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The forced departure of the sixth British prime minister in 10 years is being interpreted as yet one more symptom of Britain’s chronic political instability. Comparisons are made with Italy, though the current Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has been in office for three years and eight months.
Such hand-wringing misses the point that a country able to rapidly change its leaders by democratic means is far better off than one stuck with the same dud. Longevity in office is not necessarily a sign of successful leadership: witness Vladimir Putin firmly in power since 1999 despite launching a disastrous war. Khalifa bin Salman Al-Khalifa, who died in 2020, probably holds some sort of record as the despotic prime minister of Bahrain for 50 years and 300 days.
All recent British prime ministers have failed to cope with, still less reverse, the country’s comparative decline compared to the rest of the world. This failure has gathered pace since the financial crisis of 2008, though its roots go back much further to the first half of the 20th century.
But it is crucial here to keep a sense of proportion because Britain faces deep-seated problems, but it is not on the edge of a catastrophe. Yet it might easily inflict a real calamity on itself by ill-judged and over-radical efforts to promote national resurrection. Brexit is the most notorious example of national self-harm, but other remedies for the British malaise have had equally negative results. Britain is like a patient who suffers from serious but non-fatal illnesses whose immune system – in the shape of plausible but toxic reforms – goes into excessive overdrive, doing more damage than the original ailment.
Despite exaggerated talk about Britain’s ultimate decline, there is strangely little realistic analysis of how to put it right. The chief economic commentator of The Financial Times, Martin Wolf, says that the starting point in raising languishing economic growth rate “must be admission that the Thatcher experiment failed: it did not transform the underlying performance of the economy for the better.” He says the political response to this falls into two categories: charlatanism and timidity, with Sir Keir Starmer in the latter ineffectual camp.
Can Makerfield MP Andy Burnham do any better as prime minister, given how many wrong turnings there have been in the past? Privatisation of public utilities and outsourcing of government operations in the 1980s and 1990s are now generally admitted to have been a disaster, but how quickly and effectively can they be brought back under public control? A vast divide today separates those who own property outright and those who do not, a gap exacerbated by the sale of council housing, but to what degree can mistakes made over 40 years be reversed? Nor is it clear that the British state, at both the central and local levels, possesses the basic skills and resources to make up for past failings.
Reform and Restore are banging loudly on the gates of power with their simple but poisonous explanation for Britain’s troubles which boil down to blaming somebody else. In 2016, it was Brussels and the European Union, while 10 years later, it is immigrants. As a councillor in an impoverished south coast town put it to me: “It is always easier to blame everything on Johnny foreigner.”
The British problem is often portrayed as essentially economic: get Britain’s economy growing again and all will be well. But I believe that this analysis is fundamentally mistaken. British comparative decline no doubt has deep social and economic causes, but the worst failure is political and the greatest danger is that the far-right will use an inflated and cataclysmic vision of Britain’s ultimate decline to panic people into making a fatal leap in the dark and into the embrace of shady folk posing as national saviours.
After the Brexit referendum in 2016, I began visiting different parts of the UK to try to understand the nature of the British crisis, and what might be done to mitigate or end it. Because of the near collapse of the provincial press as a source of detailed information, much of the country has become a terra incognita to a greater extent than at any time since the early 19th century.
Having witnessed real crises tearing apart places like Belfast, Baghdad and Beirut, I was dubious that Britain was as far down that road as many Britons feared. What I did find was enormous inequalities not just between North and South, but within cities and towns that appeared to have a lot going for them. A friend in Canterbury told me that she had been stopped by a young man in the street. He came from an estate where residents complained resignedly that rats were infesting their houses, but the council no longer had a pest control officer and they themselves could not afford to pay one.
Anger at the decay of public services was everywhere: In rural Herefordshire, close to the Welsh border, an amused local man told me that he had just met two American tourists standing hopefully by a bus stop. “When is the next bus?” they asked. “2pm on Thursday,” he replied to their dismay. In prosperous Skipton in North Yorkshire, younger people can no longer afford to live in the town where they grew up, but if they get cheaper accommodation in Lancashire, a few miles away, they find there is no bus to get them to work on time. London may also have its poor districts – but they are usually close to richer ones where there are jobs and services.
These are not merely differences in the quality of life but in life itself. The suicide rate in the North of England is almost twice that in the South. A woman living in an affluent ward in the Isle of Thanet in Kent will live on average 22 years longer than a woman living in the poorest ward.
It is not that nothing was ever done to help regions recover from de-industrialisation. As Burnham prepares to take office, there is much speculation about “Manchesterism” as a prototype for enhanced state intervention in combination with private investors. The symbol for this is Burnham bringing an expanded and popular local bus service in Manchester back under public control.
More generally, Manchester has been the most successful example of “city centrism”, also tried in Newcastle and Birmingham, where local administration, universities, financial institutions and services are concentrated in the modernised centre of cities in the belief that this will in turn rejuvenate a whole urban area. In central Manchester and Salford, this formula has worked to a degree. A forest of tower blocks and 100,000 people live in the city centre, where once there were only a few hundred inhabitants and ageing buildings – but further out in Greater Manchester, places like Eccles appear as moribund as ever.
The good news for Burnham as prime minister is that so long as he does something visible and concrete to improve people’s lives, they will believe he and his government are on their side. Starmer never did that.
Further Thoughts
I have always been bad at party games like Charades, which I find a bit less funny and more embarrassing than other participants. But my father, Claud Cockburn, did devise a game, of which I have written about before, that still strikes me as genuinely amusing and original. The purpose being to invent national sayings and proverbs that sounded plausible for their country of supposed origin but are in fact entirely meaningless. For example, an old Norwegian saying: “The tree is taller than the highest wave”. India has a proverb that “all is not nothingness, nor the nothingness all”.
I made a collection over the years of these supposed pieces of wisdom, which I published more than a decade ago, but I would like to revisit them since they were not easy to manufacture. At first sight, for instance, a plausible candidate might be the traditional Scandinavian saying: “The pine is tall, but does not reach the sky”. Yet, unfortunately, it conveys the trite idea that even those who succeed or grow great have their limitations.
But no objection can be made to that wise piece of Norfolk folk wisdom – in fact, invented by my wife – which holds that “burrowing badgers catch no butterflies”.
Real national proverbs are often dull or banal or have long since lost their edge through overuse. Sayings by individuals are often more interesting, though many of the more famous have a contrived, too clever-by-half feel to them, such as Gertrude Stein declaring that “in the United States there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is. That is what makes America what it is”. One can almost smell the midnight oil that Stein must have used in concocting this.
Sayings by individuals are generally more interesting than national proverbs, which tend to show a firm grip on the obvious. Stein’s vastly overused remark, speaking of Oakland, California, that “there is no there there,” has long set my teeth on edge. It has become an excuse for ignorance equal to foreign writers making snide remarks about the supposed lack of character of the American heartlands.
The British claim that their humour is too subtle and ironic for foreigners to appreciate and very occasionally this is true. An example of this sort of wit is the famous Punch cartoon of the 1930s showing two hippos in a tropical pool, one saying to the other, “I keep thinking it’s Tuesday”.
Collections of quotations often rely on a predictable pool of contributors and frequently disappoint, an exception being Quips & Quotes: A Journalist’s Commonplace Book, written by Richard Ingrams, former editor of Private Eye, many years ago. It is a mix of fresh and unexpected quotes from people long forgotten and others still famous. I did not know, for instance, that Vladimir Lenin said that “the best government has only to be in power long enough for everybody to wish to remove it”, and I particularly enjoyed the remark of Peter Cook: “Cricket is nothing if it is not one man pitted against a fish.”
As I wrote in 2012: “Few real proverbs are as interesting as these. But my father discovered two, both Chinese, that are equal in appeal and which I have never seen quoted elsewhere. One says: ‘Do not tie your shoelace in a melon field or adjust your hat under a plum tree if you want to avoid suspicion.’ The other competes with Peter Cook’s in its cryptic allure: ‘Of nine bald men, eight are deceitful and the ninth is dumb.'”
Beneath the Radar
It has been a good week for mayors: Andy Burnham of Greater Manchester is on his way to Downing Street after his triumph over Reform UK in the Makerfield by-election. New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani has become a crucial power-broker in the Democratic party by ensuring the defeat in primaries of old guard Democratic Congressmen by radicals whom he endorsed.
What do Burnham and Mamdani have in common? They are away from the nominal centre of power in London and Washington. They can therefore credibly present themselves as outsiders able to do constructive things. Both face discredited and decrepit party machines, and in the age of the 24-hour press conference, are confident and articulate.
Cockburn’s Pick
The former Israeli diplomat Daniel Levy is always worth listening to on war and peace in the Middle East.
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