22 January 2025

Without the will to change, we’ll never reach prosperity

By

On day one of his second presidency, Donald Trump signed over 200 executive orders, covering the crisis on the southern border, a national energy emergency and withdrawing from the 2015 Paris agreements, as well as rescinding 78 of President Biden’s executive orders. 

You might be tempted to think that this can’t happen in Britain, and that our political system cannot facilitate such decisive action. You would be forgiven for thinking so, given the 80-seat Conservative majority of the 2019 election led to very little change, the constant humiliation of the Tory government by the courts over deportations or the seemingly interminable struggle to ‘get Brexit done’. 

But you would be wrong for thinking so. The virtue of the British political system is that parliament is supreme; anything that the King in parliament says is law is unchallengeable by the courts, or indeed by any other body in the nation. When discussions surrounding constitutional reform were raging in the 1970s, Old Labour types asked the very simple question, why would we reform a system that allowed us to create the NHS? Had Britain been governed by a different constitutional arrangement in 1945, the new Labour Government – and hence, the will of the people – would not have been enacted quite so easily. 

The same system facilitated the mass privatisation and liberalisation of the economy under Margaret Thatcher 35 years later. The British people were prepared to tacitly admit that they had got it wrong in the 1940s, but the consensus that dominated the two-party system until the late 1970s was so entrenched that it proved almost impossible to break. 

The fatalism that pervaded the 1970s has returned to us today. Back then, Britain’s political class seemed resigned to managing the decline of Britain from a great power to a marginal one, to a poor nation on the periphery of Europe no longer in control of her own destiny. Such sentiments echo today; it wasn’t long ago that warnings were sounded that Poland’s economy could soon grow larger than Britain’s in GDP per capita.

It would be very easy, then, to believe that the task of restoring the principles of prosperity is impossible, and the fight should not even be fought. Yet history, as Benjamin Disraeli reminded us, is made by those who show up; those prepared to wrestle with the hard questions, take the bull by the horns and attempt to solve the problem. They may fail, but they can at least say they tried, rather than farming the problem-solving out to another quango or signing up to another international commitment that sucks up time, money and political capital with very few results. 

The pessimism of the 1970s and our current epoch were both driven by the same sentiment, that Britain’s course is set, and the only question is the pace of change, not the destination. But this is, again, a choice: we do not need to accept hundreds of thousands of migrants a year to support our welfare state or provide economic growth; we do not need to tax ourselves into poverty to send cash overseas; we do not need to make ourselves cold and come close to energy blackouts. Such actions are choices, not requirements, sold to us under the label of ‘no alternative’.

Yet the tools of restoration remain intact. Edmund Burke’s warning to the French – that they had a constitution deficient in parts but still capable of restoring itself – rings even truer for us today. Our political system is predicated on the supremacy of parliament above all else, and any claims that we have no control over our political destiny must be exposed for the fiction they are.

Prosperity or poverty is a political choice. Political change is almost always a question of political will. There are, of course, some constraints – politics is the art of the possible, after all – but those constraints are real and practical, and should not be the consequences of the political equivalent of sitting on our hands. We cannot tax our way to prosperity, and we cannot regulate our way to innovation; but we can set ourselves free, if we are brave enough.

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Dr Jake Scott is the Research and Editorial Director of the Prosperity Institute.

Columns are the author's own opinion and do not necessarily reflect the views of CapX.