Here’s a telling statistic about the United Kingdom. Between 1850 and 1992 more than 200 reservoirs were regularly opened across the country, even during World War Two: seven were dug in 1955 alone. Since 1992, not one has been constructed. What goes for reservoirs goes for every other conceivable aspect of infrastructure. Britain is a country living off its past like fallen aristocrats, in deadly hock to nostalgia and expecting a comfort of life way beyond its means.
Such is the thesis of Torsten Bell (Judd School, PPE Oxford, Resolution Foundation and now Labour MP) He presents his thesis in a work of immense detail and careful scholarship called Great Britain? How We Get Our Future Back. He details the consequences of our doleful mismanagement in terms of education, poverty wages, health, and a tax-and-benefits system of Byzantine complexity and contradiction. Yet it is chapter five on investment which diagnoses the root causes of British woes. Compared to other OECD countries, the British are terrible at it, both public and private. This in turn leads to appalling weaknesses in productivity, entailing less investment, and so on etc, etc. Downwards. The consequences of this economic stagnation will be a rise in political extremism as different ethnic and cultural groups fight over the shares of a declining national cake.
His analysis and prescriptions read like the DNA of the present Labour Government. It fits into a long tradition of well-meaning analyses of what’s wrong with Britain. Yet he cautions against the pat solutions of Centre Left bien-pensants (our problems are much deeper than membership or not of the EU) He calls for a new patriotism, based on our undoubted strengths in things like service industries. In this and many other recommendations, he has much good to say. But will the British want his, and his party’s, medicine? Consider this:
Anyone serious about governing Britain should plan on taxes remaining at higher levels than we are used to (p189)
Paying taxes is the litmus test of patriotism: if you won’t put your hand in your pocket, how serious are your protestations of national love? Our fellow countrymen grumble about health and roads: but they hate, viscerally hate, paying taxes, as we know from our lived experience of them. So any new ethos based on shared experience will die stillborn; there are still too many comfortable with the mental furniture of our decline, at least among the English.
Great Britain PLC is a failing company: underinvested , indebted, overdrawn and still overpaid in many grades. A merger was tried between 1973 and 2016, but it failed. Now the only option is a foreign takeover. How hostile shall it be?
We have one criticism of the hardback The graphs are printed in weak grey ink, thereby making comprehension difficult at times, and spoiling the hard work of the author and his researchers
Torsten Bell Great Britain? How We Get Our Future Back The Bodley Head 2024
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