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[                    ]
Britain | A historical mystery

The strange case of Britain's demise

A country that prided itself on stability has seemed to be in
free-fall. Whodunnit?

[20221217_B]
Dec 12th 2022 | GRANTHAM
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THE DRIVEWAY dips as you approach Belton House, the gold-hued facade
rising before you as the road tilts up again. Passing through a
marble-floored hall to the ornate saloon, early visitors would have
admired a portrait of the original master's daughter with a black
attendant. For a while, says Fiona Hall of the National Trust, a
heritage charity that these days owns the property, servants came and
went from the kitchen wing through a discreet tunnel. A magnificent
staircase led finally to a rooftop cupola, and views of an estate
that stretched beyond the horizon.

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Built in the 1680s, the idyllic mansion embodies a costume-drama view
of Britain's past that is widely cherished at home and abroad. Its
location in Lincolnshire makes it emblematic in another way: in the
heart of England, in a region that in 2016 voted decisively for
Brexit, and on the outskirts of Grantham, a typical market town that
was the birthplace of Margaret Thatcher, the country's most important
post-war prime minister. Previously the venue for a murder-mystery
evening featuring suspects in period dress, this history-laden spot
is an apt place to ponder a different sort of mystery. Who nobbled
Britain?

Alas, the victim is in a parlous state. A country that likes to think
of itself as a model of phlegmatic common sense and good-humoured
stability has become an international laughing stock: three prime
ministers in as many months, four chancellors of the exchequer and a
carousel of resigning ministers, some of them repeat offenders. "The
programme of the Conservative Party," declared Benjamin Disraeli in
1872, "is to maintain the constitution of the country." The latest
bunch of party leaders have broken their own laws, sidelined official
watchdogs, disrespected Parliament and dishonoured treaties.

Not just a party, or a government, but Britain itself can seem to be
kaput. England's union with Scotland, cemented not long after Belton
House was built, is fraying. Real incomes have disappointed since the
crash of 2008, with more years of stagnation to come as the economy
limps behind those of most other rich countries. The reckless
tax-slashing mini-budget in September threatened to deliver the coup
de grace. The pound tanked, markets applied a "moron premium" to
British sovereign debt and the Bank of England stepped in to save the
government from itself.

Today the economy is entering recession, inflation is high and pay
strikes are disrupting railways, schools and even hospitals. The
National Health Service (nhs), the country's most cherished
institution, is buckling. Millions of people are waiting for
treatment in hospitals. Ambulances are perilously scarce.

In Grantham, a town of neat red-brick terraced houses, half-timbered
pubs and 45,000 residents, the malaise shows up in a penumbra of
hardship. Amid staff shortages in the NHS--and an uproar--the local
emergency-care service has been cut back. Immured in stacks of
nappies and cornflakes at the food bank he runs, Brian Hanbury says
demand is up by 50% on last year, and is set to rocket as heating
bills bite. Rachel Duffey of PayPlan, a debt-solutions firm that is
one of the biggest local employers, predicts that need for help with
debts is "about to explode" nationwide, as people already feeling the
pinch come to the end of fixed-rate mortgage deals. As for the
mini-budget: "It was a shambles," laments Jonathan Cammack, steward
of Grantham Conservative Club.

Natural causes

Whodunnit? A rich cast of suspects is implicated in the debacle. Some
are obvious, others lurk in the shadows of history, seeping poison
rather than dealing sudden blows. A few are outsiders, but as in many
of the spookiest mysteries, most come from inside the house.

To begin with, Britons with long memories may detect a familiar
condition: a government that has reached decrepit old age. A
parliamentary remark in October about soon-to-quit Liz Truss--"the
prime minister is not under a desk"--brought to mind immortal lines
from the death-spiral of the Labour administration that lasted from
1997 to 2010. Then the chancellor referred to the prime minister's
henchmen as "the forces of hell"; "Home secretary's husband put porn
on expenses", newspapers reported. In the mid-1990s, at the fag-end
of Tory rule that began in 1979, a run of MPs were caught with their
pants down or their fingers in the till in another relay of shame.

Britain seems trapped in a doom loop of superannuated governments
which, after a term or two of charismatic leadership and reformist
vim, wind up bereft of talent, sinking in their own mistakes and
wracked by backbench rebellions; in office but barely in power.
Eventually routed at the polls, it then takes the guilty parties
several parliamentary terms to recover. In opposition, both Labour
and the Tories have determinedly learned the wrong lessons from
defeat before alighting on the right ones. In a system with two big
parties, for either to lose its mind is dangerous. For both to do so
at once--as happened when, amid recent Tory convulsions, Labour was
led by Jeremy Corbyn, a hard-left throwback--is a calamity.

"A family with the wrong members in control," George Orwell wrote of
the English. Yet a repeating cycle of senile governments does not, by
itself, explain the national plight. Those previous administrations
never plumbed the depth of disarray the current lot has reached.
Something else has struck a country that has spewed out ruinous
policies and a sequence of leaders resembling a reverse ascent of
man: from plausible but glib David Cameron, to out-of-her-depths
Theresa May, disgraceful Boris Johnson and then Ms Truss, probably
the worst premier in modern history. Philip Cowley of Queen Mary
University of London says that, in bygone days, Rishi Sunak would at
this stage of his career have been a junior Treasury minister, rather
than the latest prime minister.

Violence has been inflicted on the body politic--most brazenly, by
Brexit, in the referendum, with 52%. Parties in power for over a
decade are bound to scrape the bottom of the talent barrel. In this
case, much of the Tory barrel was poured down the drain when support
for Brexit became a prerequisite for office. The outcome has been
rule by chancers and cranks. Mr Johnson's Brexit machinations put him
in Downing Street; the tribalism that the campaign fostered kept him
there for much longer than he deserved. Brexit has wrecked the Tory
party--and yet it is, broadly speaking, the side that won.

[20221217_BRD002]

Brexit has also institutionalised lying in British politics, as the
dishonesty of Brexiteer promises segued into the pretence that they
are being fulfilled. They are not. "Nothing much has changed," Mr
Cammack in Grantham says glumly. "Life just keeps going on." But some
things have changed for the worse. Investment is down and inflation
higher than it would have been inside the European Union. Labour,
skilled and otherwise, is scarce. Farmers are losing crops for want
of workers. In Lincolnshire, says Johanna Musson of the National
Farmers Union, tulip-growers are especially fretful. The county's
exports have fallen as, across Britain, Brexit-induced red tape leads
some businesses to give up on European markets.

In 1975, during an earlier strike-hit era, Britain held another
referendum on its relationship with Europe. Roy Jenkins, a pro-Europe
statesman, predicted that, if it left, it would wind up in "an old
people's home for faded nations". Give or take a detour to the
lunatic asylum, that judgment looks prescient. The economy is
floundering and the country's international prestige is plummeting:
precisely the future Brexit was meant to avoid.

Still, as any murder-mystery aficionado knows, the obvious suspect is
rarely the right one. In the curious case of Britain's decline,
Brexit is as much a weapon as the ultimate culprit.

The hand of history

Many of the factors behind the decision to leave have roughed up
other countries, too. Lots of people on both sides of the Atlantic
crave simple answers to complex questions, and populists have
provided them. Faith in mainstream parties has waned, even as
expectations of government have risen. The line between politics and
entertainment has blurred, aggravating, in Britain, an old reluctance
to take things too seriously, and a weakness for wits and eccentrics
who cock a snook at convention. That is less damaging when there is
substance behind their insouciance and discipline beneath the
panache.

Ben Page, the boss of Ipsos, a global research firm, points to what
he terms the "loss of the future", common across the West but acute
in Britain. In 2008, as the financial crisis struck, only 12% of
Britons thought youngsters would have a worse quality of life than
their parents, Mr Page notes. Now that figure is 41%. As elsewhere,
people worry about immigration and feel threatened by globalisation.
All this makes Britain's predicament seem less an inside job than
part of a wider takedown of democracy.

But other likely suspects lurk in the attic of British history. One
grew up down the road from Belton House. The grocer's shop in
Grantham above which Margaret Roberts, later Thatcher, was born is
now a chiropractor and beautician. A statue of her put up earlier
this year was quickly egged and defaced (she endured worse in real
life). Her legend still looms over the country--particularly her
Conservative Party.

Thatcher's 11-year rule was an amalgam of caution, patience, luck and
boldness. But among some Tories it is often misremembered as a
prolonged ecstasy of tax-cutting, fight-picking, union-bashing and
shouting "No, no, no" at Brussels. The rows over Europe that erupted
on her watch rumbled on till the referendum of 2016. For some, she
bequeathed a hunch that if economic policy doesn't hurt, it isn't
working. Her ousting nurtured a lasting taste for party bloodletting.
To court Tory members, Ms Truss even seemed to mimic Thatcher's
wardrobe. (It took just 81,326 of them to put her in Downing Street.)

Peer deeper into the past and more evidence comes to light. Recall,
for instance, that painting in the saloon at Belton House, of the
girl and her black attendant, possibly a slave. Her family, the
Brownlows, had links to both Caribbean plantations and the East India
Company, which helps explain the house's splendid collection of Asian
porcelain. The wider legacy of Britain's former empire, runs a
plausible theory, is a gnawing sense of unmet expectations and a
fatal delusion of grandeur over the country's place in the world.

For Sathnam Sanghera, author of "Empireland", a powerful book about
the largely unspoken effects of imperialism, "the original sin behind
Brexit is empire." The circumstances in which that empire was lost
may have redoubled the psychic blow: in the wake of the second world
war, during which, at least in the popular memory, Britain stood
nobly alone against the Nazi onslaught. Afterwards it found itself
diminished, broke and outdone by erstwhile foes, nurturing entwined
feelings of greatness and grievance and haunted by phantom invasions.
As the Irish author Fintan O'Toole has quipped, "England never got
over winning the war." In his view, Brexit was "imperial England's
last last stand".

[20221217_B]

Perhaps not quite the last. Even now you can hear an echo of imperial
hubris in the tendency of some British politicians to talk to EU
negotiators, or the international bond markets, as if they were
waiters in a Mediterranean bistro, liable to comply if only you
repeat yourself loudly enough. It resounds in hollow boasts about
having the best health care or army (or football team) in the world,
in the yen to "punch above our weight", and in the pursuit of a pure
sort of sovereignty which, in an age of climate change, pandemics and
imported gas, no longer exists.

"Until we face up to our history," thinks Mr Sanghera, "we're just
going to carry on being dysfunctional." On this analysis, the
unravelling of Britain is a kind of karma.

In the 18th century, with a shrug

Maybe. Yet imperialism, greatness and all that have always been more
an elite preoccupation than a popular one. In his enlightening new
book, "The Strange Survival of Liberal Britain", Vernon Bogdanor of
King's College London cites a survey of Britons conducted in 1951,
when the loss of empire ought to have been most raw. Half of
respondents couldn't name a single colony (one suggested
Lincolnshire). Odd as it is to say of a country that for centuries
ruled swathes of the world, it may not be ruptures like the end of
empire or Brexit that have done in modern Britain, but, less
dramatically, a kind of long-term drift; not violence, in other
words, but neglect.

Think back to the era in which Belton House was built. After the
execution of Charles I in 1649 and the short-lived English
Commonwealth, the monarchy had been restored. Compared with other
European nations, the English got their big revolution done early--but
then thought better of it, afterwards nudging forwards to
constitutional monarchy and democracy. This piecemeal approach has
characterised the country's political evolution ever since. Walter
Bagehot, a great Victorian editor of The Economist, noted the habit
of compromising on thorny constitutional issues--or ducking them. "The
hesitating line of a half-drawn battle was left to stand for a
perpetual limit," he wrote of such botches, and "succeeding
generations fought elsewhere."

Booby traps were often left behind. One lies in the fuzzy and weak
restraints on the British executive. As Lord Hailsham, a Tory
grandee, warned in 1976, a government with a secure majority in the
House of Commons has an inbuilt tendency towards "elective
dictatorship". The House of Lords, which is meant to scrutinise
legislation, is the fudge par excellence. In an absurd backroom deal
of 1999, the hereditary peers who once dominated it were
ejected--except for 92 of them. They are still there; when one dies,
another is elected to replace him. Those are the only elections to
Parliament's upper chamber.

It is hard to see many other countries tolerating such a farrago.
Meanwhile, a gentlemanly understanding that leaders would regulate
their personal behaviour, once known as the "good chaps" theory of
government, did not survive contact with Mr Johnson. As when a mob
realises the rule of law is a confidence trick, it turned out that a
few good shoves could dispense with much of the flimflam of
oversight.

Or consider the myopic attitudes of successive governments to
devolution. When it created the Scottish Parliament, Sir Tony Blair's
Labour administration did not fully anticipate the subsequent surge
in English nationalism. Nor did it foresee how, after taking office
in Edinburgh, the canny, pro-independence Scottish National Party (
SNP) would enjoy both the dignity of power and the sheen of
opposition to Westminster. Now Brexit is inflicting more casual
vandalism on the union, undermining support for it in Scotland and
Northern Ireland, which both voted to remain in the EU.

Whereas once Scottish independence was an in-or-out proposition, says
Sir John Curtice of the University of Strathclyde, it has become a
choice between competing unions, British and European. As the SNP
vows to rejoin the EU, some Scottish Remainers who had rejected
independence are embracing the idea. For some in Northern Ireland,
explains Katy Hayward of Queen's University Belfast, the mere fact of
Brexit made a united Ireland more desirable; the region's awkward
post-Brexit position has led still more to think unification is
likelier than it was before. Across Britain, a majority thinks the
union will fall apart. It is not on the cards yet, but one day
Britain may dissolve itself by accident.

Drift and neglect have undermined more than the constitution and the
union. David Kynaston, the pre-eminent historian of 20th-century
England, invokes Sir Siegmund Warburg, a German-born banker who
helped shake up the City (on the slide as an equity market in the
aftermath of Brexit). Warburg detested the British fondness for the
phrase, "We'll cross that bridge when we come to it." As Mr Kynaston
observes, Britain is not a place that is "good at grasping the
nettle".

With some glaring, uncharacteristic exceptions--Thatcher's battle with
the coal miners, the bust-up over Brexit--Britain tends to dislike
confrontation, especially the ideological kind, perhaps a legacy of
the civil war. It prefers irony to ideas and douses plain-speaking in
good manners; its people have a quaint instinct to apologise when a
stranger steps on their foot. Alongside this squeamishness, says Mr
Kynaston, runs a "deep-dyed anti-intellectual empiricism", and an
inclination to tackle problems "pragmatically, as and when they
arise, not looking for trouble in advance".

This reticence has costs, not least through its complicity in the
underpowered economy. Consider the glacial planning regime, or--an
even more venerable problem--the skewed education system. It produces
a narrow elite, dominated for too long by the alumni of a few private
schools: Brexit and the mini-budget can both be traced to the playing
fields of Eton, attended by Mr Johnson, Mr Cameron, who botched the
referendum, and Kwasi Kwarteng, very briefly the chancellor. Less
conspicuous, but at least as damaging, is the country's long
educational tail.

[20221217_BRD004]

It has recently made some progress in international education
rankings, but a stubborn quarter or so of 11-year-olds in England are
unable to read at the expected level. A higher share of teenage boys
are not in work, education or training than in most other rich
countries. As for those who stay in the classroom: the "greater part
of what is taught in schools and universities...does not seem to be the
most proper preparation" for "the business which is to employ
[students] during the remainder of their days." That was Adam Smith
in "The Wealth of Nations", published in 1776. Employers make similar
complaints in 2022.

In a post-imperial, post-industrial, ever-more competitive world, all
that contributes to a skills shortage and a long-term productivity
gap with other advanced economies. The fat years under Sir Tony and
Gordon Brown disguised these shortcomings--until the crash, when it
became clear that the boom they oversaw was over-reliant on financial
services and debt. Using the fruits of Thatcherite economics to fund
a more generous state had seemed a political elixir; it turned out to
be a fair-weather formula. In the kindest of circumstances, New
Labour left some of the hardest problems unsolved. Most new jobs went
to foreign-born workers. The number of working-age adults receiving
welfare benefits barely shifted.

The cradle of the Industrial Revolution has not yet found a secure
niche in the 21st-century economy. Nor has it figured out how to pay
sustainably for the sort of public services that Britons expect. If,
in the matter of Britain's meltdown, Thatcher is an accessory before
the fact, so is Sir Tony.

The country-house red herring

In the upstairs-downstairs, country-house vision of Britain, the
country is a museum of class, with overlords surveying their lands
and minions scurrying below stairs as they once did at Belton House.
Famously, Disraeli wrote of "two nations", the rich and the poor, as
distinct as "inhabitants of different planets". England, especially,
is indeed a class-ridden place, whose denizens still make snap
judgments about each other's backgrounds based on accents, shoes and
haircuts. Too many at the bottom of the ladder cannot see a way up
it. Some at the top still benefit from unearned deference.
Politicians often share this binary outlook, thinking the business of
government is to squeeze the rich and comfort the poor, or vice
versa.

But Disraeli's formulation is too crude for 21st-century Britain.
After generations of muddling through, it is in large part a country
of people who are not exactly poor but are by no means rich. Instead
they are "just about managing", as Mrs May, the last prime minister
but two, described them.

Take Grantham, a constituency in which the average income in 2020 was
PS25,600 ($32,900), just below the national median. (This year,
Britain's GDP per person will be more than 25% lower than America's,
measured at purchasing-power parity.) Amid the cost-of-living
squeeze, says Mr Hanbury at the food bank, not only households that
rely on welfare benefits but nurses and teachers are coming unstuck:
"People live so close to the edge."

It is only a 70-minute train ride to London, but power in Westminster
seems remote, reflects Father Stuart Cradduck of St Wulfram's, a
lovely medieval church behind Grantham's low-slung high street.
Lincolnshire, he says, feels like a "forgotten county". Kelham Cooke,
the leader of the local council, says young people who leave for
university often don't come back. Regional inequality is another old,
hard problem that successive British governments have only
desultorily tackled, watching on as London sucked in talent and
capital and other places fell behind.

There is something to be said for drift; or, to put it another way,
gradualism. A "highly original quality of the English", Orwell wrote
in 1947, "is their habit of not killing one another." By slowly
expanding the franchise and incorporating the labour movement into
democratic politics, Britain avoided continental-style extremism in
the 19th and 20th centuries. When liberalism perished elsewhere in
Europe in the 1930s, observes Mr Bogdanor, it survived in Britain.
Compared with places such as France or Italy, where the far right is
resurgent--or with ultrapolarised America--it is healthy in Britain
still. Ms Truss's stint in Downing Street was inglorious, but, Mr
Bogdanor notes, she was removed quietly and efficiently, without
riots or fuss. The flawed parliamentary system worked.

So drift can be benign. But it can also take you into a cul-de-sac--or
off a cliff. In Britain it has led to economic mediocrity and
disgruntlement, which in turn contributed to the yelp of Brexit and
the desperate magical thinking of the mini-budget. Senile
governments, self-inflicted wounds, the blowback of empire, corrosive
global trends, the spectres of bygone leaders: they are all
accomplices. But the main cause of Britain's woe belongs less at a
crime scene than in a school report. In the end, it didn't try hard
enough. #

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This article appeared in the Britain section of the print edition
under the headline "The strange case of Britain's demise"

Britain December 17th 2022

  * The strange case of Britain's demise
  * Britain's economic record since 2007 ranks near the bottom among
    peer countries
  * The British government and the unions dig in on train strikes
  * Why do Harry and Meghan wind people up?

The winter warThe winter war

From the December 17th 2022 edition

Discover stories from this section and more in the list of contents

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[20221217_WOT969]

Britain's economic record since 2007 ranks near the bottom among peer
countries

Many Western countries have had a rough time of it. But Britain has
some specific maladies

[20221217_BRD000]

Why do Harry and Meghan wind people up?

The couple represent a return to an old norm for the royal family

---------------------------------------------------------------------
[20221217_BRP001]

The British government and the unions dig in on train strikes

A battle for public sympathy alongside a dispute over pay and
conditions

---------------------------------------------------------------------

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