We have become a ‘can’t do’ nation, so it is no surprise Brexit is stalling

Britain has lost its go-ahead spirit – it is not even able to change a railway timetable without creating chaos

Ireturned from holiday to find myself standing on a railway platform waiting for a train that never arrived. While I had been away the timetable had changed; so the train I usually catch had already departed, or at least it would have done had it not been cancelled. The next one was cancelled, too.

What on earth was going on? Like hundreds of thousands of rail passengers, I was left bemused by the ocean-going incompetence of the rail operators who for weeks had been advising travellers ad nauseam to be ready for the great May 20 switchover, only to be utterly unprepared themselves.

Since I have several alternative options for getting to work, this was no big deal. It just means I won’t use that particular train any more because it is so unreliable. But for some people this was more than an inconvenience. The fiasco occured in the middle of the exam season, so pupils struggled to get to school to sit their GCSES. Holidaymakers unable to reach the airport missed their flights. People late for work said they faced disciplinary action from their bosses, which seems a bit unfair.

How did the rail companies, who had years to prepare for this event, make such a complete pig’s ear of it? There is a worrying tendency in this country for major projects, especially those involving the public sector or quasi-state companies, to go horribly wrong – either to cost too much, not work properly or simply never happen at all.

It is as though we have lost our institutional confidence to do anything proficiently any more, apart from pomp and circumstance. You can be pretty sure that Trooping the Colour on Saturday will go off without a hitch because the participants will have practised to within an inch of their lives and have decades of experience to draw upon. Failure or shoddy presentation is simply not an option.

But in much of what we do as a nation, failure seems to be the default position. And if not failure, then dither. In the annals of government procrastination, a special place is reserved for the saga of London’s airport expansion.

The Cabinet yesterday approved plans for a third runway at Heathrow and these will now be put to MPS for a vote. In almost 50 years of talking about this, that’s as far as we have got. Most homes didn’t have colour TV when the discussions began about expanding the capital’s air capacity. Ted Heath was prime minister when the Roskill Commission published its report on the options in 1971. For as long as I can remember, politicians have hummed and hawed their way around the London airport question before doing nothing at all.

But lo and behold! Chris Grayling, the Transport Secretary, rose in the Commons yesterday to announce that Heathrow is the Government’s favoured option. I could have sworn that he had said this before, as indeed he did in October 2016, when he called the decision “truly momentous”. You may well ask what has happened in the two years since, but it is probably better not to. In any case, even if MPS vote to support the Heathrow option, does anyone really think the third runway will ever be built?

The alternative of a second runway at Gatwick Airport is problematic, not least because of the woeful links to the airport. Many of the trains cancelled in the Great Timetable Debacle were on the Gatwick line. There is little point in expanding an airport you can’t get to. And yet the danger with ruling out Gatwick entirely and proceeding with an option that could become bogged down in years of legal challenges is that we end up with nothing.

We like to think of ourselves as a “can do” nation, as indeed we once were. The hopes of Brexiteers are pinned on the idea that leaving the clutches of the EU will release that spirit again, allowing an open, independent Britain to flourish. This is an upbeat view of our country’s potential that contrasts with those of a more Eeyoreish outlook who think we cannot survive alone.

But for such optimism to be credible, other things need to be done and planned for, such as lower business taxes, less regulation and a boost to infrastructure – not just by expanding airports and railways but investing in energy schemes like fracking and nuclear power plants. Has anything been done along these lines to prepare for such a future? No. At least the Heathrow announcement is forward-looking, the first policy decision of note taken since the election. Yet it is still hard to believe it will ever come to fruition.

We risk becoming mired in a state of near paralysis, talking endlessly of grand projects but rarely delivering on the rhetoric. With a government in charge that has no majority or authority, it is harder than ever to get things done. So when an internal Whitehall assessment of the impact of a “no deal” Brexit was leaked at the weekend there was uproar. Its worstcase scenario predicted shortages of food and medicines because of hold-ups at the ports, with the Army called in to distribute supplies.

Pro-leave campaigners scoffed at such apocalyptic predictions, rightly pointing out that trade does not stop because a country is not in the EU. But what was most worrying about these alleged contingency arrangements was how believable they were.

The officials who drew them up assumed that the systems required for seamless continuity at the borders would not be put in place in time or would not operate effectively when they were. It didn’t cross their minds that it is the Government’s job to ensure that they do work whatever the circumstances.

We are about to open a new chapter in our island story and yet there is a distinct reluctance to turn the page to find out what happens next because we have seen all the cock-ups that have gone before. When we consider the depressing litany of vastly expensive public sector blunders made over the past 20 or 30 years, it is little wonder that many people question whether our politicians or the administration of government are up to the task.

If we can’t change a train timetable without causing chaos, or build an airport runway without talking about it forever, should we be surprised that preparations for something as monumental as Brexit are proving to be so difficult?