The apocalypse has only come to Westminster

There are few things worse for the spirit than obsessing over politics. I was reminded of this wisdom when, sitting in a gleaming airport terminal during one of several visits to infrastructure sites around Britain, I found myself feeling optimistic about the country’s future for the first time in weeks.

On my travels, I’ve seen brand new, hybrid-powered diggers, huge cargos of Ethiopian roses fresh off a plane and crowds of tourists arriving in Britain with a glow of happy excitement on their faces. By contrast, if you listen exclusively to the reverberations emanating from the Palace of Westminster, you start to believe that Britain is on the brink of an apocalypse.

I sat in the press gallery this week as the SNP flounced furiously out of Parliament, I listened to the righteous rebel Tories telling each other it was time to “stand up and be counted” and I heard politicos wondering grimly how the Prime Minister was going to get out of her latest bind.

Across town, however, London was hosting one of the world’s biggest conferences on tech and innovation. There were events on genomics, AI, music, public service delivery, 5G networks, technology to help people improve their management performance or fitness, advice for entrepreneurs on legal issues, financing, expanding to overseas markets and so on. National employment continues to hit record highs and the demand to live and work in Britain from talented people is so strong that our Home Secretary has just increased the UK’S cap on skilled worker visas.

In other words, leave Westminster, and you start to think that there’s only so much damage the people over there can do.

Meanwhile, I’ve been reading Tolstoy’s War and Peace. He has some choice words for those of us who focus too much on interpreting and influencing current events. Referring to the period in which Russia was invaded by Napoleon, he argues: “The majority of the people of that time paid no attention to the broad trend of the nation’s affairs and were only influenced by their private concerns. And it was these very people who played the most useful part in the history of their day. Those who were striving to understand the general course of events, and trying by self-sacrifice and heroism to take a hand in it, were the most useless members of society; they saw everything upside-down.”

It was the foot soldiers and peasants who embodied their age, Tolstoy thought, whereas the generals, would-be heroes, politicians and commentators were only a sort of parasite upon it. We could apply the same logic to modern-day businesspeople, workers, parents, soldiers and the like, who are trying to get on with their lives, versus the “heroic” resigning minister or “insightful” columnist.

But at least those of us who are guilty as charged can console ourselves that, despite his views, Tolstoy himself seems to have been one of us.

A case in point for Tolstoy might have been Iain Duncan Smith’s universal credit scheme. The National Audit Office has just concluded that this expensive overhaul of the benefits system has not delivered value for money, might not have made any difference to employment levels and that, if it has had any impact, officials will never be able to measure it.

One of the problems with modern democracy is that politicians spend years in opposition with nothing to do. This can be a fruitful time in which to clear out the old guard and discover new talent. But it can also beguile politicians into thinking that, if only they could get their hands on the levers of power and implement the exciting new ideas they’ve thought up, the country’s problems would be solved. This is rarely the case.

Usually, a country benefits more from continuity in policy than from innovative rearrangements. Even if the new policies do fix a problem in the current system, they invariably introduce new problems and prompt institutions to forget the lessons they’ve learnt from the old ones.

In almost every major area of policy, Britain has suffered from decades of chopping and changing – health, benefits, schools, pensions, defence, energy, you name it. In fact, the changes that really drive improvement, like greater public service efficiency, usually emerge from technological advances. So London Tech Week might well be the place where real “politics” happens.

The march of technology has its victims, of course. The consumer group Which? has told us we should all be very alarmed by the fact that 60 bank branches are closing every week. The reason for this, of course, is that fewer and fewer people actually need to go into branches any more because they can bank online.

I well remember as a child trips to the local Natwest branch with some adult or other. It was a depressing place, with a ratty carpet, a smell of boredom and a long queue of torpid customers. The only amusement available was playing with the pens that swung on chains from a side counter. I won’t be sorry to see more of them go.