Damian Pudner has a useful CAPX piece on why so many people from Tony Blair upwards know why the UK political status quo is running aground.
Time is running out for the political status quo
Even Tony Blair – the man who built managerial Britain – recognises the state has grown too large
For 30 years, the state has expanded on the misguided assumption that someone else would always pay
We are stuck in a slow, painful managed decline
This week I was fortunate enough to sit down with the Rt Hon Liz Truss. We discussed the usual things you expect. The state of the UK economy, the Bank of England, the Civil Service, and to quote Truss, how ‘Power was taken from the elected and given to progressive bureaucrats and judges’. I must admit I found our conversation refreshing.
So let me be just as direct. British politics has reached a point where the old arguments no longer work and the old settlement is visibly falling apart.
For 30 years, the British state has expanded on the misguided assumption that someone else would always pay. Taxpayers. Bond markets. The next generation. That growth was always just around the corner. That all we needed was more spending, more regulation, more quangos, more debt, more promises. And that the productive part of the economy – the private sector – would simply absorb it, that bond markets would keep lending to us, that the public would keep accepting the situation.
Well, they won’t. And deep down, everyone in Westminster knows it.
The whole piece is well worth reading, especially now, with old-style political huckster Andy Burnham in hot pursuit of Keir Starmer's position. Burnham doesn't have the nous nor the answers, but neither do far too many voters.
Time is running out for the political status quo. And the public, I suspect, is far ahead of Westminster on this.
Time is running out for the political status quo. And the public, I suspect, is far ahead of Westminster on this.
5 comments:
I have some regard for the concept of cliodynamics. The idea that an Elite forms, spreads more and more patronage around ( particularly to the children of the Elite) and then the whole thing collapses under its own weight into a period of chaos before a new Elite steps up.
My guess is that our old Elite are followers of the Universal Davos Policy and cannot conceive of it failing them. They keep trying to restart the good times they are used to, not seeing that we are in a period of chaos and old nostrums no longer work.
Might explain why Stumbler has had so many relaunches and U-turns trying to find the magic cure for a dead horse he keeps beating.
"...a period of chaos before a new Elite steps up."
iirc that's one of the themes of "1984".
But to adapt another old quote, "there is a deal of ruin in an elite", and they won't go down without a fight. Notice how there is already talk of political strikes to paralyse a Reform government.
DJ and Peter - it's possible that elites have been evolving for a long time into something much more diffuse and more difficult to define.
The old insular upper middle class which used to run things, senior government officials, bishops, chief constables, generals, admirals, bankers, business leaders and so on morphed into something else decades ago, but without the chaos. They seem to have morphed into more varied and fluid influential networks with weaker national ties. Possibly more adaptable too.
Tony Blair popping up again doesn't seem odd, he never left his elite networks and in that sense he was never really deposed.
Here's what to do to avoid chaos and painful ruin.
1) Abolish the following,
Net Zero, all subsidies to green energy companies, universities, the home office, the entire secondary education system, (as presently constituted), quangos, and foreign aid.
2) Large public investment to be allocated to building modern.
Coal fired power plants steel works etc.
Revision of welfare system to make work pay, (they've only been talking about it for the last fifty years).
Reform tax system gradually. Allow inward investment and fracking, not to mention North Sea drilling. Abolish all financial support and subsidies to big business and send their lobbyists packing, transfer any support to growing new businesses.
Start a program of widespread deregulation, before it destroys us all.
Now if only we had someone in power to make a start on it!
Tammy - no that's too sensible, our elites have given up on sensible because voters might understand it. It isn't clear why they think that though, given current polling numbers.
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