Radical moderation: work-shy Britain needs a boot up the backside

Is Britain losing faith in itself? The signs are there. The country is like an elderly inmate in a care home who has taken another turn for the worse. The family – those who care, that is – are hoping for the best, but few really believe that a full recovery is on the cards and there is talk of, well, perhaps it would be for the best if nurse intervened with a dose of morphine so that the rest of us could get back to the pub. 

The analogy breaks down, of course, with the realisation that nations don’t die, they merely drop down the rankings, sometimes for centuries. Think of China in the Victorian era, or Spain and Portugal in the seventeen-hundreds, or Turkey as the Ottoman Empire lost its grip. 

During almost the entirety of my lifetime, and I am 74, Britain has been running to stand still. The effort of staying the course in the Second World War, following the exertions of the First, knocked the stuffing out of us. The gradual unravelling of the Empire completed the process, leaving us isolated and confused. 

During the long years of industrial decline, little happened to sooth our troubled soul. The bright spots were all too often revealed to be false dawns: leadership in nuclear power; revolutionary aircraft like the Britannia, the Comet, the Meteor and TSR2; the Blue Streak ballistic missile; British Leyland, Austin-Rover, British Steel. Even North Sea oil and gas, which was supposed to transform the economy, proved to be little more than a monstrous sticking plaster, covering up a gaping wound. 

It hardly matters at this stage how all of this happened or why it was allowed to happen. All that can usefully be said is that successive British governments were unable to stop the rot and that our innovators – of which there were many – were in most cases unable to translate their visionary ideas into hard sales. Wages were low, hours were long, yet still our key manufacturing and service sectors struggled to make ends meet. 

But if those in charge were culpable, the British people also played their part. The UK didn’t have a French-style trentes-glorieuses ­– three decades of solid economic growth. There was no British Wirtschaftswunder. Instead, too many of us sat on our backsides and felt sorry for ourselves. 

Insofar, as Britain did pick up in my lifetime, it was during our long and unhappy membership of what is now the European Union. It took a while, with Margaret Thatcher in Downing Street, for Europe to work its magic. The trade unions did everything they could to hold up progress. But gradually, notwithstanding an accelerated sell-off of national assets, the turnaround took shape, so that by the time of the EU referendum in 2016, Britain was growing again, providing jobs at record rates. If there was an over-concentration on the services sector, to the detriment of manufacturing, there was a sense that an upwards curve had been restored, pointing towards previously elusive sunlit uplands. 

That was when we decided to look a gift horse in the mouth. Half of us determined that we didn’t want foreigners – i.e East Europeans – living among us, doing the work that we couldn’t, or wouldn’t, do. We told Brussels where it could stuff its treaties and struck out on our own once more, imperialists without an empire, looking to Asia for our salvation. 

Since then, the number of migrant workers and their families from the developing world coming into the UK has soared. Last year, a quarter of a million British citizens left the country for new lives abroad, many of them, with no sense of irony, citing immigration into the UK as a reason for their departure, while twice as many, and more, turned up to take their place. And we were not happy. Though several million of us in the aftermath of Covid have chosen to exchange the workplace for a life on benefits, we still manage to resent those from overseas who hold to the older value of earning a living by the sweat of their brow. 

Of late, the Tories, in power since 2010 and for most of the last 50 years, have begun to admit that they have failed in almost every area of governance. At the same time, they insist that they, and only they, know what has to be done to rescue the situation. Trust us, they say: we got you into this mess and we can get you out of it.

In the same way, those running our mostly foreign-owned public utilities, while pleading guilty to the charge that they are both incompetent and fundamentally greedy, are rushing to persuade us that they know where the bodies are buried and that a long-promised cleanup is about to get underway. 

In the meantime, Labour, the People’s Party has gone full woke. Like America’s Democrats, it has come to the conclusion that management of the economy is really hard and that instant gratification – the sine qua non of twenty-first century democracy – is best achieved by way of likes on ultra-liberal social media. A year away from the general election and they are already watering down their commitments. Does this mean that a radical response to climate change will have to remain on the (gas-fired) back-burner after 2024? Probably, alongside a wealth tax and a realistic (and enforceable) minimum wage. But at least the trans-population and their backers will be less likely to throw themselves under the King’s horse at Royal Ascot. 

If Britain is to recover the ground lost since 1945 and 2016, there is a strong case to be made for what could be thought of as radical moderation. A new government with a decent majority in Parliament could, over ten years, renationalise the public utilities, including the railways, making them directly answerable to state and regional authorities; establish a credible minimum wage; impose a 50 per cent wealth tax on annual earnings above £1 million; cut corporation tax from 25 to 21 per cent; sack at least a third of hospital managers; restore NHS dentistry; devise apprenticeships across industry as effective and respected as those in Germany, with technical colleges to match; slash the number of degree courses at our bloated universities; re-schedule, but also reinforce, the drive toward Net Zero; replace our ruinously expensive nuclear deterrent with increased spending on a military that works; and – crucially – rejoin the EU single market.

There seems little point in itemising more schools and hospitals, increased social housing and more “inclusive,” and effective, policing. These have been on every party’s manifesto going into every election for the last 30 years – though it would be nice if at least some of the targets were actually met. And you will note that I haven’t included the need for tougher immigration controls, which is both obvious and a nightmare. For that, I would need a magic wand. All we can do over the next five years is muddle through. 

For any of the above to have a lasting impact, one more key reform is needed. The British people, having grabbed what they can from the current round of wage negotiations, must resolve to get back to work. Too many Brits are sitting around. Productivity per capita is one-sixth lower in the UK than in the US, Germany and France, and the gap is widening. Yes, NHS staff and workers ought to be paid more. The same is true of train drivers, steelworkers, civil servants, police officers and municipal employees – just about all of us. But the money has to come from somewhere, and part of the solution, along with better management, a revised tax structure and a fairer distribution of wealth, has to be increased productivity. 

The government that successfully delivered anything like the package I list above would transform Britain and restore it to its rightful position as one of Europe’s leading and most progressive powers, with an influence to match. I don’t know if Keir Starmer reads Reaction (any more than he reads the Daily Mirror), but if he does, I have just offered him a winning hand. 

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