BritanniQ: Political Class Action
The following opens the latest issue of BritanniQ, Bournbrook’s weekly newsletter in which A D M Collingwood curates essays, podcasts, books and quietly patriotic beauty, and sends the best directly to your inbox.
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There is no opprobrium so scalding, so molten that Britain’s elite do not deserve it poured upon them.
They have gotten every major foreign policy decision wrong for 150 years, to calamitous effect; the Treasury has for decades been a byword for economic indifference, destruction and decline; our education system has fallen from world beating to national embarrassment; the NHS, accounting for some ten per cent of GDP, employs more people than any other organisation in the world save Walmart and the militaries of the USA, China and India, yet our life expectancy ranks 18th out of 19 developed countries (only morbidly obese, fentanyl-addled America is lower); our nation is increasingly an obsequious satrapy of Washington DC, pathetically in thrall to the imperial centre’s sociopolitical pathologies.
Despite this, Britain’s elite strut and preen on the world stage, dividing their time between lecturing countries about morality and governance like gin-sodden imperial missionaries who can barely hide their disdain for the natives’ table manners, and making grandiloquent, platitudinous speeches in the salubrious conference halls of New York, Davos and Delhi about about “world class… leading… top table… global Britain punching above its weight”.
In a wonderful essay for UnHerd, Aris Roussinos, lays the blame at the feet of a “Whig-Imperialist” view of the world, an ideology “entirely unmoored from” the reality of Britain’s position, leaving us with an elite who “find our islands too small a stage for their talents” and yet are “incapable of running a small northwest European archipelago”.
As an explainer of Britain’s current predicament, it is difficult to imagine a better essay than Mr Roussinos’s.
Meanwhile, at The Long March, economist Michael Taylor argues that “decades of political indifference” has “left our political establishment barely even pretending to be concerned about the deterioration of much of the country’s fundamentals”. At least, he argues, they are now “exposed naked to our view”.
