For my part, I would think that the term ‘broken’ implies permanency, and is linked to the introspective doom-laden declinism that has done us so much damage in the past. You know the sort of thing: ‘Once we ruled the world and now we are nothing. We should emigrate to New Zealand. Or rejoin the EU.’
When I started thinking about this, I quickly concluded that Britain has spent several hundred years labouring under the disastrous illusions and errors of its rulers. Fortunately, as Adam Smith observed, ‘there is a great deal of ruin in a nation’ and we have survived. But a great deal of ruin there has nevertheless been.
We should start with the ‘Enlightenment’, which in many ways we (or some of us) rightly cherish – ‘the Age of Reason’, freedom of thought, liberty of expression. But it also began a new era in which people began to believe that human society was perfectible, and that it was the task of governments to advance, or even impose, perfection. All modern politics stems from that. The first to take it literally were the French, who proclaimed 1792 as beginning ‘Year 1’. So disastrous was the outcome that most people took a hasty step back for a century. Then Lenin, Mao and others followed in the Jacobins’ footsteps, imposing virtue by terror and killing millions. We are we are still living with some of the consequences.
What about Britain? Not disaster on this scale, of course, but serious damage none the less. The Victorians, so successful in many ways, followed two disastrous illusions, both of them aiming to remake the world. One was the dogma of Free Trade in the first age of globalisation. The other was the acquisition of empire, at first unplanned, but by the end of the century a deliberate and equally deluded strategy for an imagined world of ‘great empires, not little states’. Free Trade was supposed to create an era of universal harmony based on mutual interest – the utopia resurrected by the globalizers of the 1990s. Empire went hand in hand with this: it would spread modern values and British commerce – including free trade.
But free trade, applied dogmatically, devastated British agriculture and handicapped British industry. Just like today’s Net Zero, it was supported as unquestionable by all progressives – churches, feminists, trade unions, pacifists. It made some people rich, but overall it gave little benefit to the national economy. None of Britain’s competitors followed. Germany and America protected domestic producers while exporting freely to Britain and successfully grew new industries behind tariff walls. Free-trading Britain was left with the older industries like textiles which collapsed in the 1920s.
As for the empire, despite modern Left-wing myths it too gave little or no benefit to British society or the economy. It required enormous resources to defend and govern – all those brilliant young graduates sent off to rule far-flung colonies. It meant high taxes and misallocation of resources. As for trade, we did not need an empire for that: we could and did trade with the USA, South America and Europe. Moreover, empire markets, developed and administered by Britain, were opened to our competitors. That is not to say the empire did no good. It provided peace, protection and development. But not to Britain. Apart from constant imperial peace-keeping, it involved us in two world wars. Britain went to war in 1914 to defend India as much as Belgium. In 1941, it had to try to defend South East Asia from Japan, while struggling with Germany and Italy in Europe. Victory had a very high cost.
Perhaps the most catastrophic policy ever adopted by Britain’s rulers, again with the dogmatic support of the progressive elite, was the interwar ‘appeasement’ of Germany. I sometimes wonder whether the British governing class has not been in a default setting of appeasement at least since the 1920s, and perhaps since the 1900s. Based on the alarming realization that Britain was a small country which had taken on vast global responsibilities, the appeasement mindset assumed that the only thing you could do in the face of a threat was to try to defuse it by being nice. The present government is now enthusiastically applying this repeatedly failed strategy to China, the EU and even Mauritius.
World wars nearly bankrupted Britain. But after bankruptcy, you have to start again. To some extent we did. But then came more bad decisions. A return to the Gold Standard in 1925 pushed Britain into disastrous years of recession until the government was eventually forced to see sense and devalue the pound, after which came quick recovery through new industries and rearmament. The same after the Second World War. Again, we kept sterling over-valued, leading to an obsession with the balance of payments, ‘stop-go’ economic incoherence, and wasteful cancellation of major projects. Britain led the world in nuclear power and aeronautics. But the lead was thrown away. We allowed the nuclear industry to wither. These were the days of loss-making nationalized industries run by national boards and trade unions, a legacy of wartime controls tinged with admiration for Soviet-style ‘planning’. That world has gone – at least for now. The sole exception is ‘our NHS’, the biggest civilian public sector organization in the world. Does any other country have regular national strikes of medical personnel?
If we think our present problems are due to a decline in the quality of politicians, we should think of the Suez Crisis in 1956 – reckless, illegal, botched, and directed by gentlemanly old-school politicians and diplomats. We should also remember their misguided decision soon after to join the European Economic Community, based on an elementary misunderstanding of Britain’s economic performance. They believed that more rapid economic growth in Italy, France and Germany, due in reality to rebuilding and modernising after the war, proved that Britain was a failure. It was ‘the sinking Titanic’ and Europe ‘the lifeboat’. Furthermore, America wanted us in. So they accepted highly unfavourable membership terms – they must ‘swallow the lot’, said the chief negotiator.
They swallowed, ironically, just as the Continent’s ‘economic miracle’ ended for good. Membership brought high inflation, which fuelled the chaos of the 1970s. Under Thatcher and Blair, whole industries closed. With British governments eager to say yes, the EU system permitted and encouraged the replacement of British industries and workers with cheaper goods and people. As with those earlier Grand Illusions, free trade and empire, some people benefitted. Most did not. Yet somehow Britain managed to out-perform the EU. The sluggish European economies were a drag on the British economy – a drag that the present government is desperate to reimpose.
Are we more ‘broken’ today than in the past? We certainly have an unprecedented combination of destructive policies, few of which have ever had popular support. Many of them are rooted in a pseudo-Enlightenment notion that the job of British governments is universal philanthropy, leading to a never-ending chase after the end of the rainbow. ‘Net Zero’ is the purest example of virtuous utopianism. As bad for the economy as the 1920s Gold Standard, it places us at the mercy of China, the real beneficiary of ‘green’ policies and those much-vaunted ‘green jobs’. We have deliberately run down our national defences to a degree rarely if ever seen in history. As the ‘rules-based order’ collapses, the government hopes that Sir Keir Starmer can deter aggressors by blustering. Ever expanding welfare leaves little money for anything else, as people are encouraged to find excuses for inactivity and youth unemployment rockets. Uncontrolled immigration, economically ruinous and socially destructive, continues. The present government, ignoring all warnings, has heedlessly adopted a further portfolio of growth-destroying policies that negate all its other proclaimed aspirations. Finally, nothing seems to work because legitimate powers of government have been deliberately hemmed in by legal and bureaucratic restrictions. Adding insult to injury, Starmer plans ‘alignment’ with the stagnant EU, in shameless defiance of a democratic vote. Any one of these policies would be seriously damaging. All together, they are potentially catastrophic.
Here are symbols of today’s Britain: HS2 with its ‘bat tunnel’ (think of how those billions could have been better spent!) and potholes in every road. We have a state that overreaches itself in vanity projects, but cannot manage the simplest everyday tasks.
You may ask what is the point of my gloomy survey of our history. It is simple. There has never been a golden age when everything – or even most things – worked satisfactorily. People have always had to bear the burdens of huge mistakes made by their rulers. Britain’s people came through, and even flourished – at least by comparison with countries whose rulers inflicted far worse disasters. Nevertheless, they did not come through unscathed. We should not be fooled by the Enlightenment illusion of constant improvement. Things do not only get better.
My only consolation is that damaging policies were never inevitable or in the nature of things: they were choices deliberately made, and they could be unmade. There was always choice in the past, and there is choice now. If Britain is ‘broken’, it can be repaired, as so often in the past, however huge the task. But only if we the people demand it. We get the governments we deserve.
An earlier version of this article appeared in the Daily Telegraph.
