This is the beginning of CentreRight’s third week and as a little experiment I thought I’d initiate a little debate between contributors. If it works we’ll run debates about once a week and if readers have strong thoughts please email them to me and I’ll publish them in another post.
My contention is that Britain is in relative decline again.
I’m writing this post on the 11.20am South West Trains service from Salisbury to Waterloo. The train is air conditioned and comfortable. The young woman sat next to me is wearing expensive clothes and listening to an iPod. The couple opposite aren’t even 60 but are retired and are heading to London for lunch, shopping and theatre. Across the aisle another man is tapping away at his laptop and taking business calls. Lots and loudly unfortunately! These are anecdotes but point to the obvious fact that Britain is richer and more contented in many ways. When I argue that Britain is in decline I don’t say everything is awful – just that we’ve been heading the wrong way for some time and at the next election we don’t just need a change of management but a strong change of direction.
Our decline is most evident in three areas:
In economic decline. We have the biggest budget deficit in Europe and that’s before the economic slowdown – not as a consequence of it. Years of plenty haven’t been used to rebuild our infrastructure, reduce welfare dependency or reform our public services. Our economy is sliding down the competitiveness league table as Peter Cuthbertson blogged last week. We’re not doing much better on educational standards. Our competitors are cutting taxes and trimming wasteful spending. The hard won supply-side gains of the Thatcher years are being undone. If Maggie often got the macroeconomics wrong she consistently got the microeconomics right. Brown, until recently, got the macroeconomics right but has been consistently illiterate on the supply-side implications of his microeconomic policies. And as Keynes might have said, in the long-run it’s all about microeconomics (incentive structures, regulation, quality of labour force).
In social decline. There’s a debate to be had about the overall movement in crime statistics but there can be little doubt that it’s far too high. More than anything else there’s a strong sense that the law-abiding no longer own public spaces. Stories of being intimidated on buses or tubes are commonplace. London has got more violent as New York has got safer. So many social indicators – not least family breakdown are all going in the wrong direction.
In military decline. If the first duty of any government is the defence of The Realm, I’m worried. Only today we’ve got the Commons Defence Committee’s analysis of overstretch and the loss of experienced servicemen from the ranks. Liam Fox has pointed out that defence expenditure hasn’t been as low (as a percentage of national income) for seventy years. The consequence is that our equipment-starved troops are known as ‘the borrowers’ by the Americans. Our soldiers are individually brave but their standing has been battered in recent times. The Navy 15 episode comes to mind. More serious has been our unwillingness to prevail in southern Iraq – a huge contrast with the resilience of the Americans led by General Petraeus. And it’s not just about investment in hardware. We’re weaker because we put too much defence in multilateral institutions like the United Nations for our security and we live in a media culture that is hostile to the sacrifices inherent in military conflict.
Have I depressed you all? Sorry. Why have this discussion you might well ask? I think it matters because the right course of action follows proper analysis. We need to steel ourselves for what the next Conservative government will have to do. During his failed leadership bid David Davis talked about the Conservatives as ‘the rescue party’. Britain needs rescuing again.
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