BY: PETER FRANKLIN
Peter Franklin is an Associate Editor of UnHerd.
Let’s face it, 2024 was a miserable year. It was a low point for the Conservative Party, of course — featuring the worst election campaign (and result) in our history. More importantly, though, it’s been a terrible time for our country.
Economically, socially and culturally, we’re stuck. The latest downward revision to the GDP figures means that there was zero growth between July and September – and now we have the full consequences of Rachel Reeves’ budget to look forward to. Evidently, mass immigration isn’t quite the tonic it’s cracked up to be; certainly not for social cohesion, as this summer’s riots demonstrated.
To cap it all, this year’s Christmas Number 1 is was Wham’s Last Christmas, a song first released forty years ago. No matter where you look, the country’s running on fumes. The political changes of the year (a new government, a new leader of the Conservative Party) ought to feel like a new start. But as I argued recently, they don’t.
Indeed the most dynamic feature of Sir Keir Starmer’s leadership of the nation has been Labour’s polling collapse. According to a Sky News analysis, it’s the third biggest fall in poll ratings suffered by any political party in any calendar year since the war. The Starmer disaster of 2024 is only overshadowed by the rise-and-fall of Nick Clegg’s Liberal Democrats in 2010 and the brief, if consequential, flowering of the Brexit Party in 2019.
And, so, an exhausted, despondent nation has limped into 2025 lumbered with a government it already hates, but can’t get rid of until 2029. What hope does that leave? Well, more than you might think.
That’s not because I’ve exaggerated the depth of the hole in which we find ourselves, but because more than most nations we possess the ability to climb out of it. After all, there’s a reason why the richest man in the world is poised to plough millions into British politics. I speak, of course, of Elon Musk.
A BBC News feature seeks to explain his “curious fixation with Britain”, but it misses the point. What Musk looks for in all his ventures is potential. For instance, he didn’t just invest in rocket ships because they’re exciting, but because he saw an opportunity to transform the economics of space travel (which is exactly what he’s achieved).
Similarly he didn’t put every penny he could into electric cars because he’s a finger wagging environmentalist of the Greta Thunberg sort, but because he realised that giga factory manufacturing was the key to unlocking affordable clean technology.
As for Twitter, he saw that by junking its bloated censorship bureaucracy, he could disrupt the media market while simultaneously slashing costs. If Musk really is “fixated” on Britain, it’s not out of mere sentiment, but because he senses a huge and unrealised opportunity.
The cynics might frame that in a negative way: that this country is so badly managed that even the most basic improvements will yield results.
And to be fair, the cynics would have a point: the reason why growth rates in many developing nations (even the Soviet Union) outstrip more advanced economies is that they still have plenty of low-hanging fruit to pick. One only has to put in the fundamentals of modernity, such as safe water and a reliable electricity supply, to unleash a nation’s potential.
The UK has not yet returned to third-world status. But compared to our neighbours our largest cities beyond London have unusually low levels of productivity – a consequence of chronic under-investment (Leeds, for instance, is the largest city in western Europe without a mass transit system). The levelling-up agenda was supposed to fix that, but, between them, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, and Rishi Sunak comprehensively betrayed the promises of 2019.
The result is that alone among the G7 nations, the best jobs (and therefore the most talented individuals) have become increasingly concentrated in the dominant region (in our case, London) while the rest of the country stagnates. So, yes, plenty of low-hanging fruit still to be had in left-behind Britain.
And yet there’s a more positive aspect to Britain’s room for improvement. As is clear from the utter bordel of politics in France and Germany, we’re far from being the only country with deep structural problems. We are, however, unusually well-placed to do something about them.
For a start, we’re not in the European Union. We are neither constrained by the regulatory superstructures of the EU and the single currency nor by the tendency of national elites to refer the task of fundamental reform to Brussels, Strasbourg and Frankfurt. There is neither the requirement – nor the excuse – of having to seek the agreement of 27 other countries before moving forward.
That is especially important when it comes to potentially transformational technologies like AI, robotics, automated vehicles and drones. If we really want it to, the future can happen in Britain years ahead of the continent.
In some respects, we even have an opportunity to steal a march on the Americans. That’s because this is one of most centralised countries in the free world. As the economist, Paul Collier recently put it, Britain is run by about fifty people – most of them in the Treasury. That’s not a good thing in itself, but for a determined and visionary government it does make it easier to effect change.
For proof-of-concept, one only has to look to biggest single success of 14 years of Tory government: Michael Gove’s education reforms. There’s a reason why the UK (or, rather, England) has risen up the PISA and TIMSS global rankings. Gove, together with Dominic Cummings, had the guts to force through meaningful change in the face of concerted opposition from the infamous blob.
They prevailed because, as Cummings argues, they were prepared to carry out purges of the officials standing in their way. Even after a weak-willed David Cameron shuffled Gove aside, the reforms were embedded during the long and dedicated tenure of the schools minister, Nick Gibb.
There is absolutely no reason why a future government of genuinely conservative and reformist character shouldn’t take the same approach in every policy area. Unlike America, Canada, and Australia, with their federal constitutions, almost all the levers of power are there at the centre, ready and waiting for a prime minister with the strength to seize them.
Obviously, the devolved administrations in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are an exception. But England, should it choose to, can turn on a sixpence.
So why doesn’t it choose to? Well, you only have to look at every prime minister since 2010 for the answer to that: the five failed Tories and Starmer. Establishment politics, whether tinged blue or red, is as broken as our economy, society and culture, and there’s no point in looking for solutions from the usual quarters.
Just as well then that, in Britain, change has a habit of breaking through unexpectedly. For all the pride we put in the continuity of our national traditions, we have at various points in our history led the world in epochal transformations. Furthermore, it can happen even when the established order does everything it can to resist — as in the case of Brexit.
Could it happen again? Yes, because so many of the smartest policy thinkers are to found on the British centre-right. I won’t mention current colleagues, but a very non-exhaustive list includes Danny Kruger, Miriam Cates, Neil O’Brien, Nick Timothy, Michael Liebreich, Gavin Rice, Juliet Samuel, James O’Shaughnessy, Phillip Blond, Nicholas Boyes Smith, Yuan Yi Zhu, Nikki Da Costa, Sam Dimitriu, Charlotte Pickles, Lawrence Newport, Tom Owolade, Iain Mansfield, Ben Southwood, Paul Goodman, Tim Montgomerie and, of course, Dominic Cummings.
It’s not that I agree with everything these individuals do and say. Nor are they in perfect agreement among themselves. Rather, my point is that, unlike the Left, the Right possesses the capacity for deepand original thought.
For the moment, the thinking part of the conservative and reformist movement is largely disconnected from its public face. That, however, may change – and, if it does, an awful lot will change with it.
This article was moved to TLB from our British site UK Reloaded.
Peter Franklin: Everything is terrible now – but Britain is uniquely positioned for change was originally published by Conservative Home and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Peter Franklin and conservativehome.com
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