Britain’s decline won’t be halted
Every decade or so, the UK goes into crisis, says Samuel McIlhagga. This opens up a brief period of reflection. Then the gate closes, the crisis ends, and our overmighty financial sector and the lingering reputation of venerable British institutions cushion the decline until the next crisis appears.
That the decline is real is obvious enough if you look at growth, productivity, investment, capacity, research and development, quality of life, GDP per capita, wealth distribution and real wage growth measured by unit labour cost. All are either falling or stagnant. We are on track to be poorer than Poland in a decade, according to the Financial Times, and have a lower median real income than Slovenia by 2024. Many provincial areas already have lower GDPs than eastern Europe.
This crisis has deep historic roots. The “distinctively innovative and moralistic culture” bequeathed by the English Civil War flowed into America’s east coast elites even as it was crushed by the aristocracy at home. Despite early industrial supremacy, bourgeois culture then died a premature death and the UK’s elite contented itself with “living on the rents of a bygone age”. The result is a social order that incentivises speculative, consultative and financial services work over manufacturing, research and production. That allowed the US and Germany to overtake Britain in the late 19th century in areas crucial for industry.
Occasional attempts to turn all this around, most recently led by Dominic Cummings, have all ended in failure because they underestimated the geopolitical and economic constraints. Despite comparing itself to the US and EU, the UK lacks their “productive power and highly skilled populations”. “A move towards increased technocracy, even if it could survive the austerity impulse of successive British governments, cannot undo the constraints, forged over centuries, that the UK operates under.” Having tried to reform the state from within, Cummings was “spat back out by it”.
When will the long decline end in the final big crash? We don’t know. As long as London remains relatively prosperous, the British elite “may continue to manage the UK’s decline for decades, even another century”. In the meantime, “things go well enough for the people that matter and there are plenty of distractions for those who don’t. And eventually, you find yourself just another vassal state in a cold, grey ocean.”