WHAT WOULD YOU DO IF ...?
An Exploration of Moral/Political Philosophy in the UK
I was going to title this week’s newsletter “While England Slept” then I remembered there was already a book by that title, published in 1938.
Churchill’s book has one overarching theme: the willingness of England’s leadership and other European leaders to pretend that Hitler’s Germany was not re-arming with its impending consequences:
“Now the victors are the vanquished, and those who threw down their arms in the field and sued for an armistice are striding on to world mastery.”
When war came the year after Churchill’s book was published. The son of the American Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s expanded his Harvard senior thesis into a book that echoed Churchill’s title.
It begins,
“Why was England so poorly prepared for the War?”
But unlike Churchill, who focuses on failures of political leadership to recognize the danger, the future president finds his answer in the society at large
“Given the conditions of democratic government, a free press, public elections, and a cabinet responsible to Parliament and thus to the people, given rule by the majority, it is entirely unreasonable to blame the entire situation on one man or group.”
Today England>Britain> United Kingdom is similarly naked before the world and there really is no reason for it, except for the moral/political queasiness of its current Prime Minister.
To go back to the question in the title of this little essay, What would you do if ?:
What would you do if you were walking down the street and found a huge wad of bills, or a brick of hard currency? It is bound together by a rubber band or some shrink wrap with no identifying marks.
You look around. There’s nobody else in the street.
What would you do?
Leave it there?
Pick it up and take it to the local cop shop?
Take it home and post a notice online or put up a 3 x 5 card in the window of the corner shop or bodega?
Or would you congratulate yourself on your good fortune and put the money to good use by paying off your kid’s college debt (I told you it was a very large amount of money) or paying off your other debts and investing for your future?
That is the situation in Britain today. Last July 4th, the UK had a general election the Labour Party was expected to win but in the event it gained a shattering and unexpected landslide. The party led by Sir Keir Starmer more than doubled its number of Parliamentary seats from the previous election in 2019, going from 202 to 411. The Conservative Party collapsed from 365 seats to 121. Smaller parties split up the remaining seats.
This was a seat landslide not a vote landslide. Labour only increased its share of the vote by a little over 1%. But in Britain’s first past the post electoral system the party that wins the most seats forms the government. If you win lots of seats by a small majority of votes cast in each constituency you win the election. Proportional representation based on the overall vote count is not a thing in Britain.
So now to the question, what would you do if, instead of finding a shrink wrapped brick of money — enough to clear your debts and invest for your future — you, the leader of Labour Party woke up one morning with a 170 seat majority in Parliament — a majority that, based on the historical precedent of the Tony Blair Landslide of 1997, would take three elections to overturn. You only have to call an election every five years so, in theory, this victory gives your party a good chance at 15 years in power.
Would you take the gift of that landslide and put into place a dramatic legislative program that would reverse the economic stagnation Britain has endured since the double whammy of leaving the EU and the pandemic five years ago? Or would you, look at the gift of the unexpected landslide and just tinker at the edges, tip-toeing into the future, acting as if the global economy today is shaped by the same forces it had been shaped by before those two cataclysmic events.
Sir Keir Starmer acts like a guy who would take the unexpected gift of a brick of money to the local police station.
“Here officers, I found this in the street.”
The cops thank him and as soon he is out the door collapse in hysterical laughter and split up the cash, call their wives and say
“Book a holiday in Spain, love. I don’t care if we have to wait for an hour in the non-EU passport line, let’s get some sunshine.”
Starmer’s government has done the opposite of hit the ground running. He has already been through several re-launches, now in his seventh month in charge this from last week’s Financial Times is fairly typical of how his government is being reported.
This is the kind of headline you might expect towards the end of a goverment’s second term in office.
He still acts like this majority wasn’t really his to use. Actually, he behaves like he didn’t really expect to win.
It’s very different from the atmosphere around Tony Blair in his first general election campaign as leader in 1997. After 18 years of Tory rule, the Thatcher/Major years, it was pretty clear that Britain’s voters, hereinafter referred to as “the country”, wanted a change.
Blair exuded confidence throughout the campaign. I traveled on the press plane with him to Manchester for an outing. He made time to come to the back of the plane where I was seated with Newsweek’s Stryker Maguire, to check on us, make sure we were getting what we needed. Nothing quotable, small talk, a bit of showing off his charming personality. Whatever you think of him today in the context of 1997, he really was exceptionally good at retail politics, in small groups or in large halls.
More importantly there were serious ideas in the 1997 party manifesto, ideas that moved Labour away from its socialist and trade union roots and that took into account the post-Cold War global economy.
“In economic management, we accept the global economy as a reality and reject the isolationism and 'go-it-alone' policies of the extremes of right or left.”
At the same time Blair and co were committed to the National Health Service as it had been founded: health care for all, free at the point of provision.
None of that energy or thought or confident planning has been evident since Starmer’s landslide. Nor has there been the sense that he is learning on the fly.
A book looking at the failures of Starmer’s first months in office would be titled “Isms and Projects: How Technocratic Thinking Ruined Labour’s Chances for Success”. Actually, that sub-title could be applied to a book about the Democrat’s loss last November.
Too many people who have glommed on to the party have no idea of the real world. A couple of years ago for the FRDH podcast, I interviewed the Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton. They were having a moment for having identified the decreasing life expectancy of America’s white working class. They studied why and came up with the phrase “Deaths of Despair” to explain the phenomenon. Deaton, a Nobel laureate in economic, is Scots by birth. During our conversation he noted that inClement Attlee’s great post-war Labour government which laid the foundations of Britain’s welfare state including the NHS there were many cabinet members who had “coal dust under their finger nails”.
That was no longer the case by the time of Blair, most of his cabinet were lawyers, although his deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott was true working class and had come up through the trade union movement. Starmer’s cabinet, even those who grew up on council estates (public housing or “the projects” in US parlance) have reached politics through the engine of elite university education and, often, student politics while getting their degrees.
They are well-schooled in reading data analysis but have virtually no ability to read the public, or inspire them. They also, as a collective seem oblivious to the changed geo-political circumstances in which they have taken office.
It is now five years since Britain officially left the European Union, the stagnation of the economy and the increase in the cost of living is in considerable part down to that act of folly. During last year’s general election campaign, Starmer sought to reassure Brexit voters, particularly in the former Labour heartlands of the industrial north of England, that he had no intention of overturning that catastrophic referendum. But even as polling shows Britons have more than a little buyers’ remorse, Starmer clings to the idea that Brexit means Brexit
He is running scared of right-wing populist Nigel Farage’s Reform Uk party which has a grand total of five MPs including Farage who spends most of his time in the US hanging on the fringes of Trump world. If Trump is the Sun King, Farage is somewhere beyond Pluto trying to orbit around him.
Now, faced with the menace of a second Trump term, Starmer and team are still tinkering at the edges rather than using this moment to boldly reshape the British economy AND state by rejecting, as the 1997 manifesto said, “isolationism and go it alone” policies.
England — today Churchill would say Britain — is once again sleepwalking to disaster. As new alignments are forming all over the globe it remains isolated. It doesn’t even have enough rare earth metals or good beachfront property to draw the interest of the regime consolidating its hold over the United States.
This is how Churchill ends his book — lightly edited to reflect the present;
“Look back on the last five years … If mortal catastrophe should overtake the British Nation … historians a thousand years hence will still be baffled by the mystery of our affairs. They will never understand how a nation with everything in hand, suffered themselves to be brought low, and to cast away all that they had gained by measureless sacrifice … gone with the wind.”
My guess is that bafflement at our political and economic affairs will be a permanent condition of Britons — and Americans — for the rest of my life
My conversation with Case and Deaton is here
Michael your voice should be everywhere TV, radio, political magazines, I am sharing this far and wide. It is not just the content, it is the way you bring it all together.