Even Biden’s America is booming compared with basket-case Britain

TOur many problems are not shared across the Atlantic, where economic growth is strong and public services are run properly

Mississippi, the poorest state in the US, is set to overtake the UK in terms of GDP per capita in the very near future. Just think about that for a moment

here have been great ructions in Washington DC this week, and as usual when great ructions happen elsewhere it is impossible not to feel slight pleasure. What a consolation it is. In the UK we may have been through the year of the three prime ministers. We may be entering our seventh year of political turmoil, but at least we haven’t seen events like those in DC.

What are those events? Principally the inability of the House of Representatives to nominate a Speaker. Despite the Republicans having a majority in the House, since November’s mid-term elections they have struggled to agree on a candidate. The different factions within the Republican Party are at war and so the frontrunner, Kevin Mccarthy, has kept failing to reach the necessary number of votes (218) to gain election.

One of the more controversial members of his own party this week got up in the House and nominated Donald Trump as the next Speaker. Something which, while not remotely possible, would undoubtedly add to the gaiety of nations, if not to the stability of the United States. After a dozen votes this is a log-jam not seen since before the Civil War.

Of course, it is easy for outsiders to feel a certain sense of relief. In Britain, we might rejoice quietly that we are not the only dysfunctional democracy in the world. Remember the period in 2017-18 when it really did look like Parliament and the people were at an impasse reminiscent of our own Civil War a good two centuries before America’s? That was a grim period in British politics. Or imagine being the Italians – the butt of so many jokes over the years about their alleged ungovernability. So many countries in Europe now have the opportunity to look to America and think: “Well, at least it’s not just us.”

But there is a difference. And it’s not that subtle. Which is that although America currently looks politically ungovernable, economically it is in a different league. It is bigger, obviously, and it has five times the population of the UK and so is able to do much more. But on a simple production basis, and a simple financial basis it is we, not they, who are in the biggest trouble.

The American economy isn’t nearly in the same doldrums as the British one. The dollar remains painfully strong against sterling (as visitors to the US will notice). And this isn’t just a reality among the coastal states. Last year I visited Mississippi for the first time. It is the poorest state in the US. Even in its capital of Jackson you can see row upon row of empty, abandoned houses. There are decent areas of town where you can still find yourself living only a couple of blocks away from places that look almost bombed out.

And yet even this, the poorest state in the United States, is set to overtake the UK in terms of GDP per capita in the very near future. Just think about that for a moment. The poorest American state, ridiculed for its poverty, could be richer than the UK. How on earth did this happen?

One reason is that America allows competition and positively encourages people to move around. When you see abandoned streets in Jackson, St Louis, Baltimore or dozens of other cities in the US, it is not simply a sign of urban decay. It is a sign of people moving when the jobs move. That is what happens in the US – in general, if the jobs go, you go.

Compare that with the UK, where we still have whole communities stuck in towns set up for industries that no longer exist. Do some people leave them? Of course. Is it regarded as normal to leave if the work leaves? No, quite the opposite. In many towns in Britain people wait around for jobs to come back that simply won’t.

And then you have the most important flexibility in American life. That is the flexibility of individual states to make their own destiny. If Mississippi starts to boom in the coming years it will be because it has watched the situation in neighbouring states like Tennessee and wants part of the action.

In recent years, cities such as Nashville, Tennessee have seen a huge influx of people from hightaxing states. Everybody now talks about the attractiveness of Ron Desantis’s Florida, but a similar story of wooing of individuals and businesses is happening across the US.

I recently met a young couple who had married and moved to New Hampshire. It’s very beautiful up there, I remarked to them. Yes, they confirmed, but there is also the advantage of a zero state sales tax rate and a flat 5 per cent tax rate on individual dividend and interest income.

What, by contrast, can we do in the UK? Well, you can live in Wales where the docile and dimwitted Mark Drakeford tinkers with things he has no business in and fails at every major task. You have Nicola Sturgeon’s Scotland, where amid an epidemic of drug deaths, an almost pathological desire to disappear the reality of biology and a decline in education standards not seen in our lifetimes, the executive continues to pretend that everything in the world would be solved if only they could cut themselves off from the dreaded Westminster.

And then you have that awful, wicked, tax-producing south-east of England. The part of the country that actually provides most of the tax-yield and yet is spoken about by regional politicians as though it is the ball-and-chain around their otherwise Icaruslike potential.

Where do you go in the UK if you want to make your fortune? I recently met a young self-made millionaire who had been introduced to a member of our government who asked him how he had made his money. “By leaving Britain,” was his honest reply.

We are caught in a winter of strikes because the biggest issues in the land are presented as being above-inflation pay rises for NHS staff, train drivers and postal workers. Watching Sir Keir Starmer’s new year message made me roll up my sleeves and then put my head in my hands.

None of these people know what they are doing. None of them know – or seem to have the ambition to create – a booming economy. We can’t even make decisions about our energy future without people complaining that there might be a tiny rumble – roughly the same as that of a nearby motorway – if any shale-gas exploration is attempted.

And our whole country pays a heavy price for this nonsense. Energy costs in the United States are far below those in Britain because America has kept thinking about its energy needs, not farmed them out to a schoolchild from Scandinavia. America has been fracking, drilling and much more (even under a Biden-run administration hostile to much of this) because it did not fall for a Kremlin campaign waged over the past decade to make Europe dependent on Russian gas.

Oh, but the NHS, I hear some say. “We have our beautiful universal system but in America you must produce a credit card every time you go to A&E.”

Well, you know, in the US you get the best medical care in the world. And the nurses don’t strike. And the doctors don’t demand ever-more money. And if you don’t like the care you receive you can go elsewhere. Cancer treatment is better regarded in the US than in our beloved, ill-run money pit of an NHS. And somehow, just somehow, this excellent care reaches all sections of society. It is essentially universal.

So sure, the US may be in a political stalemate. But they have things to look forward to. Not just an economy that is regrowing, but Ron Desantis in 2024. What do we have? Stagnation followed by Keir Starmer in 2024. Let’s hear anyone whoop for that.