Grinning into the abyss

Joseph Dinnage has an interesting CAPX piece on the way Britain trundles on in spite of having to endure ludicrous levels of political incompetence.

Britain’s leaders are grinning into the abyss

• Britain is succeeding only in how well it is faring under the weight of its own incompetence
• From migration to driving tests, our decision makers get nothing right
• We can only avert political and economic implosion for so long

‘Britain doesn’t need to become great again – it already is.’ That’s the flattering verdict of the former Polish ambassador to both the UK and USA, Piotr Wilczek, writing in the Spectator.

After the year-long gloom fest that was 2025, Wilczek’s positivity will come as a surprise to many. Descriptions of Britain as ‘one of the most astonishing places in the world’ and reminders that we are in fact ‘the sixth-largest economy on earth’ and home to some world’s best universities don’t chime with the experience of 82% of Britons who think the country is in a bad state.


The whole piece is well worth reading because the political incompetence, mendacity and chicanery are so obvious, yet predicting some kind of immanent collapse seems unwise. Daily life still goes on and the private sector held up well during the pandemic debacle in spite of the monumental mess it created.

As if things keep trundling along in spite of grossly incompetent political actors because they don't matter too much. They are merely actors, we know that, but perhaps when things become too embarrassing they are told to change the script or they are simply ignored.  

It isn't competent political oversight and serious decline is impossible to miss, but it is also slow enough to be corrected by honest, energetic and determined competence. Unfortunately we don't have that, but it could be done. Not by the major political parties though.


Zooming in with the microscope, our culture of political avoidance worsens even the smallest of issues. Take driving tests. We have a backlog of 1.1 million tests that were not taken in the 2020/21 financial year due to Covid pandemic, and around 360,000 of these have still not been booked. Last September, the average waiting time for a test was 22 weeks, but 70% of test centres reported waiting times of 24 weeks. Fixes have been suggested. Ellen Pasternack advocates rolling out Approved Driving Instructors to get through the backlog, in much the same way as volunteers were quickly trained to administer Covid vaccines. This is clearly too much like hard work for the Government, which is instead consulting on enshrining the delay into law by requiring learner drivers to wait six months before taking their test.