Why Britain stays ungreat.
“With all thy getting, get understanding”
If there were an award for comedic incompetence in statecraft, Britain would win, hands down. The Sceptred Isle has thoroughly botched Brexit since the referendum took place in June 2016. The country’s economy today is at a virtual standstill, and how the divorce with the EU will unfold remains a mystery. The ruling conservative government has been so inept that the inconceivable could happen: The anti-American, anti-Semitic, malignant
Marxist leader of the Labour Party, Jeremy
Corbyn, might become the next prime minister. (Seven Labour members of Parliament recently quit the party because of his venomous views.)
The country had an opportunity to shape itself as a global economic powerhouse, combining the best of Switzerland, Hong Kong and Singapore. The soaring success this would have engendered would have had EU countries hankering to be part of the United Kingdom. Instead, the Tory regime opted for drift, confusion and the pandering politics of more “compassionate” spending and more regulation. Barack Obama would have been right at home.
• Ineffectual insurgents. After the referendum and the resignation of the incumbent prime minister David Cameron, who had engineered the vote in the belief that Brexit would never pass, conservatives chose as the country’s new leader an individual who opposed Brexit; the principal pro-Brexit conspirators had fallen to squabbling among themselves and were unable to unite behind a candidate. It’s been an unseemly mess ever since. Compounding the incompetence, Theresa May called a snap election, thinking her party would win in an easy landslide. Instead, it lost its absolute majority.
A government of timorous hacks. Sharply cut income taxes or even enact a flat tax, as a number of central and eastern European nations have done? Continue to prune the bloated bureaucracy, as Cameron had been successfully carrying out since he took office in 2010? Reduce burdens on business, especially startups? Heaven forfend! Such sensible measures would beget criticisms of helping the rich, of being pro-business and antienvironment. Theresa May and her craven crew had no stomach for any of the pro-growth boldness of Margaret Thatcher, who, since being ousted from 10 Downing Street nearly three decades ago, has become a virtual nonperson in her party.
Needless to say, Britain couldn’t even fathom becoming an economic dynamo by unilaterally abolishing virtually all tariffs and trade barriers, as Hong Kong did after WWII, which was critical in its turning from a poor, overcrowded speck of real estate with no natural resources into one of the richest economies on earth. Not to mention becoming the undisputed financial capital of Europe—or even the world—by making the pound as good as gold, as Isaac Newton did in 1717, when he ran the Royal Mint. The golden pound laid the foundation for Britain’s incubating the Industrial Revolution and amassing history’s greatest empire.