Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are.
This stirring end to Ulysses fills me with such a sense of mission that Mrs Price and I named our cocker spaniel Tennyson. Much has been taken from Britain in recent years and decades, and we have been made weak by time and fate. You will not struggle to find pessimism, nihilism and fatalism around every journalistic corner.
But much abides. In this first edition of a regular column, wherever possible I will endeavour to remind you, and myself, of the positives out there in Britain today. I put to you one simple plea: Please don’t emigrate! Dubai can wait. So to kick off, here are five reasons to be bullish about Britain, despite it all.
First, just as the songs of Abba are so bulletproof that they could survive Pierce Brosnan’s warblings in ‘Mamma Mia’, so too are our own innate strengths nearly indestructible. We have perfect geography to thrive in the 21st century. The English language is the language of the AI revolution and the technologies of the future. Common law is still the system of international commerce and all Chinese efforts to supplant it will fail. And our glorious constitution, though its light has been hidden under a bushel of Blairite rot, still gives us the best chance to restore ourselves. The lessons of our history, our institutions and our gentle, Christian, ancient ways of life are still alive, as we approach the 1,100th anniversary of England in 2027. This is a starting point every other country wishing to renew itself would kill for.
Second, there is a growing consensus amongst many elites, let alone the public at large, that the ‘blob’ is the biggest blockage to addressing the needs of the nation. With nearly four years until the next election, there is plenty of time for serious people to work on the reforms necessary to reassert parliamentary supremacy, and the concomitant ability for the executive to act, moving power away from the permanent bureaucracy of civil servants, regulators, quangos and the rest. Groups like the Centre for Policy Studies, Prosperity Institute and Fix Britain are charging headlong at these issues, and people like Alex Burghart in the Conservative Party are doing the hard yards of how to change the system.
Third, it bears pointing out just how much Britain’s problems are acts of self-harm. Consider a thought experiment; what would happen to gilt yields if it was announced that Ed Miliband was sacked tomorrow? What would happen if his successor announced an end to Net Zero? And that domestic fracking & North Sea oil and gas were brought back, alongside an announcement that the Government would back Rolls Royce in rolling out a fleet of next generation nuclear reactors? To draw on another Victorian poet; we are still the masters of our fate.
Fourth, Pitt the Younger may once have said that ‘England has saved herself by her exertions, and will, as I trust, save Europe by her example’, but this time, it may be the example of our cousins across the pond whose example can save us. The United States has been faced with a bizarrely similar set of troubles as us: skyrocketing spending, a soft border, rampant illegal immigration, loss of military industrial capacity, rising violent crime and lawlessness in big cities, insane regulatory burdens and a runaway bureaucracy. We shall be able to watch and learn from their failures and successes. For example, and to use a ghastly corporatism, we can see how they ‘operationalise’ the task of mass deportations of illegal immigrants and take notes on what works and doesn’t. As Churchill advised his cabinet in his last utterances as Prime Minister ‘never be separated from the Americans’.
Finally, the future is going to be much weirder than we imagine. The sorts of technological advances, of which we are currently only in the foothills, will become indistinguishable from magic. Britain may miss out on some of the AI boom, as we have with driverless cars and maybe humanoid robots, but we are extremely well placed to take a global lead in many of the other technologies of the future. I’ve already mentioned nuclear energy, but we also have a world-beating life sciences sector, cryptography and quantum computing expertise, and, I would imagine, unfathomably cool stuff currently hidden away in university labs and garden sheds. If the government got out of our way, there’s every chance we could build many of the new industries of the future here in Britain.
Adam Smith said that there is much ruin in a nation. These were meant to be words of consolation and hope, rather than a hypothesis for our current leaders to test. So have hope. Because tho’ much is taken, much abides.
