The country is a basket case that nobody is going to stand up and fight for. You could fit the Mississippi in the gap between the government/state and the average citizen.
Christopher Chantrill
2 months ago
This is not that hard. Check my ukpublicspending.co.uk. Britain spent 45 percent of GDP on government last year. Public Pensions: 8% GDP; NHS: 9% GDP; Social Services: 6% GDP.
I say that the modern state is Jobs for Educated Gentry, and neo-slavery for everyone else.
Here in Yankland we have a saying from Apollo 13: Houston, we have a problem.
I rather think that in the U.K. a State monopoly is rationing healthcare through a broken NHS. One might call it levelling down. Just for example compare U.K. cancer survival rates with other OECD nations .
Paul Ten
2 months ago
‘Post-Brexit malaise.’ Oh dear. I nearly stopped reading there, though to be fair there are a few passing references to other issues near the end of the article. Brexit was itself the biggest decision about who governs Britain since 1974. Time to stop tying all our current problems implicitly or explicitly to Brexit. It’s just boring now.
Britain was never truly in IMO. The disparity between our somewhat vague pay to play legal system and mainstream Europe’s more one law for all set up caused friction. The very visible difference is our need to allow the wealthy and powerful to remain unaccountable to laws that apply to the general population, but the details at the sharp end are ofetn unseen and unreported. EG – Horsemeat with meds found in food chain: EU response – big jail time and uncapped fines for culprits. Blair response – passports for horses. There are 1000s of such examples from car parts to food produce. Often serialised in tabloids as “Rip-Off Britain”. Posher commentators harp on about Roman v Common Law – but UKs common law looks a lot like the Kanun i Lec from tribal Albania – meaning its very old, often not written down and when it is its largely gibberish!
The failure of our political system to firstly enact the democratically expressed will of the people and then, when it finally did, to look to exploit the benefits rather than find ways to say “we told you so” has had and still has a profound effect on why the wider population is so disenchanted with all parties and the system as a whole.
Since Brexit the EU has shown time and again what a rotten institution it is and how it has no real interest in delivering the best outcomes for the people of Europe. Whilst Britain’s post Brexit malaise is real and responsible in many ways for the way things are here now, the EU’s malaise was there well before Brexit and the downward trend continues. The problem for the people of Europe is it is really hard to see a way out for them, thank god we never joined the Euro.
Not just boring. By affirming that Brexit is the most decisive event in the past 30 years, the author betrays a Remainer’s habitual (sad) obsession – and blindness to the true reasons for our current protracted decline and poor governance. The Blair Revolution from 97 – alligned carefully with the emergence of a new Federal EU Big Daddy – recast everything in the 90s. We are witnessing the fruits of the New Progressive State which the (sad) Fake Tories gleefully signed up too. A dismantled enfeebled Executive has been usurped by a vast permanent Regulatory Technocracy (NMIs like Bank of England and OBR), and a new Higher Caste of European and Human Rights obssessed (and Supreme) Lawyers and the chaos of devolution. A Windfalling interventionist Anti Risk high tax State indifferent to the needs of enterprise and whose crass regulators have shattered both the savings and pension industry and the health of the City. Then comes their love of the heroin of mass uncontrolled immigration which has twisted social cohesion and crashed the public sector/NHS . Add in the recent Lockdown insanity (way bigger than Brexit) and their imbibing the EU’s climate and Net Zero hysteria and we find that it is this grim collective of deeply rooted 20 and 30 year old structural problems – in housing energy labour markets – that has sped the good ship Britannia onto the rocks. By 2016 the collision was already set. You cannot fix 30 year problems in a Parliament. Hence the paralysis in both political parties and the same public despair as was felt in 1974.
This photo of Keir Starmer keeps popping up on UnHerd articles – it reminds me of something/someone and I can’t quite put my finger on it. I think it might be Weed from Bill & Ben the Flowerpot Men.
Who governs? The WEF.
The government, whoever it is, cannot do anything without investment, so it is beholden to the billionaires. The next government, economically, will look like this government.
Yes and Liz Truss’s ousting by market forces proved this.
If we want true sovereignty we need to take back control of our currency and our capital. Limit the free movement of capital and bring monetary decisions back within the remit of government.
People do not know it yet but it’s not the EU, human rights, woke academic institutions, the BBC etc. that they dislike but rather the post-war economic liberal era shaped to America’s interests.
If you don’t agree with this it is only because you are scared to truly have control. And if you think this is all too high a price to pay for sovereignty then you are just as bad as any globalist liberal who is willing to sacrifice freedom and power for easy weak comfort.
R Wright
2 months ago
Can we stop pretending elected politicians run the United Kingdom? Your average High Court judge or senior civil servant has more political power than half of the cabinet combined.
You cannot avoid the fact that a powerful administrative class is needed to run any sizeable modern nation. American right-wing journalist James Burnham explored the subject in detail decades ago in his influential book The Managerial Revolution. Burnham believed that ‘managerialism’ rather than socialism was the new post WW2 world order.
Correct! But now we can see the downsides of the supposedly modern neutral technocrat Mangerialist system. A now stale closed and detached state funded bureaucracy is easily infected by first corporate lobbying, then by new statist progressive ideological groupthink (DEI anti meritocracy and now degrowth Net Zero Pol Potism) which spread chaos. As with the CCP in Soviet Union and modern day China, the Managerialist grow to realise they are a Higher Caste, a new Class, impervious and now hostile to the grubby people (who threaten their property wealth with ideas like Brexit). The Managerialist Revolution has failed.
If only it had failed.
Instead it has grown into a monstrous entity and the real source of power in the world. If you are not part of the degree educated managerial class you’re just little people.
In order to join the system there is now a whole Woke creed to which one must, at the very least, pay lip-service. With soul-searching moral demands (confess to your unconscious bias, check your privilege) it looks more like the pre-reformation Catholic Church than the Soviet Union.
We agree about the clerisy. It has failed US as it prospers. It has failed the nation state and people. The fact that its power is permanent and growinv means our suffering will be protracted.
You can argue that once Ministers refused to resign (or stay resigned) for failures ‘on their watch’ then the responsibility of our elected representatives has been cast aside.
N Satori
2 months ago
Broxton quotes the former Labour MP Woodrow Wyatt:
Parliament is an increasingly irrelevant charade, a repository of illusions and a graveyard of talents that is culpably out of touch with the complex needs of modern society.
All very grand but some of us who lived through the dismal mid-1970s actually remember that dubious and hypocritical MP (and journalist) Woodrow Wyatt – the original “champagne socialist” fond of hobnobbing with the gentry.
On the subject of Till Death Us Do Part:
…rooted in the politics of the age with each episode set against heated debates between Alf and his socialist son-in-law about the future of Britain.
let’s not forget that the actor chappy playing the son-in-law was Cherrie Blair’s dad.
William Cameron
2 months ago
Labour get elected. ” Gosh we didnt know things were this bad” – “so we cannot do what we promised”.
Economically Britain is at the mercy of forces it cannot control and no other country can either. That will however not stop the political parties from lying and claiming they do have the answer. Both will make promises in their manifestos to spend more on certain things based on an assumed level of growth. When that growth does not materialise, both will renege on those promises because they have to.
It is therefore the differences in approach to cultural issues that should be the real discerning factor, as that is what will have made the most difference to our lives by 2029 when we come to do it all again. The Tory record is one of cowardice and being asleep at the wheel, but what Starmer promises is truly frightening. He has his own strange beliefs, which he will look to impose on us all, but more frighteningly his party is so in thrall to all the dark forces of woke that as soon as Labour gains power, most likely with a significant majority, the radical social justice ideologues will run amok.
A D Kent
2 months ago
Heath’s curtailing of the power of trade unions and handing some of ours to Brussels essentially amounted to the same thing and the upshot of both were a transfer of wealth upwards. It was around this time that the link between rising productivity and wages was broken. It was about this time that the percentage of GDP that went to wages started to decline – from around 60% to now less than 50%.
The government stepped back from any kind of mediating role between the interests of Capital and Labour and essentially took a side. They did so on the basis of economic fairytales of rational actors and free-markets, everything buttressed by clever curves, playschool analogies and a fundamental misunderstanding of money and its creation. From this everything else has followed because markets..
It is now true that There Is No Alternative – because our Establishment mediates against anyone with the courage to prove otherwise. Until everyone who has ever even applied for a PPE degree or an MBA is removed from government (and ideally public life entirely) nothing will change. Governments and states are not shops, their not households, their not PLCs.
Truss’s childish laisse-faire holiday was just a step too far for our Neoliberal Establishment.
Ethniciodo Rodenydo
2 months ago
Alf Garnett’s son in-law was played by Tony Booth, father to one Cherrie Blair.
Now call me a conspiracy theorist but……..
I’m coming to the depressing conclusion that democracy itself is broken and the only thing that keeps it hanging on is that it’s the least bad of all systems we have.
Everywhere I look there are vested interest groups which make reform impossible. Pensions, social care, housing, welfare, civil service reform, education, immigration, birth rates, the NHS, all have significant voting blocks which are increasingly difficult to form a government or run the country without but make any sort of reform next to impossible. We’re like a car that has lost its breaks and has its accelerator jammed to the floor. The only way to stop is to crash.
As someone whose formative political years were spent railing against the ideological graveyard which the end of history seemed to have inaugurated, I’ve always been opposed to technocratic governance but the system seems to lost all ability to self correct. As one of my least favourite people, Jean-Claude Juncker candidly said “We all know what to do, we just don’t know how to get re-elected once we’ve done it.” I fear now he may have been right. We have accumulated rights far beyond the merits of our responsibilities but this does not matter when we can vote out anyone who would have the temerity to point this out to us.
I dislike the notion of rule by treasury spread sheet and mathematical formula determining our worth but I don’t see how we can continue with a system where we continually vote to take out more than we put in but are enabled to do so by an electoral system which incentivises us to demand precisely that. We are far poorer than we believe but this revelation will only become apparent once our debts become un-payable, likely to those who played very little role in accumulating them. Our political parties are designed only to win elections, not to competently govern.
I once laughed when my mother in law suggested the best course of action to secure yourself against the future was to buy gold and bury it in the garden. Now I might just go get my shovel.
“We are all going to have a pretty tough time”.
Can you imagine any politician in Europe today being this honest with the population, never mind the population being adult enough to realise that some serious decisions had to be made ?
We’ve all become like ‘Les Froggies’ who invariably vote for radical change and then go on the rampage to stop any of it happening.
The only thing people want to hear is more and more, faster and faster, while half the population in fact gets poorer and less secure anyway.
I think you’re right; the whole system will have to crash for anybody to take any of the difficult decisions that would be required.
It’s like an end-of-life patient that’s constantly kept alive for just that bit longer to no great purpose, guzzling more and more of the dwindling resources. MAID, anyone ?
Bitcoin doing better than gold. Detectorist gangs will dig up your garden
That’s exactly what will happen and we will be back in 1979 by the end of their term. I was 15 when Margaret Thatcher was elected and from the perspective of a teenager her message of change looked better than any other option, who will be the new Thatcher and from which party?
I was a bit behind you but thought the same (horrors of the miners strikes aside). My Dad was put out of work by endless strikes and secondary picketing in the 1970’s and had to do a career change to get away from it. I think the UK is on a path to severe failure that will maybe be worse than the 1970’s, and this time we have nothing to privatise in order to pretend to still be wealthy. Whether there will be a Thatcher type of revolution who knows. I’ve this month been contemplating that with the income to house prices ratio I might have to change my pension plans and work to 70 to help the children out. Times like these I stick the middle finger up or laugh when I hear the MOD Walt’s in the media wittering on about conscription lately. The country is a basket case that nobody is going to stand up and fight for. You could fit the Mississippi in the gap between the government/state and the average citizen.
This is not that hard. Check my ukpublicspending.co.uk. Britain spent 45 percent of GDP on government last year. Public Pensions: 8% GDP; NHS: 9% GDP; Social Services: 6% GDP.
I say that the modern state is Jobs for Educated Gentry, and neo-slavery for everyone else.
Here in Yankland we have a saying from Apollo 13: Houston, we have a problem.
I believe you yanks spend over double that on healthcare (17%), sounds like the Brits are trying to do it on the cheap
I rather think that in the U.K. a State monopoly is rationing healthcare through a broken NHS. One might call it levelling down. Just for example compare U.K. cancer survival rates with other OECD nations .
‘Post-Brexit malaise.’ Oh dear. I nearly stopped reading there, though to be fair there are a few passing references to other issues near the end of the article. Brexit was itself the biggest decision about who governs Britain since 1974. Time to stop tying all our current problems implicitly or explicitly to Brexit. It’s just boring now.
Quite right! Whatever your views on Brexit, Britain is out, and it is not going back anytime soon! Best to come to terms with that!
Britain was never truly in IMO. The disparity between our somewhat vague pay to play legal system and mainstream Europe’s more one law for all set up caused friction. The very visible difference is our need to allow the wealthy and powerful to remain unaccountable to laws that apply to the general population, but the details at the sharp end are ofetn unseen and unreported. EG – Horsemeat with meds found in food chain: EU response – big jail time and uncapped fines for culprits. Blair response – passports for horses. There are 1000s of such examples from car parts to food produce. Often serialised in tabloids as “Rip-Off Britain”. Posher commentators harp on about Roman v Common Law – but UKs common law looks a lot like the Kanun i Lec from tribal Albania – meaning its very old, often not written down and when it is its largely gibberish!
The failure of our political system to firstly enact the democratically expressed will of the people and then, when it finally did, to look to exploit the benefits rather than find ways to say “we told you so” has had and still has a profound effect on why the wider population is so disenchanted with all parties and the system as a whole.
Since Brexit the EU has shown time and again what a rotten institution it is and how it has no real interest in delivering the best outcomes for the people of Europe. Whilst Britain’s post Brexit malaise is real and responsible in many ways for the way things are here now, the EU’s malaise was there well before Brexit and the downward trend continues. The problem for the people of Europe is it is really hard to see a way out for them, thank god we never joined the Euro.
Not just boring. By affirming that Brexit is the most decisive event in the past 30 years, the author betrays a Remainer’s habitual (sad) obsession – and blindness to the true reasons for our current protracted decline and poor governance. The Blair Revolution from 97 – alligned carefully with the emergence of a new Federal EU Big Daddy – recast everything in the 90s. We are witnessing the fruits of the New Progressive State which the (sad) Fake Tories gleefully signed up too. A dismantled enfeebled Executive has been usurped by a vast permanent Regulatory Technocracy (NMIs like Bank of England and OBR), and a new Higher Caste of European and Human Rights obssessed (and Supreme) Lawyers and the chaos of devolution. A Windfalling interventionist Anti Risk high tax State indifferent to the needs of enterprise and whose crass regulators have shattered both the savings and pension industry and the health of the City. Then comes their love of the heroin of mass uncontrolled immigration which has twisted social cohesion and crashed the public sector/NHS . Add in the recent Lockdown insanity (way bigger than Brexit) and their imbibing the EU’s climate and Net Zero hysteria and we find that it is this grim collective of deeply rooted 20 and 30 year old structural problems – in housing energy labour markets – that has sped the good ship Britannia onto the rocks. By 2016 the collision was already set. You cannot fix 30 year problems in a Parliament. Hence the paralysis in both political parties and the same public despair as was felt in 1974.
Blair was merely a continuation of Thatcher
This photo of Keir Starmer keeps popping up on UnHerd articles – it reminds me of something/someone and I can’t quite put my finger on it. I think it might be Weed from Bill & Ben the Flowerpot Men.
Flobberpop.
Who governs? The WEF.
The government, whoever it is, cannot do anything without investment, so it is beholden to the billionaires. The next government, economically, will look like this government.
Yes and Liz Truss’s ousting by market forces proved this.
If we want true sovereignty we need to take back control of our currency and our capital. Limit the free movement of capital and bring monetary decisions back within the remit of government.
People do not know it yet but it’s not the EU, human rights, woke academic institutions, the BBC etc. that they dislike but rather the post-war economic liberal era shaped to America’s interests.
If you don’t agree with this it is only because you are scared to truly have control. And if you think this is all too high a price to pay for sovereignty then you are just as bad as any globalist liberal who is willing to sacrifice freedom and power for easy weak comfort.
Can we stop pretending elected politicians run the United Kingdom? Your average High Court judge or senior civil servant has more political power than half of the cabinet combined.
You cannot avoid the fact that a powerful administrative class is needed to run any sizeable modern nation. American right-wing journalist James Burnham explored the subject in detail decades ago in his influential book The Managerial Revolution. Burnham believed that ‘managerialism’ rather than socialism was the new post WW2 world order.
We used to run the colonies including India with a staff about the size of Rutland County Council.
And now there ars as many civil servants in the MoD as soldiers in the army.
That’s true, but the colonial state then essentially did very little.
Correct! But now we can see the downsides of the supposedly modern neutral technocrat Mangerialist system. A now stale closed and detached state funded bureaucracy is easily infected by first corporate lobbying, then by new statist progressive ideological groupthink (DEI anti meritocracy and now degrowth Net Zero Pol Potism) which spread chaos. As with the CCP in Soviet Union and modern day China, the Managerialist grow to realise they are a Higher Caste, a new Class, impervious and now hostile to the grubby people (who threaten their property wealth with ideas like Brexit). The Managerialist Revolution has failed.
If only it had failed.
Instead it has grown into a monstrous entity and the real source of power in the world. If you are not part of the degree educated managerial class you’re just little people.
In order to join the system there is now a whole Woke creed to which one must, at the very least, pay lip-service. With soul-searching moral demands (confess to your unconscious bias, check your privilege) it looks more like the pre-reformation Catholic Church than the Soviet Union.
We agree about the clerisy. It has failed US as it prospers. It has failed the nation state and people. The fact that its power is permanent and growinv means our suffering will be protracted.
You can argue that once Ministers refused to resign (or stay resigned) for failures ‘on their watch’ then the responsibility of our elected representatives has been cast aside.
Broxton quotes the former Labour MP Woodrow Wyatt:
All very grand but some of us who lived through the dismal mid-1970s actually remember that dubious and hypocritical MP (and journalist) Woodrow Wyatt – the original “champagne socialist” fond of hobnobbing with the gentry.
On the subject of Till Death Us Do Part:
let’s not forget that the actor chappy playing the son-in-law was Cherrie Blair’s dad.
Labour get elected. ” Gosh we didnt know things were this bad” – “so we cannot do what we promised”.
So true! They’re all the same!
Economically Britain is at the mercy of forces it cannot control and no other country can either. That will however not stop the political parties from lying and claiming they do have the answer. Both will make promises in their manifestos to spend more on certain things based on an assumed level of growth. When that growth does not materialise, both will renege on those promises because they have to.
It is therefore the differences in approach to cultural issues that should be the real discerning factor, as that is what will have made the most difference to our lives by 2029 when we come to do it all again. The Tory record is one of cowardice and being asleep at the wheel, but what Starmer promises is truly frightening. He has his own strange beliefs, which he will look to impose on us all, but more frighteningly his party is so in thrall to all the dark forces of woke that as soon as Labour gains power, most likely with a significant majority, the radical social justice ideologues will run amok.
Heath’s curtailing of the power of trade unions and handing some of ours to Brussels essentially amounted to the same thing and the upshot of both were a transfer of wealth upwards. It was around this time that the link between rising productivity and wages was broken. It was about this time that the percentage of GDP that went to wages started to decline – from around 60% to now less than 50%.
The government stepped back from any kind of mediating role between the interests of Capital and Labour and essentially took a side. They did so on the basis of economic fairytales of rational actors and free-markets, everything buttressed by clever curves, playschool analogies and a fundamental misunderstanding of money and its creation. From this everything else has followed because markets..
It is now true that There Is No Alternative – because our Establishment mediates against anyone with the courage to prove otherwise. Until everyone who has ever even applied for a PPE degree or an MBA is removed from government (and ideally public life entirely) nothing will change. Governments and states are not shops, their not households, their not PLCs.
Truss’s childish laisse-faire holiday was just a step too far for our Neoliberal Establishment.
Alf Garnett’s son in-law was played by Tony Booth, father to one Cherrie Blair.
Now call me a conspiracy theorist but……..