The Prime Minister’s longer-term aspirations make sense, but the danger is that he won’t be in power to implement them CREDIT: Reuters
When will we finally wake up, and jolt out of our debilitating stupor? Britain as we know it faces an existential crisis. Crippled by scores of pathologies, from an imploding health service to sliding real wages, our status as one of the wealthiest, most civilised countries in the world is at risk for the first time since the Industrial Revolution.
We are gradually going the way of Argentina, once one of richest nations, and until the 1960s more prosperous than many European powers, but now an impoverished, unstable basket-case. We are likely to soon see a new generation of young, ambitious British people seek their fortunes abroad.
On current trends, we will be overtaken in terms of GDP per capita by Poland in a dozen years. It is no excuse to point out that France, Italy and many others will suffer the same fate in roughly the same timeframe (which is why the EU Rejoiners are missing the point), or that most other European countries are facing their very own health crises, or that Germany’s energy conundrum is even greater than ours.
The sorry truth is that Britain’s fall from grace has been more extreme, more sudden, less explicable and far less forgivable. We should be doing so much better, especially after Brexit.
In the 1980s and 1990s, unlike our European neighbours, we had successfully started to reverse our managed decline, and yet today all of those gains have been squandered. Our growth rate, pushed down by absurd monetary polices and ever higher taxes and red tape, is now roughly tracking the Eurozone’s pathetic performance, a disastrous deterioration.
Unlike that of America, our economy hasn’t recovered from the financial crisis: 2008 was our annus horribilis, and we have severely underperformed ever since. Our failure has not only been statistical: our economic culture has also decayed, with a collapse in service standards, a blunting of our entrepreneurial zeal and the demise of the hard-work ethos that was the hallmark of our Anglo-American exceptionalism. Covid has turbocharged this trend: nothing gets done, we have grown lazy, and everything appears broken. We have adopted an ersatz European social democracy with none of the upsides and all of the downsides. Brexit was an attempt at forcing the establishment to tackle our decline, but so far political parties and the Blob have acted as a cartel to maintain the status quo.
Our most obvious, urgent crisis is the implosion of the NHS. Even though its resources have increased – both in cash and frontline staffing hours – its output has fallen. Thousands are dying, and hundreds of thousands are suffering: its performance is a catastrophe that disgraces Britain. If you are skilled and educated, why live in a country that cannot even provide its citizens with a decent level of healthcare? Why is it still taboo to call for the NHS to be scrapped, and replaced by a better system? If our politics were working properly, the NHS’s chief executive and the bosses of numerous trusts would have been sacked, and we would be in the middle of a national debate about building a new health system fit for the 21st century. We would be discussing charging people who can afford it, and moving towards a German or Swiss-style social insurance model. Instead, the discourse is stuck in its usual hysterical rut, with the Tories minimising the scale of the problem and Labour pretending that even more money is the only solution.
While the NHS is the most obvious symptom of our national decline, immigration, law and order and our energy policy are also deeply broken. With virtually no growth, what is left of our military prowess and geopolitical influence will wither as the welfare state gobbles up an ever greater share of GDP. An insane refusal to allow the construction of the sorts of private homes that make a good life possible, combined with artificially cheap loans, has alienated millions. Labour will only make these problems worse: it has no useful solutions, just more failed tax, spend, class war and woke nostrums.
It is in this context that Rishi Sunak’s new year speech should be assessed. His decision to set out his vision for the country is welcome. Unlike much of the establishment, which veers between delusion about the magnitude of our challenges and a strange resignation that our national failure is inevitable, Sunak is keen to reverse our descent into oblivion. He wants to tackle the “creeping acceptance of a narrative of decline”.
I fear, however, that his approach suffers from a lack of urgency, a gradualism that will be his downfall. One of Sunak’s core beliefs is that there are no quick fixes; another is that if everything is a priority then nothing is. He must also realise that the Tory party is a dysfunctional coalition and the majority he has inherited is chimerical.
The result is a limited, self-consciously “realistic” plan in two-parts: short-term, he proposes five pledges; longer-term, he wants to rebuild a more conservative Britain around education, the family and innovation. The first three of Sunak’s pledges – to halve inflation, to grow the economy and cut the national debt – are largely meaningless, though it is good finally to see the Prime Minister taking responsibility for price rises.
The reduction in inflation amounts to what economists are already predicting, and Sunak didn’t announce any policies that would impact growth or debt this year. He might reform welfare to encourage work: let’s hope he has the appetite for some genuine tough love. He doesn’t want to shake-up the NHS but does want to use more private hospitals, which is highly positive. We shall see what he achieves on small boats.
His longer-term aspirations make sense, but the danger is that he won’t be in power to implement them. Many of the Government’s semi-socialist policies militate against the innovation Sunak hopes will boost GDP. His paean to the family was wonderful, but there was a disconnect between the immensity of the issue and the modesty of his proposed solutions. Better, more widespread mathematical knowledge would be excellent, but so would lower taxes, deregulation and massive health and welfare reform.
The Prime Minister is taking the proverbial pea shooter to a nuclear battlefield. He risks failing to rise to the scale of the challenge: Britain requires shock therapy, not gentle reforms.
