'You who live after us, do not harden your hearts against us.' Christopher Furlong / Getty Images
There’s a poignant epigraph in Hilary Mantel’s final book, The Mirror & the Light. “Brother men,” it reads, “you who live after us, do not harden your hearts against us.”
Right now, it feels particularly difficult not to harden our hearts to the governments of our recent past. Layer upon layer of political failure has consolidated into a deep rock of mismanagement which grows more obdurate by every passing generation. Britain is just so bleak: the sense of decay and neglect is palpable across the country. Everyone knows something is fundamentally off; that things are out of kilter.
Was anyone really that surprised by the report published earlier this week which found parts of Birmingham and the North East are now among the poorest places in Europe? You only have to walk around these places to know they are profoundly poor.
During my last trip to Birmingham, the city of my birth, I watched a group of Bayern Munich fans wandering aimlessly through the town ahead of the match against Aston Villa. What were they making of our second city as they compared it with their German home-town? Britain must have seemed so much poorer. This wasn’t because of anything dramatic — boarded up shops or jarring poverty — just an unmistakable feel.
The city’s problems run particularly deep, of course: failures of local government exacerbating failures of national Government. I’ve been reading David Lodge’s Nice Work, set in the depressed Birmingham of the Thatcher years. What is so striking about that novel, written almost four decades ago, is just how relevant it remains. That sense of decline and neglect captured by Lodge in 1988 has, if anything, only become worse.
Governments have come and gone, new ideas have been tried, grand promises made. And yet, here we are, Birmingham among the poorest places in Europe, a failing city at the heart of England: once Tory, then Labour and then Tory once again, but now, potentially, Reform. It should be no surprise that Nigel Farage chose the city for his party’s “BIGGEST Event Yet” last night.
But as deep as Birmingham’s problems go, they are far from unique — and it is this which goes at least some way to explain the national popularity of Reform in the polls. Even in London, which cannot be said to be a failing city in any real sense, there is now a sense of listlessness and decay in the air. As someone recently said to me, “It feels defeated.” London gambled on globalisation before 2008, and now, like the rest of the country, seems lost.
Everything here seems to be out of sync. What were once seen as basic life expectations have become aspirational luxuries; three-bed semis, family doctors, functioning A&Es, pleasant town centres and simple family holidays. Those jobs that once guaranteed a comfortable standard of life and status, no longer do: teaching and medicine, social work and military service. A friend of mine calls this the crisis of the “downwardly mobile professionals” — the DMPs or dumpies. These are not the “left behinds” of lore, but the quietly seething dumped upon, unsure who or what is to blame, but aware that something is wrong.
Who should the dumpies blame? In one sense, it’s easy: the Tories. There is a strong empirical case that the government from 2010-2024 was the worst in Britain’s post war history; a period of rule almost entirely without merit. Not only did the Conservative Party leave office with taxes at record highs but public services were at record lows and people’s living standards had barely improved since they took power. The country’s prisons were full, its military power reduced, its police forces cut and utility companies disgraced. Heathrow was not given its third runway, HS2 was not finished, the Northern Powerhouse was abandoned, and old-age care left to rot. The failure is almost impressive in its totality. Not a single prime minister or senior figure from this period emerges with credit: from David Cameron to Rishi Sunak via Theresa May, Boris Johnson and the Liz Truss moment.
Such is the Tory record, it is fanciful to think Badenoch might have turned things around in the short time she has been limply in charge of the party. Yet, brother man, for the sake of honesty, we should not harden our hearts too much. The Tory record is disastrous, but it was book-ended by crises beyond even its own ineptitude. No one serious can account for the years of Tory failure without acknowledging the crash of 2008 and the pandemic of 2020. We continue to live with the seismic consequences of those two events, as well as the stains of the 2016 Brexit crisis, which Cameron, May and Johnson cannot so easily wash from their hands.
But things go even deeper. It is not possible to travel around the UK without seeing not only the failures of the last period of Tory rule, but also the failed promise of the Blairite years of plenty before that, and the epoch of upheaval under Thatcher before Blair and Major. Andrew O’Brien, from the Council for National Resilience, has calculated that in 1975, when Thatcher became Tory leader, the country was spending around £19 billion a year in today’s prices on support for nationalised industries and employment programmes. Today, we are spending £41 billion on unemployment assistance alone. We have few nationalised industries ensuring that the essentials of advanced economic life — like steel — are produced in Britain.
Given our current predicament, O’Brien believes it would be sensible for the Government to abandon decades of Treasury orthodoxy and begin subsidising British industry all over again. That we are even contemplating such things is telling. Old answers no longer make much sense. The country today is walking around in a daze, like those Bayern Munich fans, dimly aware that something isn’t right, but unaware how to fix it.
All certainties are gone. In the Conservative Party, the children who worship at Thatcher’s feet have suddenly found their assumptions turn to dust. The transatlantic alliance, which was the alternative to Europe, is crumbling along with America’s commitment to free trade. What, then, is supposed to take its place? The Labour Party, meanwhile, has inherited a state which does not work in the way it assumed; it is unable to deliver either the improvements in public services or the economic growth necessary to begin to shift the malaise which is powering Reform into contention at the next election.
And yet, even Reform — Westminster’s disruptors — still cling to old Thatcherite orthodoxies which no longer make sense in a world where Trump and Putin hold sway and national resilience is the key, not just nationalism.
The failures of four decades have combined in this moment of profound national malaise. But Mantel’s plea for the compassion of future generations, contains a profound truth about life — and politics. It is too easy for us to pass judgement on those who made decisions in the past. Who, though, has the political bravery to try something new today? We should not harden our hearts to those who fail, only to those who never bother trying.
Tom McTague is UnHerd’s Political Editor. He is the author of Between the Waves: The Hidden History of a Very British Revolution 1945-2016, due to be published in September 2025
TomMcTague 
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
SubscribeThere is a lot wrong with the UK, but I’ll go with economic policy. The article states the Blair years were ones of plenty, but they were not – they were years of running up debt, in both the public sector and households (mostly because house prices rose so dramatically, requiring ever bigger mortgages). It looked like a time of plenty but it was no different to someone spending excessively on the credit card looking like they are wealthy.
Since 2008 we have, collectively, been trying to pay that credit card off and just like someone who suddenly has to pay off their credit card debt, we have become poor. Or some of us have – many became wealthy during the Blair years and those having to pay off the debt are not the people responsible for it.
And yet the Bank of England barely even gets a mention. It used to be said the Governor of the BoE’s job was to remove the punch bowl just as the party was getting going. The problem is that since 97, and especially since 9/11, they chose to spike the punchbowl instead. And the problem today is that given the slightest chance they will spike what is left of the punch again.
However, I do not see anyone even acknowledging the issue really. Trump and Farage have some flickers of understanding but they do not seem to have the whole picture. I have been hoping for a revolutionary, Thatcher-like figure for nearly 20 years now but I see little sign of one appearing.
We defaulted on our US debt repayments in 1934, thus we have ‘form’ as an undischarged bankrupt.
So why not again? After all it’s our grandchildren who shall have to pick up the pieces, not us.
Still blowing that one around, are you. Only part of the story, again.
Quite right, Mark. The other countries who defaulted on their way debt to us (for even larger sums) left us unable to pay the Americans.
Didn’t seem to hold them back much though. The debtors who defaulted on us did derail us somewhat more severely…
I agree Dennis; Debt is the killer and the new “normal”.
Making borrowing normal, usual and easy means we can buy “stuff” we cannot afford. This keeps up a veneer of wealth that is illusory. But it does allow GDP and things to seem good. Manufacturers do well selling stuff on the lam. We (all, me included) enjoy things we can’t really afford, we remain complacent and are bought off with distractions. The winners are those who control the debt, no one else in my view, not manufacturers long term nor individuals and families.
The chasm between the haves and have not gets wider, the poor are kept quiet with hand outs of borrowed money, the better off are kept quiet with trinkets bought with borrowed money or serviced with the illusory asset price rises.
Bought and sold; all of us.
Bang on
Completely unsustainable and doomed to sudden and uncontrollable collapse
It is worse than that. If you go into debt to buy products, you might stimulate actual growth because you stimulate jobs and, hopefully, innovation eventually. However, most household debt is used to buy a house, which usually produces almost nothing since in many cases it was already there. In fact, house prices are pushed by how much can be borrowed in the first place, and banks are fundamentally in the business of selling credit. If their underlying assets appreciate in value they are more likely to lend out more as well. So you borrow more because asset prices go up and the more asset prices go up, the more you can borrow. What could go wrong?
Underpinning that seems to that no political party dares give the electorate bad news, dares to tell them that they have been living beyond their means (in all manner of ways) and that the party is over.
Churchill said “The British nation is unique in this respect: they are the only people who like to be told how bad things are, who like to be told the worst.”
If it was ever true it is no longer. Anyway Churchill was an a*se and one of the guilty men who are responsible for our current malaise.
Underpinning that seems to that no political party dares give the electorate bad news, dares to tell them that they have been living beyond their means (in all manner of ways) and that the party is over.
Churchill said “The British nation is unique in this respect: they are the only people who like to be told how bad things are, who like to be told the worst.”
If it was ever true it is no longer. Anyway Churchill was an a*se and one of the guilty men who are responsible for our current malaise.
Debt is fatal. Freedom from it is the breath of life. Here I got lucky, if a little smug, remembering my long dead grandmother’s words “Neither a borrower nor a lender be”.
In 1997, living in South East Asia, I had problems with the rental on my house in Twickenham and sold it to be free of the mortgage. Shortly afterwards the Asian crisis allowed me to use the proceeds to buy properties there and start a business on the cheap. I’ve never borrowed for expansion or for buying further property, preferring organic debt-free growth. It’s limited my drawings but the peace of mind over nearly 30 years has been absolutely worth it. Without question. Not easy to transfer a lesson like this to a national government of course but suggestions welcomed.
But the advantage of borrowing to spend is that the costs of borrowing are going up and our credit rating is going down. Already a huge amount of money is spent simply servicing the INTEREST on the debt, let alone getting out of debt. (Plenty more than is spent on defence and research combined.) This is a recipe for disaster but Reeves, once she established herself as in favour of securonomics, has rapidly reverted to the time honoured policy of tax and spend.
I really don’t understand why the British keep putting Thatcher on a pedestal and then go on to complain about the problems that basically started with her. Am I missing something? Not saying that everything she did was wrong. But selling off state assets, offshoring productive industry, producing private debt/credit bubbles and turning the economy into an international London-based casino. It all started in the 80s. In the 90s those reforms were only accelerated with a bit more of a human face. According to Thatcher herself, Blair was her greatest achievement after all.
One of the old orthodoxies is, in fact, the misconception that public debt functions like credit card debt that you have to pay back. That is simply not how it works in a FIAT system. Unless you borrow in foreign currencies or from the IMF, which most Western countries don’t really do. But this orthodoxy does reinforce the constant ‘austerity for the many and free money for the few’ dogma. In the end, debt in your own currency is just money creation. Money creation should allow a capitalist system to optimally use its resources and produce growth, and if you don’t, you get all sorts of inflationary problems and toxic behaviors like rent seeking. And that is what is actually going on.
In 2008 the financial system essentially appeared to be a Ponzi driven – not by public debt – but private debt. However, instead of real reforms central banks essentially bought the debt, gave big capital and the rich a huge amount of free money and re-inflating their speculative assets while the real economy and working people had to deal with austerity. In 2020 this more or less happened again. The underlying orthodoxy is still that if you give the rich a lot of money, don’t tax them while keeping wages low, they will produce growth and jobs. However, this does not really happen because, fundamentally, there is still no productive economy. So what do they do instead? Back to casino and rent seeking. It is mostly this welfare system to the top, not so much the bottom, that will squeeze the middle class into poverty.
I meant to explain my Thatcher statement further but then forgot. I didn’t mean her policies – as far as I’m concerned we’re still living in a more or less Thatcherite world. I meant Thatcher-like in the sense of someone that smashes the previous, dysfunctional system. Her policies were a solution to the issues of the day, but have now, as you say, created their own issues. Someone needs be Thatcher-like in the revolutionary sense, and change the current system.
I pretty much agree with what you say (I usually do) and in my post I was mainly talking about private (housing) debt, and the increase in this initially boosted the economy (like spending on the credit card appears to boost your income), but now is a drag as the young pay for that excessive debt through high house prices or rent (or in my analogy have to pay off the credit card and have reduced spending power in consequence).
I hope that explains my meaning better
My apologies, I should have read more carefully. I agree in that sense a leader – who is strong and can really change things – like Thatcher is needed. I also agree with the private debt as well. As I argued the government basically bought that debt and the bill is, indeed, passed to the young as they can not longer buy a house. In a way they miss that free money from the central bank since their wages did not keep up with the asset inflation. And if they can get the mortgage they are more indebted than previous generations.
You should also look at the banking system – one that prioritises companies running on debt! A company with a cash making business is pushed by their banks to ‘utilise their spare cash’ and buy other businesses and take on debt.
A few years ago I sat in on a conference being put on by one of the UK’s more successful businesses where they announced that they were planning, over the next 5 years, to invest their surplus earnings (that above their current profit) in updating their technology for the future. So they would hold their profit at the same level for the next 5 years. They got absolutely panned by ‘The City’ for this and their share price dropped like a stone the next day!!
The city wanted them to continue to increase profitability and to take on debt. By the same token much of the industrial problems (prior to the Net Zero insanity kicking in) is down to short term investment in business. Banks and investors here want instant returns, or within 5 years and for big business or large scale industry, that just doesn’t work. Europe looks more at 10-20 years, Japan and China even further ahead! Add to all that the malaise of the bloated State and the actions of the Civil Service and we have huge issues to address.
UnHerd’s post system being weird again
…
“One of the old orthodoxies is, in fact, the misconception that public debt functions like credit card debt that you have to pay back. “That is simply not how it works in a FIAT system. Unless you borrow in foreign currencies or from the IMF, which most Western countries don’t really do.”
That is is just magic money tree nonsense as we are learning to our cost. In 2024-25, the UK government will spend £104.9 billion on debt interest, equal 8.2% of total public spending and over 3.7% of national income.
Unless you are the US you have to borrow in foreign currencies. In the UK we have to buy food from abroad and pay for energy in dollars. Also most of our manufactured good are imported. Accordingly we have to effectively borrow in foreign currency which we can only do if the GBP remains credible which will only be the case so long as we pay off our debts.
You are living in the world of hard currencies. You could make a good case that we need this, but we do not live in that world. Whether money creation (in your own currency) leads to anything good has to do with a lot of abstract metrics like the velocity of money, the money multiplier etc. But fundamentally a state cannot run out of money, it can only run out of useful things to spend it on, which creates inflationary problems. Since the US has the world reserve currency they can go a lot further before they run out of those things.
Anyway, when the state ‘borrows’ the treasury more or less goes into overdraft, which is not allowed. So they sell bonds/gilts to banks for the same amount who often buy these bonds with newly created money, i.e. fundamentally the state creates money when they ‘borrow’. So money supply in the private sector increases, which you can simply observe. Interest payments are basically doing the same. So you could say they’re not actually borrowing at all, just redirecting resources. Besides, the central bank can and do buy the bonds on the secondhand market, which pushes down the interest rates and gives the banks even more money. So if you want to have zero national debt and pay zero interest, in theory, the central bank can make that happen today.
Now, you could argue that this system is a liability. But many people – including some mainstream economists – simply do not even agree on what happens within that system on a fundamental level. Then it becomes almost impossible to discuss any solutions.
Very well put, the downvoters must be entirely deluded
The one point you missed the Ponzi scheme of flooding the country with low wage immigrant (legal and illegal) to inflate GDP.
An ethnically homogenous society can rebuild. A multi-racial society is doomed. As the economy worsens the country will divide even more along ethnic lines as we fight over dwindling resources. Meanwhile the state struggles to maintain control and order attempts to buy off certain racial/religious groups, who will not bow to the use of state power by favoring them over the minority. Indeed this we have already witnessed with the differing treatment of the Palestinian and Southport protesters
Some people need to be tried for treason – Blair, Brown, Campbell, Cameron, May and Johnson which would be a palliative.
But it would not address the wider question which is where were all the supposed adults in the room, in Parliament, the MSM and civil service who are supposed to hold the executive to account but stood by and watched this happen. Were they too stupid to realise what was happening or were they active conspirators.
Either way none of those that are still around seem to possess an ounce of insight, self awareness or guilt. They still persist in claiming that they have the solutions to our problems even though they were in large part responsible for the genesis of those problem in the first place. Worse they still believe that they have the right the lecturer us on what to do and think. A list should be drawn up and they should be shamed and driven from public life.
I picked out one aspect, there are plenty of other issues. Though to be honest I see large-scale immigration as a part of the same economic policies that have brought us to where we are. Free movement of capital, free movement of labour. The difference I guess is that economic policies can be easily changed, populations not so much.
Certainly importing large numbers of low skilled migrants looks irresponsible at this point in the tech cycle. We’re just on the cusp of large-scale customer service agents as an example. It’s coming …. and the early results are surprisingly good.
Tried for treason? Executed for it!
Empires are a lot more stable than homogenous countries:
Consider that the British Empire lasted a couple of hundred years, the Russian empire for 400 years, the Roman for 1000 years, and the Chinese empire is still around(the Chinese are anything but homogenous internally), and the US, which was explicitly modeled on the Roman empire, is still around.
I would argue that the root cause of a lot of civil wars and wars in general is the frankly rather silly notion that the right and proper thing to do is to shoot all your neighbors for being different, rather than you both deciding to take it to the higher authority to judiciate.
I think the issue in the UK is that the state is being undermined by “Left nationalism”, which is usually called identity politics, which make it impossible to enunciate a simple and clear set of principles to be applied uniformly to all those who live in the UK, since it demands that you recognize and treat different nationalities differently.
Thatcher like figure: At the end of the day, Liz Truss was the best hope for doing something radical but wiped out by the machine.
Policy-wise, Truss was on the correct track. But she lacked, and still lacks, the political nous and charisma to sell it to party and public. Thatcher had both in spades, although it helped that the UK had reached a much lower point before she was elected.
The Blair/Brown years poisoned the well more than you mention. Look at the earnings to house price ratio, from the mid/late 1990s to 2008 – it doubled, making it much more difficult for first-time buyers and those with families to climb the property ladder. Then there was the 50% university ideology, sending swathes of young people to left-wing madrassars and fuelling the woke/state-is-best mentality that makes everyone poorer.
The Tories’ biggest mistake/problem was not recruiting enough skilled & experienced people as candidates (ditto the other parties). None of them had the nerve to do what was needed – “austerity” barely scratched the surface of public sector waste and inefficiency. Boris bottled the pandemic because of his own vanity, and fuelled net zero thanks to Carrie’s lobbying.
Birmingham made the mistake of building the NEC way outside the centre. Millions of people go through there each year; restaurants and shops could have benefitted from that footfall, and it would have fuelled other entrepreneurial ideas.
Absolutely right. Blair inherited a strong economy, which stayed strong for a while purely because they agreed to continue the economic policy. Fairly soon after they got carried away, raising ongoing year on year costs while paying for the likes of hospitals via public-private credit card, the hang over was inevitable.
They didn’t fix the roof while the sun was shining, they had a massive house party then scarpered as the clouds came in.
Added to all that, the changes they made via legislation, and moving control to quangos and the civil service, set the ship for decline then broke the rudder.
The article doesn’t mention mass immigration at all.Birmingham is not a british city anymore.
Which British city is?
British is a concept word
And there no such thing as British city
Only English , Scottish , Welsh and NI cities
Big clue. UK
Winchester
Yes, it is. It’s just that the British people there have black and brown skins.
So what?
Importing 10 – 15 million useless people from the third world for idealogical reasons, is the root cause of most of these problems
I found it curious this did not get a mention in the article.
The last time I went to Birmingham the ethnic make up looked similar to that of a Dubai shopping mall – about 10-15% white and the rest from everywhere else, but mainly Pakistan and India. I wonder who would vote Reform there.
Earlier arrivals worked at the remaining large factories such as BL at Longbridge, and acquired property – which they now rent to newer arrivals since the factories have mostly gone.
I would occasionally have gone there for a football match or a concert, but now just don’t bother since that trip to the Bullring about 10 years ago. It’s just too wretched.
Some estimates put the true figue between 20-30 million since 1980!
It’s the uselessness that boggles my mind. 15mill *actual* doctors and engineers would at least make sense from a purely utilitarian perspective. But a load of useless freeloaders really doesn’t add up.
Oh, but it does. It adds up very nicely if you are a short-term politician looking for votes.
The Bayern Munich fans were probably walking around thinking “This is what Germany’s going to look like in 10 years if things carry on as they are now.” Which unfortunately they will because the German political establishment is as inept, paralysed and lacking in ideas and courage as the British one.
Rather, German political establishment is as treasonous as ours.
I’d be more comfortable blaming “The Tories” if Labour had spent its years in opposition actually opposing the most ruinous policies.
But they didn’t. Instead they wanted more lockdowns, more open borders, more Nimbyism, more debt, more welfare dependency, more tolerance of criminality, more hostility to industry and commerce and defence, more net zero.
And now here we are.
And the 5 year LibCon coalition is never mentioned.
Well that is not strictly true. It was the age of austerity which the great and the good all fall over themselves saying it was a terrible mistake. I don’t think that is right although the way it was done was a mistake e.g. not dealing with the welfare issue or spending more in the right places.
It was not austerity at all.
Nor the SNP’s role in extreme bad policymaking.
Agreed on the problems of Kier Starmer et al. Absolutely no ideas of their own. Never better demonstrated than the COVID nonsense. All Kier could say was even more lockdown, harder and faster and longer…. It was the most obvious thing to oppose, and the data from the NHS as far back as late March 2020 supported doing nothing at all for the vast majority of people of working age and younger. Yet none of them could see it. If they couldn’t tell COVID was a non event, there is absolutely no chance of them “running the country” with any vision and quality.
Worry not O ye of little faith. Nothng you do can turn the wheel of fate.
Birmingham is now a North African-Middle Eastern-Pakistani city and judged by those standards remarkably pleasant. There is probably 10-15 years left till the European verneer wears off and full-on Islamisation, corruption, tribal conflict and social collapse begin.
“And yet, even Reform — Westminster’s disruptors — still cling to old Thatcherite orthodoxies which no longer make sense”.
This has been the assumption for many years and, during those years, the state has grown and grown and we are now poorer. A Thatcherite solution would be painful and takes years to bear any fruit and, yet, I see no alternative.
“O’Brien believes it would be sensible for the Government to abandon decades of Treasury orthodoxy and begin subsidising British industry all over again.”.
This seems to me lunacy – not only because of the question, how does the Government know what to subsidise and might there not be a little corruption but because we’ve been there, done that and it doesn’t work.
There seems to be among the population a view that the Government should be there to help us to the extent to 60% of households receive more from the state than they contribute.
There is only one way to prosperity and that is through more productivity. I don’t know how to achieve that but it certainly does not involve guidance from His Majesty’s Government.
It could subsidise industries that are strategically important such as steel and energy, the same as other countries do. Instead we went all in on Tharchers ideology of privatising everything that state owned foreign companies now own billions of pounds of British assets.
British workers are literally handing money to foreign governments for things their predecessors created, which is a frankly ludicrous situation
I’d add the railways to that list of unwisely privatised assets. But the problem is that governments are historically terrible at running businesses (British Leyland anyone?).
The nationalised industries effectively stole money from the taxpayer
But privately-owned manufacturing businesses didn’t fare much better. British industry has historically been saddled with an ownership class that was always much more interested in lining its own pockets, than modernising production methods and products in order to stay competitive.
We did. British Steel was losing a million pounds a week in the 70s. There was gross overmanning and corruption.
We subsidised the coal mines to the same effect.
But at least we got an end product for that outlay (steel and coal).
Instead we’ve shuttered those industries and spend just as much on unemployment benefits (not to mention the associated costs such as increased crime and poor health outcomes) with nothing to show for it, while we can no longer make our own steel and have to buy if from foreign (often state backed) producers
Umm hello subsidising energy? That is Net Zero and it is bankrupting us!
Somebody is making good money.
While I agree that a Thatcherite solution would indeed take years to bear fruit and yet there is no apparent alternative, this would only succeed if the UK maintained a competitive advantage in multiple sectors. Financial services is obviously one of them, pharmaceuticals another, R&D yet another. The problem is we require a higher degree of diversification for economic stability and this means at least partial re-industrialization. High end manufacturing can take years to incubate and nurture. Net Zero would kill this baby before it is even born. It has to go.
If there is anything I have learnt about economic development in my short time on this planet, the price of energy is crucial to it. The direct correlation between long term energy prices and economic growth is disputed by few (short term fluctuations do occur and sudden economic shocks can reduce demand and lower prices for short periods of time eg; COVID). No point having a well renumerated workforce if most of their income is spent on rent and energy.
Government is the problem. We require a bonfire of the quangos, abolish Net Zero, cut ministerial departments to 6 or 7 (eg; we do not need a Department of Education – education can be devolved to regional authorities). There is so much that can change for the better if only we had the right people in charge.
The US now has a GDP per capita approaching $90000 a year while we languish at $55000 a year. Their economic model might result in bigger booms and busts but even a catastrophic bust of 25% for them would mean they would still be 10% better off than we are.
In order for us to go full out for growth, we would need Milei style governance for at least two years. Unfortunately, I don’t think we as a country have it in us anymore.
Yes, it’s energy. Our economy is driven by energy. If energy is cheap and stable then industry and commerce have a chance to grow. As you say, Net Zero has to go – it’s pointless anyway as adding more CO2 to the current 400 odd ppm is not going to make any significant difference. And it’s not us in the UK anyway.
Cutting red tape would also make a huge difference to UK businesses.
I think things have got to get a lot worse before we Brits will take the medicine. It won’t be pleasant and a spoonful of sugar won’t help.
“it’s pointless anyway as adding more CO2 to the current 400 odd ppm is not going to make any significant difference.”
It’s not the additional amount above 400 ppm that matters (directly), it’s the amount added from pre-industrial levels (ie 280 ppm to 400 ppm), which is still there and still absorbing additional heat year after year. The amounts over 400 ppm only matter because that means the 400 ppm level will be maintained for longer.
Imagine someone buried in sand. It makes no direct difference whether they are buried under 2 ft or 6 ft of sand – they are still buried. The difference only matters if you want to dig them out.
280ppm is NOT the pre industrial level. It has varied over time enormously. The 280ppm is the level when industrialisation started.
So misleading, and mostly irrelevant, statistic.
The postwar boom and prosperity in the West were basically produced by the war industry, which in turn was produced by huge public spending and a lot of state involvement. During the cold war this continued. But even during the ‘neoliberal’ period, industry, as well as the financial sector, were still largely subsidized and protected in all sorts of ways. In some ways even more so as the privatized public-private sector functioned poorly. The major difference was that the nanny state was redirected from the middle class to the wealthy who left some breadcrumbs for the poor and the managerial class. If you are middle class you are not supposed to notice that, of course, but you can figure it out if you follow the money instead of the rhetoric.
There is only one way to prosperity and that is through more productivity. I don’t know how to achieve that
What’s so depressing is that a competent government could quite easily and quickly begin to transform the British economy
The small business sector employs around 67% of the working population. But most small entrepreneurs nowadays will settle for lower rewards rather than expand by taking on new staff. It’s just too much grief. So take a chainsaw to employment regulation and taxes on small businesses. Then ditch net zero, start fracking and cut the taxes on energy.
When I read that quote I felt it was very lazy. One of Reform’s key policies is no tax for anyone earning under £20k to remove disincentives. It is bold, carries risk, and is hardly Thatcherite.
Britain has the people Even immigrants come to the UK wanting to work. The problem is that the energy to do things is continually squelched by safetism and laws of compulsion (you must do…). In past times, with the exception of taxes, law was about prohibitions – what you shouldn’t do, but so long as you didn’t do things that were prohibited, there was no limit to what you could achieve.
We have to understand England (and later Britain) as a pirate nation. It made its money from merchant venturers and privateers. It stepped over boundaries, it was adept at ‘borrowing’ ideas from other nations and then extending them for profit. It broke things – like the Catholic Church, and the monarchy, and Europe at least a couple of times. It attacked battleships with men in canoes.
Now what? The law assumes people are stupid – safety assessments, written policies, tons of compliance paperwork. Nothing is allowed to be done without matron getting her oar in.
The solutions aren’t difficult – just unpalatable. Cut anything that creates a law of compulsion – eg the Online Safety Act, GPDR, Net Zero, AML and go back to laws of prohibition – Do No Harm. Stop investing in renewables and invest all that burning money in nuclear. Make energy cheap. Get education back focused on taking apart, copying and learning from other people’s ideas then figuring out how to do them better. Let people come up with new ideas and solutions, and above all take risks
Glad you mentioned GDPR, which cost UK industry £8 billion to implement and achieved absolutely nothing. When was the last time you clicked on ‘manage your preferences’?
I agree. I don’t ever remember anyone taking to the streets or a campaign group pushing for and yet it was hugely expensive……£8bn at 1998 prices!
I have had to use a couple of times to find out what an organisation is up to.
This article does a good job of capturing Britain’s deep unease with uncanny precision. Though Blair gets an easy ride in terms of analysing root causes.
We were once a nation once brimming with confidence, ambition and capability, but have now settled into a collective shoulder-shrug: everyone feels something is off, but no one can quite work out how to fix it.
Amongst a range of contributing factors that are causing all this – two deeper undercurrents stand out in explaining this gloom.
First, there is the persistent failure to produce authentic, imaginative leadership. Instead of courageous visionaries who could rally people behind bold solutions, we have careful “managers” who appear more concerned with survival than true renewal. This lack of political bravery has, over decades, led to half-hearted, contradictory, or downright damaging policies that have fundamentally altered the fabric of our society (ahem – Blair) and which certainly never quite meet the scale of Britain’s challenges.
Second, while a strong safety net is a hallmark of a compassionate society, the welfare system and other modern comforts have arguably lulled much of the population into apathy and complacency. Plenty of people sense the country’s decline but lack the motivation – or see no incentive – to undertake the sacrifices or radical shifts needed to reverse it. The path of least resistance is simply to muddle along, allowing inertia to persist.
What remains is a system so bound up in its own dysfunction that even sincere reformers struggle to make headway. The question, then, is how to break this cycle.
One possibility is that we will be forced to act by an external crisis: a sudden economic collapse, an environmental disaster or a geopolitical shift. Such shocks have, in the past, spurred Britain to embark on bold new paths. Yet if we ar at at the stage where we are relying on catastrophe to save us; then it’s clear that the damage has already been done.
Perhaps the most pragmatic takeaway is that we should not spend all our energy blaming past governments (as easy / enjoyable as that might be) – or even scolding a population weary from decades of half-measures. If we truly wish to avoid harder external jolts, we need systems that can produce and support leaders able to overcome institutional inertia, and a public / culture prepared to make short-term sacrifices in exchange for renewed vigour in the long run.
Without both, Britain is likely to remain “out of kilter,” resigned to decline until the next externalised shock arrives to force us to make the uncomfortable yet necessary steps required to transform our nation.
Dependency begets more dependency. It is a simple truth but if you give people free stuff they will vote for more of it. The NHS is a classic example. Most people have no idea how much it is costing them. NHS and welfare are gradually destroying us. Give people free stuff and people will just want more free stuff. It was ever thus. The irony is the one Marxist Leninist state namely china would not entertain welfarism.
And how do you create real wealth? I was always told either by digging stuff up or making stuff, both of which we seem to have given up on. Buying and selling houses on borrowed money has been the biggest growth industry which is hardly surprising when you have had years of absurdly low interest rates and money printing. We are facing a reckoning and this is just the beginning.
There’s nothing Marxist about China, despite having Communism in the party name.
They’re ideologically much closer to Mussolini than Lenin in my opinion
It would be futile to engage in the blame game by castigating past governments, but we do need to recognise that with the increasing size of the state in each decade since Thatcher has brought us to this pass.
We need to give the ‘working people’ their money back and the only way we are able to achieve that is by reducing the size of the ‘State’
Finland and Denmark have no great leaders.
Finland and Denmark have excellent social welfare policies and a strong safety net.
Both are at the top of the “Most Happiest Nations” lists.
Finland and Denmark are overwhelmingly White.
They understand that they built their societies for themselves, not for some bunch of migrants or a tommyrot Commonwealth of Nations.
By us, for us. And it only works for us.
Since 1945 Britain has been told the opposite. That lie is the source of your malaise and your consequent problems.
And everybody knows it.
“Only (harden our hearts) to those who never bother trying.”
Yes, but trying what? A brand new economic theory? Finding something to ban? Pointing a finger at someone to blame? We’ve tried all of those, and look where we are.
I have a modest suggestion. The only thing we haven’t tried, at any level, is leadership. But then, do we want to be led? Are we willing to accept ‘no’ for an answer when we voice our wants? McTague describes modern Britain, but his description could just a easily describe Britain in the 1970s. We know what happened next.
Hmm, I can’t help but feel like there’s a huge elephant in the room you’re not mentioning Tom, starts with ‘Im’ and ends with ‘migration’.
The best measure of this slump – and any progress made in getting out of it – is probably GDP per capita. There are some pretty obvious actions available to increase this measure – but the uniparty and wider blob refuse to implement them. To do so requires “putting country first”. There is only one party likely to kick-start the journey.
Any rebuttal from the down-tickers would be welcomed …
Things started to go wrong at about the time of Blair’s second election victory.
There was the Iraq War, which whatever the rights and wrongs of it distracted attention from domestic politics.
There was the failure of New Labour to address industrial decline because of the enthusiasm for globalisation and the financial services industry.
There was the extravagant wastage of public service reform that focused on centralisation, bureaucracy and ‘choice’.
Above all else there was a toxic combination of complacency and a trendy liberal vision of society which disregarded the views of the majority.
Everything else has flowed from that.
Perhaps the most detrimental consequence of Blair was the decision to remove housing costs from the Bank of England’s inflation remit. This has given us the largest upward transfer of wealth in history and destroyed the prospects for family life of several generations.
A great revival in the UK, is an opportunity waiting to be grasped, and it’s really not rocket science.
The ‘Big State’ has comprehensively failed since Maggie resigned 35 years ago, extending it’s reach with each decade that has passed, it is now suffocating/strangling our economy and our values.
We need a leader and a party to radically reduce the size of the State and its agencies, to eliminate many of the taxes it takes from us and allow working people the freedom to rescue our economy and improve the lives of their families.
I’m not saying it isn’t part of the solution, but I get the feeling that if we simply cut taxes and reduced the size of the state, the extra money retained by the working/middle classes would simply be sucked up by something else, housing probably.
I’m not sure about housing. I think the secondhand housing stock is likely overvalued as the younger generation can’t afford to buy their parents’ generations properties at today’s inflated prices. An asset is only worth what someone else will pay for it.
Reducing the size of the State also includes reducing their powers in their control over housing which of course includes sorting out the Plannind Depts across the UK
In its higher echelons, the Blob is multicultural, left-liberal and unified through a Russell Group university education. Excessive tolerance is then show towards the lower echelons of local government which reinforce communitarianism.
…you’re completely and unredeemable ‘effed Youkay. Worse than when you were in in the early seventies when I was a lad there. Its’ feminization wots got ya’s by the short and curleys. So unless yas break out the Saxon scold’s bridals for the AWFULs you’re gonna crumble humble to the burqa in quite short order.
I would add 9/11 to the seismic events that have been so detrimental to us, but apart from that a fairly accurate analysis it seems to me.
It may not be popular but I think Rishi Sunak was really trying to making a difference during his tenure. The changes and projects put in place 2023 – 24 received no fanfares in the MSM, but they were going on behind the scenes, progress was made despite being up against an obstructive civil service at times.
I am not at all sure a dramatic leader is what is needed. Sometimes in history it has been the quiet steady ones who made the most useful reforming headway, Stanley Baldwin and Harold Macmillan for example.
‘Slow and steady wins the race’.
I see your point and generally think slow and steady is a good principle to adhere to. But terms of office are far too short for it to be possible in government. And people need to be a lot more patient than they are in wanting to see results.
If this chop-and-change system rinses and repeats for long enough and nothing is getting better, a sledgehammer starts to look mighty attractive.
Perhaps Mr Milei will loan us his chainsaw. It seems to have worked wonders in Argentina.
“do not harden your hearts against us” only works as an exhortation if the executives of the past and present acknowledge their failures and enact immediate changes. For example, for me to soften my heart, I would require the current administration to completely ditch Net Zero, start building nuclear power stations and start fracking, immediately, so we can have cheap energy in a couple of years. But they won’t – for reasons of ideology and short term political management. If they don’t, what possible reason would there be to retract the blame and the contempt?
I can’t see it but maybe it is darkest before the dawn. Mind you it will get a lot darker with Millivolt in charge of energy policy. Step one for a chance at revival would be removing him and Philippson from their posts.
“Do not harden your hearts against us.”
The DEI Blairite community of communities claims to be non-judgemental. Yet it judges the people of Britain’s past, and does so very harshly. Or at least certain of those who are not of the sort who are valorised in the new dispensation.
Did all these politicians of the last forty years fail despite trying? Or did they very successfully plant the seeds of a vigorous new growth? A species something akin in habit to Ficus sumatrana?
Do not harden your hearts against us is a plea for mercy; for forgiveness. That might, at certain times, stir a response of love. But only towards those, weak though they were in their humanity, nevertheless loved us.
But what of those political leaders who merely scolded us? Wanting to ‘improve’ us so that they might glory in their own rectitude? Their promises their only claim to be necessary to us. Their plea for forgiveness resting on the assumption that is it better to just have tried something.
Britain is like your elderly aunt. When you were a child she was your favourite. She always gave you a bright welcome. As generous with her interest in you as she was with her afternoon teas and gifts of pocket money on parting in the Summer evenings.
Now she is retired, living in a seaside bungalow, in a town which is itself like her photographs and nik naks: repositories of memory that communicate nothing to her decayed state of mind. Veneration of what she was requires following her coffin to the committal service and in acceptance, willed and humble, hearing the priest read the last rites – the description of the iron cage of life that will be reforged into a rod to rule, but in another Age.
There is a different plea than Hilary Mantel’s one for mercy in judgement. It is not for us to mount the tribunal to judge; much less to anathematise. A very different plea that was put into a work written near the end of her life by the Great War poet May Wedderburn Cannan in her poem From One Generation to Another.
I saw that the author is going to become head honcho at the New Statesman – which I assume means he’s leaving UnHerd. That’s a shame because I have very much enjoyed his writing here, so thank you for that. I wish him all the best at the New Statesman, but am somewhat concerned for his mental wellbeing because he will have to deal daily with the gang of insufferable smuglords over there, from Andrew Marr to Hannah Barnes etc, so I hope he will at least be well compensated in mitigation.
As to “do not harden your hearts against us”, I’m afraid this exhortation is too late for me at least, because my heart has already turned to stone towards our motley lineup of past leaders and executives who consciously and systemically decided to live beyond our means with no kind of buffer, and I’m uninclined to forgive – not least because I’m not just passing judgement in retrospect but many of the things they got upto at the time I could see were poor decisions at the time, driven in some cases by ideology, or short term political considerations, but others by blind adherence to herd mentality – for example how they reacted to the pandemic.
The biggest charge I lay at their door is that they all operated as though prevailing conditions would always continue ad infinitum, and why did they do that when many of them were students of history? For example, Brown during the entire Blair administration appeared to operate under the assumption that there would never be another financial crisis, when one glance at the past would have shown this was inevitable. In any case they had no preparation of the “war chest” type, and were reduced to reactive moves, the consequences of which we are still suffering today. The irony is, our current set of administrators have learnt nothing: what, for example, do you think Starmer and Reeves will do, if there there is another 2008 style global market crash in the next 18 months?
So no, I decline to soften my heart towards them.
If you don’t have borders you don’t have a country.
QED
Niall Ferguson offered a law that states that a country that spends more servicing debt than it spends on its defence is in serious trouble. The UK is spending twice as much on debt repayments as on defence,
Right now I would settle for a government that would just fix the $#%*ing potholes in our roads.
Hard work, self reliance, fidelity, service not self indulgence, Jesus Christ.
You’re describing life under Britain’s two varieties of Progressive Leftism – Tory and Labor.
“O’Brien believes it would be sensible for the Government to abandon decades of Treasury orthodoxy and begin subsidising British industry all over again. That we are even contemplating such things is telling.”
I am old enough to remember the 1970s. State subsidization of industries like coal, steel and car making was a disaster and had to be bought to an end.
Relived of the necessity to be competitive these industries were grossly inefficient, over maned and strike bound, and produced products that no one wanted to buy or at least buy at the price. Had they been allowed to continue the level of subsidy would no doubt have continued until it became unaffordable.
On the other hand we should have coal, steel, ship building and car manufacturing and to some extent these industries need support. If we are going to do this we need to be smart about it. I would say the first requirement is cheap power and the second is no unions.
So if I’m reading you correctly, we should have those industries because they’re strategically important and they need state backing to function, but you’re against giving these industries state backing to survive?
“Not only did the Conservative Party leave office with taxes at record highs but public services were at record lows and people’s living standards had barely improved since they took power.”
Which tells us that they weren’t Conservatives at all. They are fake Tories – part of the ConLabLib Uniparty that has governed us for 35 years and got us into this mess. Vote Reform, whenever they’ll let us.
A lot of the rot of the British state can be linked to the 28 years (and counting) of New Labour rule we have been living under. Blair’s legal frameworks and creation of judicial clerisies make it impossible for politicians to make meaningful changes. It is grimly amusing to see the current Labour authoritarians hoist with the petard created by Blair and Brown. Of course, McTague, as the incoming editor of the New Statesman, is not going to tell us the truth, because it’s much easier to be partisan and tendentious.
It will be 2028-29 before the New Labour framework can be smashed, and the ground salted.
With money taken from where, I wonder?
The taxpayer…where else?
An impressionistic piece, well below TM’s usual standards. Birmingham (where I don’t live) is only one of the poorest cities in Europe if you cherry-pick your data. Moreover, the whole of the West is in decline and decay: the only way out, for the UK at least, is Thatcherism Mk II – be honest about our debt and cut public services, reduce taxes on business and aspiration, invest in defence, cut energy prices (with a dash for gas and abandon net zero), protect certain strategic industries and reduce dependence on China.
Unfortunately, there simply is no rule that states that democratic choices will create wealth. It is perfectly possible for democratic choices to subtract vast amounts of wealth. Exhibit A: the great Covid Hysteria.
The epigraph is from a poem by Francois Villon..
What an excellent article. Please can we have more useful and straightforward input like this on Unherd. As a fellow Brummie – well I was born near there – I can only agree with the views that the city now looks like an Asian rubbish tip. You can’t blame it all on the bin-men. And industry, what industry? There is absolutely no point in going into the city these days, and thank heavens that the (very good) hospital is on the outskirts!
Good piece. How far back does the author want to go? To Thatcher (a good argument can be made for that)? To the 1970s (ditto)? To the failure to offload the Empire after WW2 and adjust the exchange rate to give manufacturing the edge over the City (a battle going on since the 19th century, if not earlier)? To performance management in the civil service (ditto here)? To the decline of the education system (impacting the quality of legislation, also the same here)? A lot of choices but, to be honest, I could have written this piece (albeit less elegantly) years ago. It is now so obvious it cannot be gainsaid but, perhaps, it was easier to spot earlier from a distance. To be honest again though, arrogance might have something to do with it. Not the people (who have been experiencing decline for decades) but the Establishment, which has certainly been in denial.
The main problem the ‘rich’ world faces now is too much government.
If they stopped Immigration (and they should) then House prices would drastically fall. There is no Industry left here and increasingly everyone shifts to the Public sector for security. But even that will eventually implode.
Tom seems to concentrate his ire on the Tories and their greatest failure was the One Nation brand. But despite that and their constant in house bickering they knew how to run the economy. With over a £Trillion of debt to pay out for the American inspired Financial Crisis and a man made Bioweapon produced in China again with American money to create a Pandemic, who could blame the Tories. Lets not forget a new Avian Flu in the brew coming shortly.
Tom appears to need glasses if he thinks Labour are competent. All I see is a bunch of mealy mouthed Marxists devoid of any economic sense, hateful of Britain’s past. Whoever removes these idiots from Government will be left with debt way over our GDP and debt repayments they will be unable to pay.
Quite a lot of waffle in there as usual. Makes connections to support an argument rather than prove a case. 18 billion in subsidising nationalised business 45 years ago against 41 billion for the feckless. Don’t insult my intelligence.
Where does the UK go from here? At some point the country collapses and something new arises. Perhaps in the future there is default on the public debt, or a date when there is not enough money to pay the pensioners and civil servants without taxing the citizenry into penury. The make up the citizen changes where there are more keffiyehs than bowler hats and the young don’t want to pay for the old.
First rule in getting out of a hole is to stop digging. What expenditures should be stopped or frozen? What rules changed or abolished? What sacrifices need to be made and by whom?
Misery loves company and here in the US we have a high debt to GDP (122%) so we have a reckoning coming too.
Tom McTague refers to failed cities. I believe we are further along the journey – feral seems more appropriate for several of our major urban areas.
When the Thatcher/Blair economic programme blew up with the GFC the UK was left bereft. Clearly, it urgently needs a new programme. Not too much to ask for a still worthy country.
As I recall Major left the economy in fairly good order. Indeed Brown followed the same plan until Blair was re-elected then spent and spent and spent.
Blair was elected twice on the promise not to wreck the economy, which he honoured at first and was rewarded with bipartisan support. Then he handed over to Brown and the floodgates opened.
The “political class ( and that includes local politics plus the Unions & Quangos ) are quite content, perhaps slightly embarrassed but nothing more.
They are one removed from day to day anxieties
To make real genuine change would take them out of their comfort zone
They are most unlikely to consider such a revolutionary move
Present day politics is what they have come to understand (and love )
You cannot say that the banking crisis was out of the blue (the levels of personal debt were an obvious iceberg at the time), nor can COVID be stated as any excuse for Gov waste. COVID is the single biggest waste of tax payer’s money ever, and probably always will be. The fact they wasted 500 billion of our money on an innocuous sniffle sums up how poor the quality in The Houses of Parliament really were in that moment. Not enough of them were capable of seeing it for what it was, nowhere near serious enough to justify that level of expense. For 500 billion quid we could have nationalised steel production and kept it ringfenced as critical, and provided enough new nuclear power plants to dramatically improve UK grid supplies, while reducing CO2 emissions and training up an army of UK workers in the sort of industry that would seriously benefit the workforce. Instead we got PPE that did nothing and a vast oversupply of vaccines that were basically piontless as well, since nobody under 60 really needed one (except specific groups), and huge numbers of people had already had the virus and yet still needed this crappy vaccine if they wanted to go for a holiday or to a restaurant….. Utter stupidity.
Spot on – Hamilton-Patterson’s “The dismantling of Britain” (2018) gives the background to much of this, not least the role of two words that should never be put together “financial engineering”. I used to use the mutual seduction scene in Nice Work when teaching about deindustrialization. Students remember anecdotes, especially racy ones. David Byrne
Franklt I was hoping for some suggestions about fixing things. We have plenty of people capable of pointing at all the problems, in fact any fool can do that.
Information theory holds that the information content of an event is inversely related to the probability of its occurrence. You have only to drive a short distance to see the truth of this,. In a 24-hour news cycle there is nothing to be gained by the mundane, no value in a photo of a government minister standing with a spade beside a filled pothole. But this failure to deal with the basics that enable daily life for the people can go on is symptomatic of failure at the top,
Poetry, but not prose.
‘Parts of Birmingham and the North East are among the poorest places in Europe.’ Possibly that is true, but other parts of Birmingham and the North East are prosperous and pleasant, and parts of London and the South East are among the wealthiest places in Europe. Selectively taking extreme pockets of the UK and presenting them as representative of the whole is fundamentally dishonest. The comparison with Munich might not stand up well, but perhaps Germany looks less admirable in the rust-belt towns of the Ruhr, or the depopulated and demoralised regions of East Germany where everyone under 50 has left.
The author is prone to projecting his apocalyptic gloom on to others (like the Bayern supporters) without actually talking to them, then offering this as evidence about the state of the country. People all around are working, enjoying homes, families, food, entertainment, travel and football matches, and generally getting on with their lives. The author could perhaps do more of the same.
@Tom McTague
Thatcher and Reagan dismantled unions to free corporations from accountability. The goal wasn’t just economic—it was structural. By removing unions, they eliminated the organized opposition that once defended workers and slowed down corporate expansion. Corporations no longer wanted checks and balances—they wanted full autonomy. And they got it. From corporate perspective, they have become successful to do what they needed- profit,!
Now the question is what does the government need to become successful? Get rid of performance opposition idealogical theatre!
I am making the same argument the conservative made against unions:
Ideological opposition in politics has become just another performative barrier—ritualistic, outdated, and counterproductive. It’s not about oversight anymore. It’s a spectacle that stalls real governance and decisions.
With live feed, it is a satire!
People aren’t voting for ideology anymore. They want results. Health. Safety. Education. Infrastructure. Tangible things. These aren’t abstract beliefs—they’re engineering problems. But instead of engineers, we have lawyers writing laws no one reads and collecting triple salaries while doing nothing. The system became legalistic when it should’ve become practical. We need arguments like town A doesn’t have hospital why? How do we find fund for new track? Not just arguing against for pure party lines! Words are empty. An AI can argue now! Lol
We don’t need never ending debates. We need builders. No more lawyers in suits debating like it’s high school. People are observing live and it is hard to watch the virtue signaling, theatrical, and it is embarassing!
19 billion to keep systems and employment to 41 billion now to keep emptiness and unemployment….but corporations are laughing to the banks.
And the world is laughing while we sink deeper into political theatre!
Opposition party ideas are becoming obsolete and needs based will take over soon enough!
Trump may be remembered the man who got rid of fake opposition party in the west! And brought the west to see the reality!
Democracy without direct participation for real needs? That idea is moot now.”
I’m an old Blairite. Never been a Tory.
But the solutions are, actually, simple. They may be hard to do, because of the resistance by the progressive lawyerist elite, but can be done. I’d prefer it if Labour were to do it, but any incoming Govt in 2029 can do it.
It’s immigration. Particularly unskilled or not very skilled.Started with Romanians and Poles and Bulgarians in c2004. They drive down wages at the bottom, and drive up housing costs, especially at the bottom. The English working class then goes on benefits, as wages have been driven down. This was the main driver behind Brexit and so many Red Wall seats went Brexit in 2016 and 2019.The present US Administration has shown that you can stop illegal administration if you want to. Leave the ECHR if you must. Reform the immigration tribunals – was it really true that a Nigerian woman had 8 appeals before she finally won?Scrap Net Zero. If green is great, let it compete with oil and gas and nuclear. We no longer make steel in the UK. Energy is too expensive. Same applies to chemicals. Cars will soon follow.Any energy intensive industry will struggle if energy costs are as high as they are. Scrap any related mandates for eg heat pumps, banning the sale of new ICE motor vehicles. If EV are better they won’t need subsidising or their competition banned. After all, we didn’t need to ban the horse and cart when internal combustion vehicles came.Reform the planning system to make it much easier to build. So reform judicial review, so that only people with standing can appeal decisions, and that appellants bear costs if they lose. Stop letting quangos like Nature England, Heritage etc have veto rights – no more £100m bat tunnels, £290m costs of planning applications (nothing has been built yet) for the M25 extension under the Thames. Labour has made a good start here, let’s see more.Control immigration – deport illegals, don’t grant indefinite leave to remain – will relieve downward pressure on wages at the bottom and relieve pressure on housing costs.Build more, especially houses. This will create jobs, relieving the bottom end of the wage scale, and tackle pressure on housing costs. Labour is making encouraging progress here, thankfully, though it’s just words at present.We’ll need to reform the benefit system, but the above measures will make that a lot easier to do. If there’s a vibrant job market that those exiting benefits can join, it’s much easier to do, as Clinton in the mid 90s showed.I used to believe in independent experts, but the present lot show that those in such experts (regulators, Bank of England, etc) are subject to progressive groupthink. I’d prefer accountability. We can see that Government control taints everything, so I’d privatise everything that wasn’t nailed down. The nailed down parts can wait for a second Parliament.There’s a lot of other things that should be done and I haven’t talked about taxes at all. But control immigration, build lots more and scrap net zero could actually tackle the economic malaise at the heart of Britain.
“Given our current predicament, O’Brien believes it would be sensible for the Government to abandon decades of Treasury orthodoxy and begin subsidising British industry all over again“. That sounds like Socialism to me.
Curious how McTague avoids discussing the contribution of Blair and Brown to Britain’s current malaise.
Most of these comments miss the point. There’s no particular issue, it’s simply that the rot has set in because there has been no substantive governance over the UK for decades. Year after year parties in or out of government have been interested only in getting elected, the electors have fallen for it and there is no mechanism to check that fundamental flaw in so-called democracy.
By the way, Tom Mctague and Helen Thompson are just the most carefully informed and thoughtful commentators on these, our times. Unlike so many who have lost their heads, these two are utterly brilliant. Just listen to their These Times.
3 years ago, after over 50 years as a Conservative member, I resigned and wrote to my MP, actually a friend, that the party had nothing positive to show after 11years except the Covid vaccine – nothing whatsoever of any value. Everything seemed to be broken and mostly were getting even worse. So, it was inevitable that Labour would sweep into power on a wave of anti-Tory sentiment and millions of Blue voters simply not turning out. Regrettably, the change promised by Labour is draconian and has few positive aspects. Nothing will get better except the promises.
High immigration is a symptom, not a cause. Yes, we need to address the issue, but the idea that halting immigration in itself would somehow solve the underlying problems of post-industrial Britain is a delusion.
As I recall, Thatcher’s plan for Liverpool was managed decline, im assuming there were other towns/cities which fell into the same bracket. Not saying I agree, but that was the idea from the government of the day. So as the author points out, what is happening now is not specific to Blair or 2010-24. Reform UK voters might want to think about that.
One fantasy the author states which is important to highlight: “Those jobs that once guaranteed a comfortable standard of life and status, no longer do: teaching and medicine, social work”
Perhaps those professions improved during Blairs government, but all were treated like sh*t during the Thatcher years. Indeed, it seems the view is that while taxes are too high and need to be cut, healthcare professionals should simply accept the worst work and pay conditions and be happy with people banging pots and pans for them. Lower taxes and a better quality of life doesn’t apply to healthcare professionals.
The teachers and nurses who I know from the Thatcher years are now retired on defined benefit pensions, if they’re still alive. That’s the kind of S**t treatment I’d be happy with.
I was referring to their working pay and working conditions. You are obviously right though regarding pensions, I imagine they are probably there or thereabouts in line with todays triple lock giveaways.
The DB pensions from that era are way more than the state pension, which is what “triple-lock” refers to. I am still working in industry when all my Education & NHS friends are long retired. My taxes are paying for their pensions. That was always the deal though, and I accept it.
The fundamentals of the governance of the UK is in the modern era of global affairs are
Simply Not fit for Purpose
And as to why is listed below
1. Westminster and FPTP so called
Democratic system which produces huge majorities from garnering a mere 22 % of the eligible votes Work it out , effectively the people have no choice therefore tolerate inept pathetic governance
2. House of Lords the largest unelected legislative chamber in the world
3. No written constitution
4 . The Crown being the Sovereign power as excersised by way of the House of Commons
5 .No one in the UK is a Citezen , we are all mere subjects of The Crown who can have erased any or all our
Rights with a stroke of the pen
6 . Power is heavily centralised in Westminster, Even devolution is seriously chained by lack of real power
7. No consideration to Federalism whereby the likes of Scotland can rapidly forge ahead and become a shining beacon as how to govern for the rest of the UK
8 . Almost every state asset has been privatised and making a Quick buck is all that matters now
9. Education system is utterly useless now
Go look at the UK,S
IPO,s , Centres of excellence and STEM graduates and where where and how they
Employed
All this screams Failure
10. Complete delusional in matters of Economic Power , Military capabilities and ability to influence
Serious global actions
11. Scotland, Wales and N.I now have a majority that 1st and foremost do not consider themselves as British
The UK no longer functions as a team
12. Days of Empire are over yet we still govern as we a great Imperial Power
Which in turn has led to a complete inability to evolve , adapt and survive and as in in Nature species fail
Hence the UK can’t possibly survive in it’s present form and is now actually self destroying itself with
Terminal velocity now
13. The key to social and economic
Success is PRODUCTIVITY
The data for that speaks volumes
And all the above in 1 to 12
Explains exactly why the productivity problems are impossible to resolve
In short all the basics and fundamentals of economic and social success are Wrong Wrong Wrong
So only one future beacons which most certainly includes Loss of Scotland , N.I and probably Wales
Which leaves behind a Bankrupt Little England
For whom the only solution is either a peaceful revolution or Civil War 2
If not the the slide into the cesspit of abject
Poverty is inevitable
#7 I still have hopes for Scotland but all the contenders for power here are hooked on dependency despite their endless “independence” rhetoric.
#8 – Quite a few of those state “assets” were in fact liabilities. Privatising was the alternative to endless subsidy.
Is this serious: “7. No consideration to Federalism whereby the likes of Scotland can rapidly forge ahead and become a shining beacon as how to govern for the rest of the UK” ?
What is devolution but a form of federalism ?
In what way has Scotland been “held back” ?
Looks to me like Scotland’s been given plenty of scope to do its own thing. And that it’s not the “shining beacon” for hope you imagine. The complete opposite on things like education. Lucky you still have “bankrupt little England” around to keep writing the subsidy cheques.
As for “Democratic system which produces huge majorities from garnering a mere 22 % of the eligible votes Work it out , effectively the people have no choice therefore tolerate inept pathetic governance”.
The party that achieved the most UK MPs per vote ever was the SNP (56 seats on less than 1.5 million votes). I don’t recall any complaints from the SNP about how “unfair” that was.
All academic reputable and renowned experts in the field
Of governance and finance clearly state that the devolution settlement for Scotland ensured that no matter what
Scotland economic performance is firmly anchored to the UK and any policies that Scotland has the power to enact that never ever can a +/-
Figure of 2 % in any area can ever be surpassed
Along with the annual GERS data that’s impossible for any Government to plan properly for the future
Some even state if you’d had to conduct your household and families fiscal affairs on a similar basis then not only would you’d soon find yourself in trouble but probably failing
Dramatically
Many a fine economist has endeavoured to drill down into
GERS to paint a true picture
Have found such as Impossible
Concluding that in all probability the rules pertaining to GERS are
None other than heavily loaded dice that shall always land in Westminster’s favour
devolved Scotland has within its limited powers, ensured that child poverty is 35% less than England and Wales….why you may wonder did that happen…a clue, labour or tories were not in charge
Absolutely correct and achieved mainly by way of effectively scraping the 2 child benefit cap
But although welcome certainly not transformational
Proportional Representation voting is destroying Europe’s democracies, many countries have had coalition govts. for decades, which results in the politicians and their ‘parties’ by-passing the electorate.
The result is the electorate’s frustration manifesting itself in the rise of extremist parties.
We’ll stick with FPTP until a better system comes about, mostly it delivers fair results, this last election was distorted by a low turn out, but its only for 4/5 years rather than the decades they suffer in Europe.