Hostilities have a way of flushing out unpleasant truths. The Iran campaign has done just that. Never mind the outbursts from the Oval Office, or the legalism of the ‘international community’.
What has been revealed this side of the pond is a country bereft of sovereignty, thoughtlessly outsourced since the Second World War. While Brexit laid the ground to recover trade sovereignty from the EU, much of our sovereignty remains outsourced to other international authorities, particularly the ECHR. Energy sovereignty remains outsourced to the COP process under the Paris Treaty; and security sovereignty remains outsourced to the United States, however grudgingly on both sides, with our Armed Forces reduced to either its de facto auxiliaries or embarrassing incapacity.
In their disagreeable way, Donald Trump and the air war in the Middle East combine to blow away the cobwebs. They offer an occasion for the UK to correct its transnational misalignments, as well as the accumulation of home-grown challenges to sovereignty.
In the first instance, this means focusing on the central strategic theatre of the Atlantic, resuming our role as an intercontinental broker; cultivating our interests in other selected theatres; raising defence spending to 5% of GDP on honest accounting; and re-arming for operational resilience.
The UK should enter into case-by-case trade relations with those willing to do so, based on mutual recognition of standards; and rectify our own barriers to trade rather than getting on our high horse about the self-defeating policies of others.
Our policymakers should remember that growth comes from stable regulation and taxation, presided over by a state which knows its limits and places priority upon competitiveness. There is scope for the country to take a lead where we faces challenges in common with others, that is demography, fiscal vulnerability and other aspects of state incapacity, the ‘good problems’ of peace and prosperity, and tech disruption.
It is time to rectify our own self-harming legacy of gesture-politics, pushing Net Zero and protected characteristics, plus more recent legislative misadventures in education, employment, housing and public law. This also means we should move on from the platitudes of levying taxes on, or withdrawing benefits from, those not on our team, instead turning public healthcare from a liability into an asset; reversing the bloat in the national balance sheet accumulated over the last century; reforming state pensions; and instituting land-use reform.
The Adam Smith Institute has joined with the Institute for Free Trade and the Henry Jackson Society in an unprecedented collaboration to address these problems, by jointly publishing ‘Sovereignty without Illusion’. The paper’s proposals pay our challenges the compliment of treating them with the seriousness they deserve. We take it that the current Government is too troubled to act; and that change can only come from its successors, to whom we present a prospectus of legislative reform ready for blackletter drafting to rebalance the role of the judiciary; reform the machinery of government; and reform the public balance sheet, including ‘off-balance sheet’ pension obligations.
Let us turn healthcare and welfare away from ill-judged pledges, which have enfeebled both providers and recipients and are now transparently far-fetched. Instead, they can become an instrument for public and personal self-reliance. Liberating the value locked up in suburban land increases the supply of housing, also contributing to self-reliance. Our economic proposals hold the prospect of over £1.7 trillion of government receipts, representing 60% of public debt, as well as stimulating economic growth. We should use some of this to invest in the military and our allies, boosting drone and counter-drone capacity, reinforcing our navy and doubling the strength of the army to four combat divisions.
None of this will be painless. The alternative is a national calamity, which follows Hemingway’s account of bankruptcy, as happening gradually, then all at once.
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On September 29, 1976, Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, Denis Healey, announced his intention to apply to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for a $3.9 billion loan, the largest ever requested. Britain, The Economist announced, was ‘bust’. This was a national humiliation, the crux of a decade of economic turmoil. Britain before 1979 was not […]
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