Lockdown was meant to be a great cultural moment, and — with furlough to smooth everything over — an economic non-event. It was the reverse. March 2020 to February 2022 saw no period of quiet reflection or creative flourishing. Half a decade out there has been no definitive lockdown novel, or film, or stage play.

Economically, it was a silent revolution. Lockdown effected the greatest upward transfer of wealth in human history, the end of the era of low interest rates, unheard of levels of state borrowing. It is almost entirely responsible for the current rash of inflation in Britain, which had already reached 5.1% months before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Rising gilt yields; the deficit; the cost of living; the increase in PIP claims; mass economic inactivity; the “decline of the high street” — these are impossible to explain without recalling that the British state borrowed £400 billion to lock the population indoors for two years. The Britain of 2025 has a very different political economy to the Britain of 2019; yet the only thing that really distinguishes one from the other is this singular disruption.

A frenzy of borrowing lockdown made “austerity” seem like a bad joke. Yet it has made any alternative to austerity impossible. There was a time when Britain could have attempted a drive for growth through state-led investment, and it was in the decade before 2020, when gilt yields were at a historic low. When Rachel Reeves now borrows large sums to invest in infrastructure, she is betting the farm on a model for growth that disappeared five years ago. With a much higher cost of borrowing, the only route to growth lies through supply-side reforms and cuts to public expenditure — which is what the Government is now increasingly defaulting to. Labour’s dreams of “securonomics” have only been lockdown’s latest victim.

But of course the Government is out of ideas. Lockdown discredited liberal ideas; the failure of lockdown discredited statist ones. All ideologies came out of it shabby and condemned. It showed that the British center-right did not care about fiscal prudence, personal liberty, or small business. It showed that “neoliberals” did not care about globalization or transnational supply chains. Witnessing the virtual end of work, communists did not bestir themselves to agitate for the end of wage-labor. In pleading the cause of the furloughed stakeholder over the minimum-wage employees that delivered things to them, the British center-left revealed itself to be little more than the lobbying arm for the public sector. Lockdown showed that all these factions, when they were really up against it, only cared about two things: human rights maximalism, and money for the old. (The winter fuel allowance is a fiscal trifle compared with the triple-lock, which all parties have pledged to defend.) Not since July 1914 has so much been decided with so little debate.

The bad parts were bad and the good parts were worse. Insofar as there was a great social coming-together during lockdown its main effect has been a decline in responsibility and standards. British institutions — everything from the railways to local government — used the initial outpouring of goodwill towards key workers as a general license to give up: as late as December 2022 public services were still fobbing people off with “Covid disruption”. To this we can also add the rulers’ new creepy overfamiliarity towards the ruled, manifest in garish PR stunts like “Can you look them in the eyes?”, or, latterly, “maaate”. This is not how adults ought to address one another.

It was a last hurrah for every outmoded social force. Unreformed Whitehall, the courts, the monarchy and the BBC — all were given an artificial lease of life. Lockdown briefly revived the prestige of Britain’s broadcast media, which was achieved in part by a simultaneous crackdown on online “misinformation”, including the now-vindicated lab leak theory. Plans for a reform to Whitehall had been well in train, even during lockdown itself. But in this atmosphere of cheap moralism and recrimination, there was a general rallying to established institutions, and the plans did not survive Cummings’ fall. Lockdown sparked the counterrevolution in British institutions that had its climax with the brief regency of Sue Gray — who hoped to put these institutions, at last, beyond effective democratic control. This is something that’s only now being rowed back on — at least rhetorically.

If we don’t acknowledge lockdown and its effects, then the problems of mid-Twenties Britain will continue to confound us. The refusal to recognize the stakes involved, to have some honest accounting of which groups were being asked to sacrifice something for the benefit of others, has led us to this state of general amnesia and low-level resentment. It’s still taken as strange, in a country where the right to leave your house was suspended for two years, that the public might now be deaf to “liberal norms” and that the young are flirting with dictatorship. Why are so many avoiding work and claiming to be disabled, or phoning it in at “lazy girl jobs“? Because they were shown exactly how far hard work and gumption would carry them: to be a tax farm for pensioners and illegal migrants. Why did so many get rich off dodgy contracts? Because the economy was brought to a halt except for a list of key suppliers. Such conditions were almost guaranteed to produce a class of well-connected Covid spivs — of whom Matt Hancock is the spiritual chief.

More from this author

The folly of a British Silicon Valley

By Travis Aaron

But there was only one true avatar of lockdown Britain, and it arrived in the person of Keir Starmer. The man and his credo, Starmerism, were both made by lockdown and were the fullest expression of its spirit. Like Starmerism, lockdown sidestepped all social and economic questions in favor of a vague sense of decency. Like Starmerism, lockdown sought to subsume all politics into the jargon of rights. Like Starmerism, lockdown meant a trembling reverence for clapped-out institutions. Partygate was when Keir Starmer was truly in his element, and it remains his beau idéal of politics: no “Condition of England” questions, just personal corruption and the law. Insofar as he’s now been forced to depart from this mode, then it’s only because of the insoluble material problems that lockdown created.

Lockdown was the great sinkhole: of time, memory, money. It is the true “Black Hole” of our age. It will live in history as a lurid and bizarre dreamworld, much better off forgotten. There was no resolution. There was no catharsis. Nothing was learnt, except this: that appeals to Humanity and Human Decency should always be treated with great suspicion, and that “social trust” is something that should be undermined.

Recent events have given this project a global significance. Keir Starmer is now the last anti-populist standing. His bet is that a sustained rise in living standards can halt the illiberal tide. A major part of this will be the growth of new industries in Britain, such as technology.

Much, then, is at stake. If a British tech sector does emerge here, the material rewards will be huge. “Starmerism” will generate enough wealth to become a model for establishment forces everywhere — an aid and comfort to both the US Democrats and the continental center-left. Fail, and anti-populism will start to finally lose what has always been its rhetorical trump card: that it is, allegedly, the side of economic modernity and material progress.

Really, Britain should already have a Silicon Valley, and it was only by a lunatic turn of the wheel that it never acquired one. The United Kingdom has some of the world’s finest universities, its first or second financial center, and enough oil and shale for energy abundance. What’s meant to be a country of handwaving generalists is in fact the fourth largest producer of “unicorn” companies (technology startups valued at more than $1 billion). It was an early leader in personal computers, and has latterly given the world the maglev, graphene, mammal cloning, and the internet.

More from this author

How Osbornism failed

By Travis Aaroe

All the ingredients, then, for a British Microsoft. Or at least a British Novo Nordisk. Indeed, under remotely normal conditions, one almost certainly would have emerged. So why hasn’t it? According to the recent paper “Foundations” — written by a trio of YIMBYish think tankers — the problem is threefold. In short, Britain has a planning permission system that makes physical investment next to impossible, a ludicrously complicated environmental compliance process, and the highest energy costs in the developed world. We can invent new technologies, but can’t build the factories or the laboratories where they might be brought to commercial maturity. And so, without the ability to “scale” in the UK, inventors are floating their companies elsewhere or selling them to overseas buyers. In the words of the authors, “at some point it becomes impossible to grow when investment is banned”.

This state of affairs has a number of causes — but they all stem from the decentralized nature of power in the UK. “Process” is not quite the word for it. Instead, what we have is a complete legal free-for-all in which local and devolved authorities, public bodies, NGOs and courts have a virtually unlimited right of judicial review and audit against central government. Courts that can halt North Sea drilling at a stroke; regional economic planning that killed off the burgeoning industry of the West Midlands; judicial reviews that have made public procurement ruinously expensive; the need for local consent even for things like reservoirs. The vast majority of Britain’s governing classes have an almost pre-modern view of state and society, in which the elected power is something to be glazed over.

The result is a society in which it’s generally agreed that a body like the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds has an almost constitutional role, and where attempts to sidestep the OBR are seen as a prelude to dictatorship. Today, this system of decentralized power, always a major block on growth, has manifestly started to consume the host. Not only has it deprived Britain of a technology industry, but it may actually cause it to run out of drinking water by the middle of the next decade.

Economic liberalism in Britain has always been associated with political centralization. Things like Enclosure were carried out by act of Parliament, and Canary Wharf was built by the fiat of the Docklands Development corporation — which was given almost dictatorial powers over the Isle of Dogs peninsula. Thatcherism, among other things, meant revoking the trade unions’ right to be consulted on economic policy. We now require something similar — a revival of executive and parliamentary authority against the courts, the quangos and the NGOs.

We’re unlikely to get one anytime soon. More than anything else, Starmerism is a defense of this decentralized Britain. What Starmerism represents is the vulgar anti-politics that has been gestating in Britain since the years of New Labour, which wanted to defend a particular set of moral bigotries about human rights from voting majorities, and so devolved substantial powers away from Westminster. They did not trust power, in case someone misused it, and so set up a system where no one could exercise it; the result was a headless oligarchy in which the buck stopped nowhere. The consequence of this general depoliticization meant that, in 2016, England’s governing classes got the shock of its life with Brexit, which aimed to concentrate authority in Westminster. The experience has given them a lasting horror of any kind of centralization, which they now see as simply a populistic attack on liberal democracy and the rule of law. The brush with populism has made them despair of politics altogether, and Starmerism is now their instrument to substantially abolish it. Rachel Reeves, for example, has made a parade of trying to promote growth — but has now largely given up control of her own fiscal policy to the OBR.

These anti-populist commitments will dog the steps of the British Silicon Valley. It can be built, but not without an attack on those same institutions — the courts, the quangos, the local authorities — that Starmer has made it his life’s mission to defend. Starmer and Reeves have announced changes to judicial review, loosened rules around development near railway stations, and railed against projects like the £100 million bat tunnel. What should be remembered, though, is that every government in living memory has criticized civil servants, meddling lawyers, the planning system and green excess. They may limit some of its more visible excesses, but the overriding aim of Team Keir is to preserve this system intact.

Suggested reading

British Nimbys are unlikely populists

By Wessie du Toit

Aside from these planned measures, everything else about Starmerism is running in the opposite direction, towards the even greater diffusion of power. It is hiving off more of Downing Street’s prerogatives to bodies like the OBR and Great British Energy. It is strengthening the power of Whitehall legal advice over ministers, and is resolute in its defense of international law — including things like the Aarhus Convention, which sets environmental regulation at a global level. It has made no attempt to rein in the judiciary over energy; and it has already assented to a judicial review of the Heathrow third runway — the other centerpiece of its growth strategy. It is devolving powers to the same local authorities that block development, and is beefing up the metro mayors. The latter are already flexing their muscles, opposing the new growth plans on environmental and regionalist grounds. It is very difficult to imagine Starmerism, a narrow defense of “Blob” privilege, ever really committing itself to the sustained, years-long exercise of executive powers that would be needed to make the Corridor succeed.

For all the talk of taking on the “blockers” there are already signs of backsliding. Reeves has refused to revive the planned Oxford-Cambridge highway, which foundered on local opposition in 2021, despite the fact that 81% of freight in the UK is moved by road.

Starmer, then, is in a bind. He has to achieve growth, but he can only do so through a revival of executive powers — the exact thing that Starmerism was meant to forestall. A new Silicon Valley is certainly achievable, but it demands an act of stakeholder fratricide that Starmer will never commit to. A British Microsoft will have to wait. Starmerism is forcing people to choose between economic growth and postwar liberal institutions. It will not like their answer.

This, in its broad outlines, is now the unifying worldview of the Brics powers: a loose pact of frenemies  — currently assembled in the city of Kazan — with whom, according to General Sir Patrick Sanders, we are on the brink of war.

But 10 years ago, this was also nothing less than the official policy of the British government. Britain was the first country — not Russia — to follow multipolar world theory as a guiding principle: the term Brics was coined by the British economist Jim O’Neill, and the country would also produce When China Rules The World, the smash-hit prophecy of American decline. America may have started to “decouple” from China almost a decade ago, but Britain still looks to Beijing as its natural source of foreign investment, as David Lammy’s visit this week proves. To Britain’s governing classes, the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008 was decisive proof that American hegemony was finished, and that Britain could no longer live off the fat of its dividends. This global system had now crashed, and it wasn’t at all certain that the country would now be able to maintain the lifestyle to which it had grown accustomed.

The times called for a new savvy. Concessions to changing global conditions would have to be made. Some scruples, such as the precise domestic arrangements of trading partners, or rules on foreign ownership, would have to be put aside.

This was the political economy of Cameronism. Everyone agreed that Britain, especially now, was a genteel legacy power; and it would have to traffic in this legacy to eke out first-world living standards.

It would mean selling off the last of the stored imperial wealth. It would mean, still more, the relentless merchandising of British heritage brands abroad. If Britain could not win the new Brics powers for liberal democracy, then it might yet win them for Dulwich College, the House of Windsor, and Macallan single malt. The new oligarchs would stash their wealth at British banks; British lawyers and law courts would handle their commercial disputes. They would hunt its fields, fish its rivers, buy its townhouses, and educate their young at its ancient schools — so many of them, in fact, that by 2016 St Paul’s School, George Osborne’s alma mater, would have to introduce a special bursary for the upper-middle classes as fees ballooned.

Few could see any alternative. Niall Ferguson, then something of a house historian to the Cameronite project, glibly predicted in 2011 that 10 years hence, Britain would be coasting off of Chinese foreign investment; Chinese purchases of Chelsea townhouses; and Chinese ownership of Scottish shooting estates.

But above all, this analysis was the making of George Osborne, Chancellor of the Exchequer between 2010 and 2016. Osborne lives in history as the austerity chancellor. Getting on for a decade after his fall, cuts to public expenditure are still held as an example of ‘Osbornomics’, and people like Rachel Reeves still feel the need to distance themselves from his legacy. But what really animated George Osborne was this diagnosis of Britain’s place in a post-Lehman world, of which David Lammy’s recent reset of relations with China is a faint echo.

Suggested reading

The gravediggers of British conservatism

By Aris Roussinos

At every turn, Osborne sought to sharpen the lines that Cameron hoped would stay pleasingly blurred. As his early biographer, Janan Ganesh, notes, those Conservative colleagues who held to pre-1997 cultural views were for Osborne not merely old-fashioned but troglodytic. For someone such as David Cameron, for whom the Conservative Party is a kind of social forum, the eventual apostasy of Michael Gove and Boris Johnson over the European issue came as a genuine shock. It did not shock Osborne.

He, too, carried furthest the Cameronite idea of Britain’s place in a post-American age. When it came to business-like relations with China, it was the “Osborne Doctrine” that The Economist wrote of, not the Cameron Doctrine. For him, competition in a multipolar world demanded that Cameronism be carried to its logical conclusion: that Britain really become a svelte, socially liberal entrepôt, open for business with anyone and everyone. This was the conceit. And it forms part of an emerging folk history of the 2010s as a period of liberal oligarchy; a never-ending party for dodgy donors and Brics influence-peddlers in which nothing was sacred and all was for sale. This glittering world, as the narrative goes, was eventually brought to an end by Brexit, lockdown, and the de-globalisation that they imply.

It isn’t hard to see why. Osbornism, as a positive economic vision beyond the simple fiscal retrenchment known as austerity, quickly became associated with the fire sale of cherished national assets to overseas buyers. The beloved chocolatier Cadbury was bought by Kraft in 2010; the Chinese firm Geely acquired London’s fleet of black cabs in 2013. By 2016, up to a third of the student body of the ancient boarding schools was drawn from overseas. In a bid to attract further Chinese investment, Cameron and Osborne declined to support anti-dumping measures, sending British Steel into a tailspin that ended with its acquisition by a Shijiazhuang-based industrial concern in 2019.

Osbornism was also supposed to mean the economic dominance of London. Much was made of the idea that Osborne had enjoyed a metropolitan upbringing, and that the squirearch milieu of Chipping Norton meant little to him. For Osborne, it was said, London was Britain’s real proposition to the world: as a discreet provider of professional services, and as a global playground for Brics oligarchs. Osbornism had ostensibly created the tax and visa conditions for just this. Canary Wharf, the Shard, and a 20% stake in the London Stock Exchange were bought up by the Qataris, and the growth of a “Moscow-on-Thames” was watched with smiling equanimity. This was held to be an example of the new ruthless national accounting post-crash, funded at the expense of the luckless provinces in the country’s north.

Suggested reading

Waitrose Woman will not be patronised

By Kathleen Stock

Capstone to the system of Osborne was the “Golden Era” of relations with China. Again, Osborne took this idea further than most. Engagement with China did not simply mean investment, but a full economic partnership. This had a logic. Before the decade was out, the European Union and the United States were once again making threatening noises about Britain’s position in Northern Ireland. In these circumstances, would it have been so bad to have in China an economic and diplomatic counterweight? The announcement, in March 2015, that Britain would be joining the Chinese-run Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) was a real coup, one that shocked and angered Washington. As one of the first practitioners of “multipolar world” theory, George Osborne had — perhaps by accident — produced a twitch of something like real strategic independence. If nothing else, Osbornism on the world stage hinted, however briefly, that there might be some alternative for Britain to the thankless enforcement of a rules-based international order, an order which, in the 2020s, does not permit Britain to control its own sea border.

These were cultural events more than they were economic ones. According to the tropes of the time, they spoke to a nation adjusting to stately poverty, whose traditional patterns of life were now sustained only by foreign money. But for Osborne, this was only what the moment demanded. Britain required a brute lesson of its place in the new world — a lesson which Osborne would administer, and of which the sale of flagship national assets was a symbol.

But there was always more theatre than reality to Osbornism. His public image was one of ruthlessness and hard choices, and so went the black cabs, the public schools, the legacy steelworks, along with other marquee national real estate like the Old War Office and the Admiralty Arch, which were both flogged on the cheap. So too was the practice — recently revealed — of selling cheese-tasting courses, magic lessons, and tennis matches with Conservative ministers to wealthy investors like Mohamed Amersi. Fiscal trifles by themselves, but seen by all as a sign of the moral compromises that Britain would now have to make. The fixation on curios like a direct flight from Manchester to China or a special visa for Chinese businessmen furnish two more examples.

All this could be presented as a kind of necessary stooping to conquer in the new Brics world, but none of them even made much money in the first place. Needless to say, no new era of svelte globalism resulted. In 2015, at the height of Osborne’s political fortunes, foreign investment stood at 1.54% of GDP — less than in France, that economic clamshell, where the figure was 1.76%. For all the talk of a “global race”, Britain left the first half of the 2010s no more globalised than it had previously been.

Suggested reading

The year Toryism failed Britain

By Tom McTague

What Osbornism represented, in unconscious terms, was the anxiety felt by a governing class convinced of national decline after 2008, but which baulked at the possible solutions. By 2015, there was no entrepôt and no global playground, but there was much of the attendant seaminess. This was a system that had all the trappings of an oligarchy, but none of its possible enjoyments. And this pretend oligarchy began to decompose almost as soon as it was assembled. As the British economy flickered back to life, Osborne embarked on a reversal of course that would undo much of his own work. First to be walked back on was the idea of Britain as a bolthole for the global plutocrats of tomorrow. In 2015, Osborne levied an “oligarch tax” on sales of homes by non-UK residents, and called for action against the financial networks that had been exposed in the Panama Papers. Boris Johnson, then the Mayor of London, publicly opposed both of these ideas. Barely a year before the Brexit referendum, then, it was Johnson who was cast as the defender of liberal globalisation, and Osborne who criticised its excesses — the complete opposite of later alignments.

Osborne was also the first to call time on the dominance of London. As soon as the capital began once more to turn a surplus, George Osborne cast around for ways to cream it off and spread it elsewhere. Osborne was the great sponsor of northern devolution, and patronised the idea of a directly elected Manchester mayor. And it was Osborne, not Theresa May, who first played the card of the regions, of London against the “left-behind”. Years before anyone had heard of Levelling Up, George Osborne was the champion of a Northern Powerhouse — such a champion, indeed, that the idea began to dominate talks with the Chinese during his last year in power. These kinds of hang-ups are not usually the subjects of international trade and diplomacy. It was a strange kind of myopia, and it spoke much more to a Little England self-involvement than Brexit ever did.

Flushed with victory after the election of 2015, Osborne was already putting together an agenda for his own premiership, which, among other things, would have seen state expenditure further reduced to around 35% of GDP. This, after the previous five years of cuts, was justified again and again with reference to the international situation — the need for a leaner and possibly meaner Britain in a post-American world. Had this plan succeeded, something like real economic liberalism would have been created in Britain. To accomplish it, Osborne planned to strengthen the party’s ties with those former Liberal Democrats who had delivered the victory of 2015: asset-rich, rural, generally older, either retired or disproportionately employed in the public sector.

A strange choice. Such a group, flushed with assets and state pensions, were the current economy’s main beneficiaries, and had no interest in overturning it. Osborne was attempting to carry out a programme of economic liberalism through the agency of some of the most reactionary classes in England. But as an ideology, Osbornism became evermore reliant on these places so that, in 2024, the two — by a strange twist — are now treated as virtually synonymous. In practice, Osborne’s plan to slash the size of the state was a demagogic one, and it required a demagogic course. It would have meant a popular appeal to the lower-middle classes — the only reliable constituency for economic liberalism. As with so much else, Osborne shrank from the means, and he left it to rivals Boris Johnson and Michael Gove to make such an appeal.

Osbornism, as a distinct ideology, has left almost no material legacy. It was always a politics of phrase and image, and it vanished at a word. In 2024, London is manifestly not the global playground it was meant to be. It is shifty candy stores that now set the tone of its main streets, not the scions of sheiks and the CCP. With furlough in March 2020, the six years of budgetary austerity that compromised the domestic side of this agenda were undone at a stroke, and ideas of a leaner, more competitive Britain were all but forgotten. The Emirati bid for The Spectator and the Telegraph — for which Osborne acted as a consultant — failed, and the door is now to be closed on any future such acquisitions. The Chinese investment is now largely gone, and “Moscow-on-Thames” was quickly rolled up, with old Cameronite retainers like Evgeny Lebedev now figures of suspicion. Osborne is the only national figure on the centre-right who still makes the case for a ‘Northern Powerhouse’, his old party colleagues having now soured on devolution. In 2024, the sole physical marker of Osbornism is a folly: a fairly miserable English leg of the Chinese “One Belt One Road” initiative, a rail line that shudders to a halt in a field near Barking. Far from being a vein of commerce, it is only used once a week, to ship 34 wagons of tourist merchandise to the city of Yiwu. It’s a symbol of a future that never was; an oligarchy that never was; a strange personal affect dreamt up in a moment of panic, and soon dropped.

Instead, Osbornism’s true legacy lies in its phrases, which are still with us today. It can be found in the idea that there exists a popular force of Cameron Ultras in the shires: a “Blue Wall”, whose salient characteristic is social liberalism, rather than being very rich. Whenever we are told that this entirely hallucinated demographic would have no truck with action on illegal migration or a moderation on Net Zero, we are hearing the echo of Osbornism.

As an actual agenda, though, Osbornism was a phantasm; a devilish idea that flickered briefly across the national consciousness and disappeared. What if England really was run to make money? We have yet to find out.

Here was the essential problem: even with the best will in the world, the League had no power to enforce any of its edicts. For this it had to rely on Britain and France, who were notorious flakes. The United States never even joined. And so it went on. The General Secretariat would pronounce, the Permanent Court of International Justice would rule, the levers would be pulled, nothing would happen. None of their high ideals were able to survive first contact with reality — that is to say, state expediency and national egoism. Whenever it counted the powers would look to their own alliances, their own security. Mussolini was left to annex Abyssinia in 1936 despite the League’s protests, because Britain and France were trying to court him as an ally; Japan was allowed to overrun Manchuria for similar reasons. It all seemed to carry a brute lesson: whatever the merits of internationalism and international law, the facts of life ran against them. 

Why does English schooling fixate so much on the League, this odd sideshow? A corrective to teen idealism, maybe. These events, as told, seemed to be a mini fable in how the high ideas can’t compete against ordinary selfishness. It certainly had its appeal for teenage me: a smirker, an online troll.

But as a story this was over-keen and over-cynical. Too cynical, because it always underpriced the power of these ideas. “Why can’t we all just get along”, or, latterly, “global problems require global solutions” — these are powerful notions, at least among the very powerful. The armies that conquered Europe in the middle of the Forties were technically those of the United Nations, marching under its own banner of war: the “Honour Flag” — this just 10 years after the League of Nations was pronounced a dead letter. Had F.D.R. lived a little longer, something approaching a world state under the aegis of the UN would have resulted, with the planet governed as a kind of American-Soviet condominium — even Wendall Wilkie, his Republican rival, called for such a course. A lunatic idea, but not one that school-of-hard-knocks international realism can really assimilate. 

Too cynical then, and too cynical now. Over the past 10 years almost everyone has again been announcing the decline of liberal international norms and the return of the nation state. Terrorism, strongmanism, populism, migration, and global diseases would force some collision with reality, the old niceties would be forgotten, and we would then revert to a harder and simpler form of rule under sovereign nations. What would this entail? Nearly every literary or political weekly at one point carried the front piece of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan as its cover. Even the vogue for the term “geopolitics” spoke to the new mood: a politics founded in expediency and the facts of life, not liberal ideas.

But nothing of the sort has happened. Whatever factors might be making the case for the nation state anew, the real story of the past decade has been a huge growth in the scope and depth of international law and obligation. These are advancing over the developed world much faster than they’re receding elsewhere.

More from this author

Rishi Sunak is a millennial tragedy

By Travis Aaroe

For all the foam of the past 10 years, it’s hard to think of any period in diplomatic history that’s been less defined by expediency, national egoism, or the cold accounting of interests. A classic example is the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), which, unlike the old League of Nations, doesn’t require a sponsor power. In 2015, a British exit from the ECHR was Cameronite boilerplate. Now it is deemed radical and eccentric. Giorgia Meloni heads up a party that can claim lineal descent from Italy’s National Fascists. Emmanuel Macron was billed as a statesman of Jupiterian standing, a liberal answer to the age of the strongman. For all this neither can bring themselves to face down the court in Strasbourg, or even the Dublin Convention. France has now been reduced to paying the ECHR an out-of-pocket charge for each deportation. 

So too with the climate. 10 years ago climate agreements like the Kyoto Protocol were a byword for the well-meaning dead letter. These have since grown teeth. Switzerland, grand doyen of the international system, was in April ruled against by the Strasbourg court for insufficient zeal on Net Zero. The Swiss government is now drawing up a list of climate measures which it hopes will appease the court.

The same is true for technology. All the world powers have now accepted global AI regulation, even though the first to defect from these rules would surely reap huge commercial advantages for itself. So much for the new egoism.

In this sense many jumped too soon. In the 2010s, a number of political leaders and factions bet on the revival of the Westphalian system and took the national plunge, only to end up disappointed. Though China has been menacing Japan in the Spratly Islands for over a decade, this has not been enough to force a revision of Article 9 of the Constitution — which forbids Japan from waging aggressive war. Some of the more slapdash Brexiteers took it as a given that, during talks with the EU27, national interest or even the needs of European exporters would prevail, and that things like the integrity of the EEA were in fact wink-nudge negotiating positions. Wrong. The process ended up turning almost entirely on legalese such as the Good Friday Agreement — never on trade or even grand strategy. They had counted on a new smirking Bismarckianism that never actually materialised. 

Subsequent events only underline the point. Two years after this bruising course of negotiations, the United Kingdom decided to commit huge resources to defending the EU27’s eastern flank. The UK is also backing Ukraine’s accession to the EU: now a closed market to British goods. Even for a relative tearaway like Brexit Britain, the international principle is still unanswerable. Under similar circumstances, any 18th-century British cabinet would probably be concluding a treaty with Russia. 

Liberal internationalism has been challenged only to come out stronger. That’s not to say it’s come through unchanged. In the 2020s, global institutions no longer justify themselves with anything so sensible as, say, cheap imports and just-in-time supply chains — these were all torched in the name of “global action” against Coronavirus four years ago. The only argument now really made for these things is that any alternative to them is morally unconscionable. Britain can’t exit the ECHR to exercise ordinary border controls because that would put it in the same company as Belarus, and would be an aid and comfort to bad men everywhere. 

Border control. Great power politics. National rearmament. A liberal course on AI. These are not bankrupt ideas. History will probably vindicate them. But their proponents can’t count on some inevitable global crack-up to accomplish their work for them. So far, the only successful reassertions of the nation state have come not from “wider forces”, but from small, organised conspiracies like Vote Leave and Boris-Cummings that were willing to act in the face of events and force the issue. Nationalism and internationalism are moral premises. Events cannot prove or disprove them. More than anything else, what the last 10 years have shown is that these ideas are more powerful than realism, expediency, and the so-called facts of life. Those who oppose these reigning ideas shouldn’t count on reality intruding in on them.

Their timing has been awful. Every critical stage in their lives has coincided with disaster. Britain’s millennials were fresh out of university during the crash of 2008, and were struck again by lockdown on the cusp of middle age. Having no assets, they saw no benefit from the asset price inflation of the intervening decade. Unlike their American counterparts, Britain had no tech boom to make at least a few of them rich, or to serve as an outlet for their talents. Nor were they, as in continental Europe, cushioned through the long barren years by things like perpetual studenthood. Britain’s millennials instead had to settle for the quietism of the graduate scheme.

Unlike Gen Z, they are too proud to keep up a raffish existence on the margins, through streaming, cryptocurrency, the monetising of hobbies, or outright unemployment. But even the path of respectability has availed them little. Britain’s private sector has slower progression than in America, and is famously parsimonious with its salaries. Millennials are underpaid, overtaxed and overcharged for everything.

Politically they have also failed. Corbynism was the authentic cause of Britain’s millennials; it, alone, made at least some attempt to speak to their material interests — like student debt. All was soon blown off course by Brexit, an issue that millennials were entirely indifferent to. Nor can they claim to be any kind of cultural vanguard. Throughout the 2010s, Britain had no campus movement to speak of, no Antifa formation of any significance. All social reforms in Britain have been carried out by fiat from above, by Roy Jenkins in the Sixties or David Cameron in 2011.

Other generations have had their share of trials. But here’s the key difference: with millennials, none of these have brought any edification whatsoever. Bankrupted, locked indoors, wages winnowed away. For previous generations, war and disaster at least brought opportunities for advancement, and a general burning away of societal deadwood. The generation of Frenchmen who survived the Napoleonic Wars could look forward to the comfortable mediocrity of the 19th century. Not so with the millennials, who have been given neither catharsis nor a quiet life. Theirs was not the kind of adversity that hardens, only the kind that makes you curl up into a defensive ball, perhaps never to come out.

So it proved. British millennials are dutiful, conscientious, courteous almost to a fault. But they have essentially checked out of history. In most things British millennials have now simply fallen back on the tastes and assumptions of their parents — the Britpopper generation. They fawn endlessly over grandees like Ian Hislop. They’ve even taken their parents’ enemies for their own, like Margaret Thatcher, someone who left office before many of them were even born. Generational deference can even be seen in the music of the millennials, in Ed Sheeran’s strange thraldom to Elton John.

More from this author

What Young Fogeys get wrong about housing

By Travis Aaroe

As prime minister, Rishi Sunak went along in a similar vein. Of millennials he was, of course an atypical one: a Thatcherite who shared in none of their money woes. But Sunak — along with colleagues Suella Braverman, Robert Jenrick, and Claire Coutinho — was Britain’s first real experiment in millennial governance. Little was ever made of this. Unlike Blair and Brown, or the Conservative modernisers, there was never any self-sense of a rising group of youngsters ready to challenge the incumbents. That would require the breezy confidence of youth which Britain’s millennials had beaten out of them long ago.

This is the story of Rishi Sunak and his government, told one way: a younger generation dutifully upholding a set of inherited pieties that are basically alien to them. Sunak and his colleagues were the first true digital natives to hold high office, but they were called upon to defend an essentially analog worldview, these Alastair Campbellisms, which holds that the exact conditions of Britain in 1997 must be defended to the last.

Sunak, for his part, was a man of the 21st century. He had built up a fortune in private equity, and had, in Silicon Valley, seen a world beyond Britain and its “broadcast ecology”. But because of their generational hang-ups, people like Sunak never found the courage to tell Britain’s gerontocrats to get with the programme: that the United Kingdom cannot in fact maintain first-world living standards with “world-beating creative industries”, and that we might learn something from the healthcare systems of France or Singapore. At the very least, they were willing to log on to the internet and read about these things, a task that has always proven beyond the Britpopper generation.

Suggested reading

How the Nineties are haunting millennials

By Kat Rosenfield

Rishi Sunak was thus one of the few “Wets” in the true sense of the term: someone who recognises what the historical moment demands of them, but dithers and temporises endlessly. He was talked out of things. His younger colleagues were taken from him. He suffered himself to be ridiculed for taking an early interest in AI, something that is set to transform all our lives. Internet use was second nature to him, but he went along with absurd legislation against online trolls that nearly caused WhatsApp to delete itself from the UK market.

But the subordination was never quite total. After all, Britain’s millennials did not share in the generational experiences that produced New Labour and the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympics; for them these “collective memories” are to be obeyed, not really believed in. When Rishi Sunak as Chancellor presented a new “Diversity Built Britain” coin, he was repeating the pieties of what is to him simply a public doctrine.

As millennials come into power, there will be a moment when this false consciousness breaks for good; when it is realised that these inherited pieties are what’s keeping them poor and diminished. Ending debt vassalage to the aged, school selection by property, and fiduciary obligations to non-citizens would each represent a huge social and financial windfall for them. They simply have to learn to say no.

This looks some way off. With the new administration, the British state has reverted to the Britpoppers, and ripe ones at that — Keir Starmer is 61, Sue Gray a stately 66. But I wonder. Even now, a millennial like Wes Streeting can say astonishingly frank things about the NHS: to the extent that the health service ever was a national religion, it certainly isn’t for people of Streeting’s age, who have actually heard about the alternatives.

No doubt, at some point in the future, a 34-year-old technologist from the Tony Blair Institute will chafe at being told by an ageing “Comms Guru” that his latest procurement request is unworkable, unlawful, and violates the Nolan Principle of Openness. In overthrowing these pieties, what is now the greatest weakness of the millennials will become their greatest strength: general disillusion.

Everything about these places lent itself to a faster pace of life. These were hothouse conditions for, among other things, treason, conspiracy, republican asabiyyah, artistic experiments, scientific experiments, murder, usurpation.

Yet to a certain kind of urbanist and architect in 2020s Britain, the salient feature of the cities of the Italian Renaissance is that they were walkable. Saying no to the tyranny of the vehicle, the citizens of these places opted instead for interwoven quilts of local and communal belonging. Milan under the iron rule of the insane torturer and patron of the arts Galaezzo Sforza was in fact a “15-minute city” of human-scaled vernacular buildings and pedestrianised Great British high streets. Shops, housing, employment, open spaces: all sat happily within walkable and cyclable distance.

But to the extent that these cities really were walkable, this was a product, not of choice, but of necessity. They were under constant siege and so had to be corseted by walls — living nose-to-nose was more a matter of civic defence than anything else. Not that they would even need to spread much further out: Florence in 1400, mistress of cities, was roughly the size of modern-day Weymouth.

And anyway, would a Renaissance prince really have turned their nose up at a car, if they had existed? Cesare Borgia would probably have allowed cars into buildings. And whatever the virtues of vibrant close-knit townscapes, most condottieri tried to escape them as soon as possible, raising a palace on Lake Como or a monolith fortress attached to the city walls.

That the city states of Italy might ever be identified with settled torpor is the result of a longstanding intellectual current in English life. This is young fogeyism — the conservatism of the literate middle classes which, for one reason or another, is estranged from those forces that made Britain a modern country: the Reformation, industrialisation, and parliamentary supremacy.

In many cases, this was more of a personal effect. Towards the end of the last century nothing was more common than a tweedy journalist who felt the dissolution of the monasteries like a wound, but baulked at, say, Norman Tebbit.

Suggested article

New Towns will never be classless utopias

By John Boughton

But this kind of showboating belied a number of sincere beliefs and assumptions that have since been incredibly influential. Chief among them is the idea that what traditional European society really meant was strong community bonds, particularly at a local and rural level. This means that anything that might disturb this idyll — like Bolshevism, fascism, urbanisation, Thatcherism, or the break with Rome — is simply part of a generalised “modernity” that can be dismissed in toto. For fogeys this is the omnicause that effaces all others. Confronted with a transcendent evil like this, many would retreat into the quietism of architecture and antiques.

Young fogeyism, this cast of mind, endures to this day. If anything, it has become more influential. For one, its modern adherents are all business. People like Auberon Waugh and Peregrine Worsthorne were sustained by journalism, but in the 2010s and 2020s tweed and flat caps are now more commonly found in think tanks, the Spad-ocracy, architectural practice, and strategic comms. Modern young fogeys are active and driven; unlike the earlier generation, who had no real use for books or ideas, except for those found in novels, today’s young fogeys have a worked-out theoretical justification for their beliefs — drawn from Roger Scruton, Edmund Burke, and the table talk of Charles III.

And here we find the same opposition to anything that might act as a solvent to Community. For the new young fogeys, this is the car. In the output of the think tank and urban design consultancy Create Streets, one of the main young fogey outfits, the car takes on an almost demonic aspect — shrieking down “dual carriageways” at breakneck speeds, leaving small children “sheltering timidly at home”. For the young fogeys of the 2020s, the car is nothing less than the Revolution on wheels: breaking up social bonds, reconfiguring the towns and cities in their image, destroying Britain’s stock of Georgian and Victorian buildings, and causing — that old chestnut — atomisation.

This is more than idle talk. Keir Starmer, like Michael Gove before him, has announced plans for the mass construction of Victorian mansion blocks and Georgian terraces as the solution to Britain’s housing shortage. And by a strange turn of the wheel, this new generation of fogeys has now been given something like a carte blanche over these plans: it is now the politicians that approach the fogeys, not the other way round. Labour Together and Onward, two think tanks of the main parties, both appeared at Create Streets’ “Restitched” urban design conference in March.

Suggested reading

The rise of California's vanlords

By Matt Feeney

This was no small feat, and these people should be congratulated on their achievement. Through a mix of royal patronage, dogged activism and a small group of devoted practices, the young fogey’s vision of urban life has emerged from the long years of obscurity and ridicule to win a final victory in the “style wars” of British architecture, which began with John Betjeman’s rescue of St Pancras station in 1967. Georgian, Edwardian, Victorian, and other vernacular styles now outpoll all others among the public.

To an extent, theirs was a victory by default. Other solutions to the problem of housing, like help-to-buy, or Gordon Brown’s eco-towns, had all run to nothing or made things worse; and proposed reforms to the planning permissions system collapsed at the Chesham and Amersham by-election of 2021. Young fogeyism in architecture was the only organised force left standing, and so now Britain’s new housing will be built on the pattern of Charles III’s Poundbury: as walkable garden suburbs of pedestrianised lanes, piazzas, trams, and gently dense traditional buildings.

The ambitions of groups like Create Streets are grand. They hope to recreate the beloved urban villages of London, only on a wider scale, and in so doing “restitch” a frayed social fabric. This is not to be discounted. These people have thought seriously and conscientiously about the problems at hand and have offered a number of valuable solutions.

But this project will, at the end of the day, be carried out according to the worst prejudices of the young fogeys: the awe for community in the abstract; the anti-modernism; the historical claptraps about traditional life. These will ensure that, in practice, little of Marylebone, Hampstead, or Dulwich will be recreated at all. They will, more than anything else, make these young fogeys the willing catspaws of some of the most retrograde forces in English society.

There are three reasons for this. The first: that the young fogeys often evince little sympathy for the people who will live in these new districts. They are, in the main, small traders, and professionals — often with families — who have been priced out of urban centres. For these people, the car is simply a fact of life. Small traders need to move goods and equipment, and white-collar workers have to commute to the centre of town. Things like commuter rail are often thin on the ground and unlikely to expand anytime soon, and, in any case, are of little use to an electrician who needs to transport their kit.

This is the material reality for millions of people, but all too often the young fogeys can only answer this with scorn. Cars are agents of vulgar modernity, you see: they require infrastructure that is manifestly not “human-scaled”, and the constant movement that they enable is an affront to ideas of local community and belonging. Other than this, these would-be planners can now simply fob people off with the climate (Did you know that “Conservation” is actually the most important type of “Conservatism”?).

All this has made young fogeys into some of the premier apologists — Create Streets is an honourable exception in this regard — for genuinely obnoxious measures like low traffic neighbourhoods (LTNs) and Ulez, things which really do make life harder and more expensive for the middle and working classes. One such scheme piloted by Lambeth Council caused local bus journeys of less than three miles to take over two hours.

And so, under the fogeys’ direction, Britain’s new garden districts will likely use all kinds of baroque devices to inconvenience cars and those who drive them as much as possible. Sensing trouble, a recent report from Create Streets titled Move Free urged their more fire-eating colleagues in local government and urban design not to “wage a war against motorists”. It has even argued that “15-minute cities” need not necessarily mean restrictions on transport. But having conceded the principle that a person’s right to go where they please is less important than communal and climate solidarity, it’s difficult to see how these things could ever be separable in practice.

Suggested reading

The battle for Thamesmead

By John Boughton

What’s more, it’s nonsense to suppose that things like walking, cycling, and public transport are somehow more in communion with traditional patterns of life. For the original owners of the Georgian terraces that are now to be aped, the main way of getting around was the carriage or the horse: in other words, an individualist if not aristocratic form of transport in which free movement was taken for granted. Most townhouses from this era came equipped with an outside scraper to wipe off muddy riding boots. Which, then, is more in keeping with the society that produced these buildings in the first place: the car or the bollarded sham piazza?

Second is the determination to turn every urban environment into a sort of market square. One shibboleth of urban planning is that demand rises to meet supply, and so constructing new road capacity for cars is self-defeating. This is not an insight that is ever applied to pedestrians. By assigning large stretches of these new neighbourhoods exclusively to walkers, the young fogeys will simply encourage more foot congestion, which can be just as bad as traffic.

Walkability for its own sake is the fastest way to kill a real place and turn it into an extended playground for who knows what. By turning the surrounding area into a permanent mandatory funzone it has ruined the Southbank Centre, just as it will surely ruin Soho if the demands to de-car it are ever met. Pedestrianisation is well underway in the City of London, and if left unchecked it will transform what is a stately place of business into the same theme-park melange.

Again, this has nothing to do with old-school ways of living, and it will do nothing to recreate, say, the gentle society of garden squares in places like Marylebone and Chelsea. These societies, these places, all recognised the need for exclusive areas of quiet and seclusion from the wider world — in other words, the willingness to tell people to get lost. Too often, “human-scaled” development turns out simply to mean teeming humanity everywhere, at all hours, and from which there is no privacy: once again, young fogeyism as applied here succeeds only in recreating what could often be so dreadful about traditional societies.

Suggested reading

Welcome to Britain's prefab nightmare

By Wessie Du Toit

Third and last is the devotion to Community with a capital C. What this leaves out is what was perhaps the most important feature of traditional urban life: exclusivity and discrimination. Residents of 15th-century Florence or Edwardian London enjoyed a freedom of association and disassociation that would be unthinkable to us today. Community with your fellow creatures was almost entirely voluntary, and it was one of the main reasons why civilised living in these compact conditions was possible.

This is not what’s on offer here. Local community is not a good thing in and of itself, and it will do little to repair any social fabric in these new garden suburbs. In many cases it will do the opposite. These new developments will include requirements for affordable and council housing, the latter of which, we are reminded, does not distinguish between citizens and non-citizens. People will resist housebuilding if they come to see it as a proxy for immigration, and they will in fact resent being “restitched” to the things that they moved out to the burbs to disassociate from. In this context, gentle density and the emphasis on community spaces would sharpen these problems in a way that divided and car-centric Metroland would not.

Young fogeyism shows little appreciation for these questions, seeing in this blatant social engineering only the best philanthropic traditions of the Church of England. If a lack of community is bad, then artificial and forced community is worse. What really did it for the civilisation of the mansion blocks and the Georgian terraces was not cars, but the “New Jerusalem” — that everyone was to now live together in a shared community in which all distinctions were effaced.

In the face of these Ruritanias, who is truly advancing the cause of urban living in Britain today? That honour belongs to one group and one group only: the assorted part-time yoga instructors, small tradesmen, and consultant astrologists who combine to overthrow LTNs, or else burn, melt, and pull down Ulez cameras. These people’s cause is the cause of modernity: that Britain’s cities really should be integrated economic zones free of fines, customs barriers or restrictions on free travel. They, and the small traders and suburban transplants that they act for, will see in the proposals of the young fogeys only another attempt to constrain and reduce them.

Many will also notice a strange combination: traditional aesthetics, paired with all the stuff of Clarksonian nightmare. In people like Charles III, and indeed even in Keir Starmer, the two are already well combined. Future generations may wonder why we ever made the distinction.

Little complacencies like these are part of a long tradition. People have dreamt of some scheme to reconcile capitalism and socialism, or at least to skirt the conflict between them, for as long as the two have existed. It’s an idea that’s hard to disagree with. Wouldn’t it be better if we could have class collaboration rather than the class war? Why can’t labour and capital simply stop disagreeing with one another and work together? Why can’t we, as is so often said, have both “a strong market and an active state”?

There has been no lack of Third Ways. Many were called into existence for a definite purpose: part of the economy walled off from market competition to accomplish something specific. For a long line of romantics, aristocratic dreamers, and clericalists, the Red Peril was to be defeated by refashioning society as a rigmarole of guilds. For Bismarck, this could be carried with old age pensions and accident insurance. The Third Reich promised German industry a great army — and the permanent demand that this implied — in exchange for its practical independence. Postwar Japan wanted to move up the “value chain” in exports, and this meant tight control of capital markets by the state to direct cheap loans to star performers.

In all these cases there was a plan, or something like one. There was, furthermore, a reasonably clear set of boundaries: an idea of where the writ of the state planners should run, and where it should end — usually at the factory door.

New Labour, of course, had its own Third Way. It was disarmingly simple. In 1997, Britain was, by some stretch, the most laissez-faire major economy in Europe. The British Third Way, then, simply meant creaming off its surplus to pay for new and expanded public services. This was hardly sophisticated. It was no MITI. But it had a tight logic: the fortunes of the City of London, bound up with the fortunes of the NHS.

But it was not to last. Britain’s Third Way meant a free market, with exceptions. This equilibrium did not hold, and the exceptions soon began to consume the host. For this there were three reasons.

For one, post-1997 Britain never evolved a defence of inequality. It was a market economy, but it could never come up with an answer as to why some prospered under it while others did not. This had much to do with the cultural forces uncorked by New Labour, which were levelling in the extreme. Ideas of the natural inequality of man, or the inequality of deserts, did not survive the long rattling decades of Red Nose Day, Britain’s Got Talent, and compulsory football sweepstakes.

Nor did it ever evolve an explanation for failure. Third Way Britain in its decline was not so much a market economy, but something much cruder: “UK plc.” This meant that every corporate bankruptcy was held up as an indictment of the managers. Even in the high summer of Osbornomics in 2015, “Business Secretary” Sajid Javid was expected to appear at the insolvent Redcar steel works and own up — but for what exactly few could quite say.

To this, add the cultural monopoly of the state broadcaster, a strange anachronism unique to Britain. The result was, as far as the economy was concerned, a permanent state of alarm, condemnation, recrimination and moral outrage. An economy directed by the personal whims of Piers Morgan. It had a dull hostility to wealth and enterprise. But being entirely anti-intellectual, it was just as suspicious of the state’s ability to direct this enterprise.

Suggested reading

Westminster is devolving itself out of existence

By Travis Aaroe

Mistrustful of politics and politicians, it was instinctually opposed to any change from above. Nigel Lawson’s monetarist reforms, or the decision to abandon the Corn Laws, would not have run. Indeed, the refrain from the breakfast shows was that economic issues were being treated as “political footballs” and should be handed over to a quango. A quango, of course, being exactly the kind of unprincipled melange of public and private that everything was now tending towards.

This was no longer a market economy. It certainly wasn’t a planned one. It was instead what E.P. Thompson called the pre-modern “moral economy”, run on crude ideas of communal obligation, just deserts, and forced generosity. It has no theory of state intervention, but will only suffer just as much private enterprise as is necessary to fund public services. Even the various centre-right governments after 2010 could only really justify free markets on such grounds.

The moral economy has no worked-out idea of what belongs to the market, and what belongs to the state. The only imperative here is community consensus, an idea of fairness. The result was an escalating series of erratic and unprincipled interventions to enforce this consensus.

Cheap moralism is its stock in trade. The government should step in to stop people being overcharged for theatre tickets. The football Super League must be broken up, and there must indeed be a “right to football”. Thomas Cook must be bailed out by the taxpayer, lest its customers be stranded abroad. An industry has profited from war, but instead of any system of regulation, there must instead be an abrupt one-time confiscation of its guilty riches. It, at the same time, meant the sham pragmatism of “value for money” (in civilised countries, this is referred to as “an audit”), which led to a public sector so mired in procedure that nothing can be procured at all.

It has a faith in the mystical power of iconvestment, or “Government working with Business”. This is not meant to yield any kind of return. These are investments made to restore some idea of inter-regional or communal fairness. The potential of certain places or groups is untapped, it is said — largely because of the ill will of the private sector. Investment, then, is the way to restore this balance within a system that is increasingly seen as zero-sum.

At the same time, post-1997 Britain has never accepted that public investment, which is not conducted on an open capital market, always lends itself to special favours and contracts for pals. Real corporatist economies like China bow to this fact. But not Britain, which clamoured for investment, but then immediately despaired of its results, accused the bursars of corruption, and called for them to be hauled in front of tribunals.

There is a low-level din of constant pointless mobilisation. Your time is never quite your own. Always lurking just outside the corner of the collective eye is the idea of conscripting the young — conscription for its own sake. Get them down the farm, or dragoon them to clean up after your nan, or, as prime minister Rishi Sunak recently put it, to learn cyber and leadership (in a rare act of grace, the two were not combined to form “Cyber Leadership”).

The highest statement of the moral economy is found in the stakeholders: the idea that politics, and the economy, should be run according to the needs of designated interests and Communities. But even this understates things. Post-1997 Britain was pathologically averse to “either-or”; it insisted in every case on both-and, and it was so continuously shocked and angered when this failed to do the trick. A market economy, though Social.

It had all the miseries of wage labour, but few of the individual freedoms that normally mitigate it. It made much of the idea of entrepreneurship, but could not even get over the trope of Dodgy Developers, and so never built any housing, or railways, or reservoirs. In practical terms, it seemed at every turn to have been chiefly set up to maintain the value of the great pension funds.

Suggested reading

The allure of a Labour dystopia

By Alwyn Turner

Such an evacuated system was left very vulnerable to challengers. So it proved. One of Jeremy Corbyn’s earlier phrases was: “A society where everyone takes care of everyone else.” This was simple enough. But having dealt in these kinds of empty chestnuts for the past 25 years, it was a phrase to which the British Third Way no longer had an answer. It escaped Mr Corbyn, but only just.

The shrieking climax of the moral economy came with lockdown. Again, this had nothing to do with any supposed British tradition of statism; Japan and Sweden, two much more avowedly statist economies, did not follow such a course. Rather, lockdown in Britain was a true media-driven frenzy, very much following the pattern of the previous quarter century. Its opening act was to hurriedly throw out the standing plan for herd immunity, which had been developed by disease control experts.

Lockdown was a parody of all the ways in which the British economy had been developing since 1997. It also meant their final consolidation. The government was made completely responsible for the operation of the free market — including for its results. Wage labour carried on, but in a dull levelling atmosphere of righteous outrage, and forced solidarity. The howl of cronyism again went up, even though lockdown, which meant certain businesses closing and others remaining open by executive fiat, meant cronyism and special favours almost by definition.

Over the previous 25 years, the residual elements of laissez-faire had always been there to cover the costs of these kinds of pogroms. But with lockdown this finally snapped. £300 billion had been borrowed. There was no chance of any return on this spending; for all practical purposes the money had simply been incinerated. Ten years of fiscal retrenchment had been undone on a whim. Fiscal bean counting, “Treasury Brain”, had long been the only effective break on the moral economy. Lockdown has destroyed this tradition as well, with Chancellor Rishi Sunak being its final spokesman. In March 2020, it was now outre radicalism to ask how the total nationalisation of all wages was to be paid for.

Thus, the classic British Third Way only lasted for 10 years, from 1997 to 2007. What followed was a series of ever more wild and careening expedients until the system crashed in 2020.

This is the great context of Rachel Reeves’s rise to the Chancellorship. Lockdown debt constrains her utterly. She cannot invest; she cannot cut taxes. She cannot make economies elsewhere: that way is barred. Surveying the ruins, her only course is to fire up the moral economy anew, driving it on in a hunt for wreckers and assorted populists. This is the real meaning of “Securonomics”: a return to moral order after self-inflicted calamity.

Suggested reading

Why Starmer will be dragged to the Left

By Steve Richards

Like the pre-Covid moral economy, it will be a policy of caprice, prosecution, and zero-sum. But this time there will be far less money to smooth everything over. Pension tax exemptions for NHS employees, and a hunt for lockdown profiteers. A Race Equality Act that will tender government contracts to favoured groups. The declaration that “globalisation is dead” because it has left communities behind and made Britain vulnerable to global shocks, along with a concomitant policy of onshoring. When combined with the promise to re-align with EEA rules, this will mean all of the remoteness of globalisation, though without even the cheap imports. It will be less a policy of “both-and” than “neither-nor”.

Government and business will continue to collapse into an indeterminate slurry. This is, of course, something that was already largely achieved with furlough. The state will not direct enterprise, but nor will it leave it alone; it will be held responsible for all its failures, and called to intervene when it succeeds too much. There will be the fake savvy of “engagement” with business, which will in practice mean the downsides of collusion but none of the pleasures of outright corruption. Shadow Business Secretary, Simon Reynolds, assures CEOs that he will personally “make the pitch” to their investors if their books should ever fail to balance.

Reevesism will speak to the vulgar anti-politics that has always been central to the British Third Way. The economy is so important that no blundering politician can be trusted to run it — either in a liberal direction or in a statist one. The only solution is to take it out of elected hands and submit all future budgets to the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), a quango. This will be the final stroke against Corbynomics — but also against Trussonomics.

As a result, no one will ever speak of Reeves as a rival to No. 10, as Gordon Brown and Rishi Sunak really were. Under Reeves, the old imperial treasury is finally to be broken up; and with it will go any real civilian control over economic policy. With this, economics in Britain will boil down to that basic impulse of Blairite society: the relentless hunt for social enemies.

Or at least a kind of Whig history. It — infamously — relied on grand narratives. Here is one. In the Middle Ages, England made a precocious finish to what we might call the story of early modernity. It had a single language; a single legal code; central government; national feeling; no great magnates; no municipal liberties; no regional distinctions that mattered. There was no rigmarole of provincial Diets, as was the style almost everywhere else. There was one organ, Westminster, where people could speak of a national interest that was felt as keenly in Scunthorpe as in London. These were legislators, not petitioners pleading the case of a town, or a guild.

The logical next step for this hot-housed national England was to round out the polity, incorporating the rest of the island to prevent it being used as a “backdoor” by its rivals. The unification of England meant, inescapably, the unification of Great Britain. Everything seemed to be pulling in this direction. The Scottish aristocracy was Norman. The Lowlanders, great bulk of the country’s population, were Anglo-Saxons. The Reformation had given the people of Great Britain a common religion (mostly), and, still more, a common set of enemies.

That decision, in 1707, to take the plunge for full parliamentary union simply made sense. Sure, much of it was down to self-interest. But it was a self-interest that presupposed a common one. The sectarian difference, dowdy and obscure by continental standards even during the time of Oliver Cromwell, was becoming even less important. Scottish merchants declared that the internal customs barriers with England were intolerable — barriers which were still the European norm well into the 19th century. Nationhood had arrived, and required only its formal consummation.

Suggested reading

Welcome to stagnation nation

By Tom McTague

If the unity of the island of Great Britain seemed in some way preordained, it still feels that way. Modern technology means that centralised rule is easier than ever. The confessional divide between England and Scotland has vanished. So too has the economic one: the choice is no longer, as it was in the dog days of Churchill’s chancellorship, between the shipbuilders of the Clyde and the City of London. Scotland and England both are now sustained by high finance; luxury goods; education; tourism. The departure from the European single market has made the British single market more important than ever.

And yet, there has been a concerted effort to throw the tide of history into reverse. Since the Scottish referendum in 2014, it has become common to say that Great Britain is an artifice with no real historical existence. But that rupture — devolution, Scottish and otherwise — is part of a particular idea of authority that has become hegemonic over the past 25 years.

The administration that came to power in 1997 was decentralist and localist in its assumptions. It did not like the idea of a powerful central metropolis in London. It did not like Parliament, with its debates, its majorities, and its ability to make and unmake any law — which threatened new unfalsifiable ideas of human rights. New Labour opposed majorities, executive power, and central government. No tradition of distributed power existed in Britain, so it would invent one. So was born the Supreme Court and the devolved assemblies, both practically free from Parliament’s writ, and which would make endless bartering between claims of right the legerdemain of politics, not popular appeals, or debates.

That idea soon became bipartisan. As a political programme, it preferred the local and familiar to the remote and metropolitan. It wanted politicians to “stop arguing” and come to an agreement. It distrusted Power, and sought to set things up in such a way that no one could exercise it over anyone else — except over the common people. It was, as George Orwell once wrote of Swift, “despising authority while disbelieving in liberty”.

Suggested reading

The gravediggers of British conservatism

By Aris Roussinos

Modern Scottish nationalism is not separable from this programme of decentralism. The two are symbiotic. Devolution created a strange and subsidised layer of local politicians and bureaucrats, who, having no real reason for their existence, could do little else but play to provincial rights and an exaggerated Scottishness as a gambit for funding and jobs. Westminster, won for the cause of sham provincial liberties long ago, always obliged. As national life was purposefully fractured, rule from London began — completely by default — to seem like a foreign imposition.

As the entirely self-created “crisis of Union” began to mount in 2014, Westminster could answer only with yet more decentralisation. Everything about London’s response to the separatist threat presupposed that a Scottish nation already existed, and that a British one did not.

The latest invocation of local rights was that Scotland had recently been getting governments and policies it had not voted for (so had, say, Cambridge). When a set of voters is unhappy, the usual course is to change things around to appease them — as Rishi Sunak is now attempting in the Red Wall. Instead, London’s response was a promise to shield them from the English electorate: “The Vow”. Reform of public services had been the main aim of David Cameron’s premiership, but now these public services were to be devolved entirely. In his heart of hearts, the prime minister did not believe that his mandate from the British people gave him any real right to govern Scotland.

The Vow, and the further devolution that followed, was an avowal that a British body politic did not and should not exist. London conceded every premise of the SNP. But these were its own premises. For its part, while the SNP was not the creature of London, at every turn it consented to play the role marked out for it. In the years that followed the referendum, Nicola Sturgeon became a permanent fixture of national life, and offered a general running commentary on British affairs. She was acting the part cast for her by London: a stern and forthright provincial critic of central excess. Unlike in Catalonia, or Quebec, there was never any serious talk of unilateral secession, even as parliamentary government in London virtually collapsed between 2017-19.

Suggested reading

Penny Mordaunt: the perfect head for the headless Tories

By Mary Harrington

The implicit relationship became clearer during Humza Yousaf’s year in power. One of his first announcements was that no second referendum would be pursued until a “sustained majority” emerged for one. This was, in practice, a way to adjourn the idea forever. In his resignation speech, Yousaf warned of the threat of populism. What? Scottish nationalism’s aim is to break up the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland: a permanent member of the UN security council, a stately member of the international system, and a nuclear power. It is, ostensibly, one of the most populistic causes on the planet. But that is no longer its way. To its leadership, at least, Scottish nationalism is not for Scotland, merely against majoritarian democracy in Britain.

But this dependence on patronage and concession made the SNP’s position too precarious. Having forsworn demagogy, it could now only petition Westminster to carry through its own project by degrees. Up till now, it had always found a receptive audience. But were even the feeblest of unionism ever to emerge in London, it would be out of road.

So it proved. After 2016, London took the bold and daring step of not allowing the SNP to hold another referendum at the time of its choosing and with its own gerrymandered franchise. This threw the party into a crisis from which it never fully recovered. The end, when it came last year, was suitably anticlimactic. Scottish nationalism, as practised, did not survive contact with a unitary British state that was prepared to take even the smallest of steps to preserve itself; and it perished over a trifle. The decision to veto the Gender Recognition (Scotland) Bill in January 2023 was a humdrum affair, entirely normal under any federal or pseudo-federal structure. But it has probably buried the SNP for a generation.

Buried, but dormant. In Westminster, devolution remains the solution to all political problems, and has indeed been given energy anew by recent events. Britain’s governing classes now believe that devolution is the best bar to the populist threat. They could not have been more clear about this: every anti-establishment vote from the British people is interpreted as, really, an inchoate cry against London, and for local autonomy. People in Teesside did not truly want lower immigration, it was said — only an Assembly of the North East, and a Mayor.

Rather than any change of course, Britain’s rulers have answered populism with devolution: to reroute and blunt public anger at the direction of national policy; and, still more, to break up the unified British body politic that had just delivered those results. It is proposed to dismember an ancient constitutional polity and hand over the fragments to a series of local fanatics and workaday crooks, in exchange for the assurance that these people will preserve the country from populism.

For their part, the British people have been vaguely bewildered by devolution. For all that is made of a clamour for regional identity and local belonging, the mandates for the new devolved assemblies and metro mayors have been derisory. The recent election for Mayor of the North East had a turnout of 31%; for the Mayor of York and North Yorkshire it was 29.89%. In May of 2022, the people of Bristol voted to abolish their Mayor and return to the old system of council oligarchy. The Liverpool mayoralty has collapsed in scandal. London politics only really exists insofar as there have been attempts to artificially wall it off from the rest of southern England: the battle over Ulez being the case in point.

Devolution, as a means to bar the way to populism, may yet reawaken Scottish nationalism. Gordon Brown’s plan for a new federal constitution, A New Britain, includes such howlers as giving the Scottish Government the ability to conclude its own international treaties. These proposals are already being watered down, and are unlikely to be adopted in full. But they show a clear direction of travel — even as Scottish separatism itself starts to sputter out. The end of the British union, if it comes, will have been entirely self-inflicted.

More than anything else, it will be a tragedy. Great Britain was created as a vehicle to unleash the energies of two almost uniquely talented peoples: people who had much in common anyway, but were being forever side-tracked by a tedious and endless cousins’ war. Union seemed to make everything young again. Union meant that the Scottish and the English could turn outwards. They pounced on the world with a boyish enthusiasm unequalled since the days of Alexander.

Devolution aims to bring this grand enterprise to an end. It offers — demands — a slower pace of life for the island and its people. The United Kingdom was created to do Something. One gets the sense that Decentralised Britain — introverted, particular, ruminating — is by design meant to do nothing.