Repairing ‘broken’ Britain — and the world
The prize for the silliest headline in the British press in 2026 — so far — must surely go to the usually sober Times with this January one: “PM struggles to take the spotlight off global events”.
But that of course is just where the spotlight needs to be, and not just on ministerial crisis gatherings but on the real international forces and undercurrents now shaping our lives and security. This is an area where too little British public debate and comment has been ready to dive deep enough and share with people the frank reality.
The spotlight, or at least more intelligent illumination, should be on both the changing external world and on all its inextricable and growing connections with the domestic scene. The longer we fail to understand the divisions and deficiencies that have emerged and onwards in the wider world, and how decisively they affect our own fates, the longer and deeper will be our divisions within.
Most of our worries — about our national safety and security, our national unity and survival, about political stability, environmental threats, costs of living and above all lack of adequate funding to meet ever rising expectations — have their roots and causes in the outside world. They are well beyond the individual reach of national governments. It is urgent collective action, in new forms of collaboration, that is most needed yet least prioritised. If this central task fails internationally to engage the best minds, as it did at the end of the Second World War, so will our best efforts at home.
Take a look at the time-worn institutions of global governance (UN, IMF, World Trade, World Bank, Arms and Disarmament, arms control systems) which were set up around 1945. Most started from nothing and were largely driven by British and American creative ideas — although with almost the whole planet participating, except the two defeated nations. Eighty years later these institutions are now all in deep trouble, haemorrhaging respect and trust and everywhere in urgent need of repair or replacement in totally changed world conditions from those in which they were born.
Without this restoration of global institutions, overall international relations are becoming a game without rules and without referees. Anarchy and the race to the bottom replace world order. For us Brits as a traditionally open and law-abiding nation, this chaos could be fatal. No amount of local and domestic reform, or zealous commitments to “growth”, will restore political stability and security. The hoped-for surge in prosperity on ministerial wish lists cannot happen without this “mantle” of overall world order and guidance. It’s like being a snail without a shell. The 1930s proved that and the current chaos proves it again every day.
Its not just a question of patch and mend. Our strategists have to re-think alliances and relationships. Our sleepy economists have to rethink the changed nature and sources of rules-based world trade, as services and goods merge inseparably — indeed, the whole “discipline” of economics. Our communicators have to restart, too: changing the language of our national conversation, without which democracy withers.
We have, in effect, to socialise, and give a new appeal and sense of fairness, to liberal capitalism. We have to prepare for entirely new sorts of conflict and security, with huge societal implications affecting the roots and styles of our lives at all levels.
AI and climate threats require new forms of action and control, both national and international. Where necessary, these demand as collective and interoperable patterns as possible, to make the slightest positive impact and to halt the downward spiral into anarchy. The muddled and frightened world urgently needs all these trends and dangers, and more, to be pieced together so that they can be focused on in a coherent way — and not only pieced together but held together, while the world shakes and Donald Trump shakes it further.
The giant paradox (which it seems politicians and commentators have yet to get their heads around) is that the world is getting rich, richer than it has ever been, yet it is also getting poorer, perilously so. This is the greatest dilemma of our times. It is also getting very much more dangerous. We have to take a deep dive into the changing structures of power – lying deeper than much of public debate or comment seems to realise, to begin to comprehend what is happening all around us and how to respond. When we do so we shall find no single magic bullet to sort things out, no new Lord Keynes to show us how to save the world for democracy.
We are confronted by the vast wealth of markets, sovereign wealth funds, colossal pension funds, insurance surplus funds, property funds, embedded capital running into trillions and quadrillions. The perplexing contrast, lying directly alongside this wealth, is with governments and state entities in most countries drowning in debt, ten times the level of even a decade ago, and gasping for more funds to stave off unpopularity and defeat. And alongside all that is a newly empowered public, loaded with information, and alas disinformation and misinformation as well, as never before, and in a permanent state of mutiny against their rulers.
The hope in almost every seat of government is for economic growth to keep taxing and borrowing against. Instead, most of the richer countries, Britain included, and almost all the poor ones as well, are left banging heads against bond market ceilings, weakening currencies, losing trust and respect, with anger replacing it and disappointed and impatient populism paving the way to political instability and uncertainty. This in turn adds to a massive hump of pessimism, to weak confidence, and therefore to lack of strong new investment, (pessimists don’t spend), of productivity, of pensions sufficient to live off, and the care, peace and prosperity that should go with it all — and so on round in the oft-quoted doom loop. Those 20th century times of high growth — especially in Asia, but also in post-war Europe — are anyway probably over for ever.
On the one side we see world capital funds galore actively looking for a sound place to invest and get a reasonable return. On the other we see promises, promises piling up by the state to deliver and perform as never before. Hyper-connected populations, empowered by the silicon chip as never before, and egged on by the media, push their electronically inflated hopes and work out their disappointments on their nearest targets, namely their governments, their policy-makers and legislators, and their well-heeled establishments whose antics the media gleefully report daily.
This is accountability in the digital age. This is the perfect recipe for rising tensions and widening division. Hit the nearest hardest. Blame everything on the people you can see and read about, right there in front of you. If any of it looks like sticking to you, set up a committee to pass the parcel on ASAP.
Is there a way for anybody to halt the process? Is there a new magic gateway to unlock between public need and private resource? John Kenneth Galbraith pondered the issue in his brilliant book published some 65 years ago, The Affluent Society – contrasting private affluence and public squalor. How could they be reconciled? How could they be motivated to cooperate rather than compete, to build each other up rather than let each other down? How could old antagonisms be dissolved in common causes, or by advance onto new common ground?
The answer was that for years they couldn’t be and they weren’t. Instead it was “promise everything”. More state, bigger state, deeper state; say “yes” to every new demand for funds from every side; promise new money for all new laws, new benefits and every other kind of “must have”. We know where that leads — and did lead — and we’re still here now, as the “lack-of-funds chorus” becomes the universal dirge of the age.
In the UK, when taxes and borrowing hit the ceiling — as they were bound to, even before Covid and soaring energy costs made things infinitely worse — ingenious minds came up with the clever idea of the Private Finance Initiative – at first glance a near-miraculous way of uniting private finance and initiative with Government approval, framework and support, but without carrying all the risk on the public budget and the bond market. . For a brief time this seemed to show that funds could be mobilised from private investment pools, at home and overseas, for all kinds of state projects and public expenditure, without governments taking, or being assumed to take, all the risk, and without giving bond markets the shakes and demanding higher interest for their loans, both the new ones and the existing ones. Without, too, the ever-present spectre of collapsing currency and unbearable living cost inflation to boot.
For a while (a short window), the concept was supported by both political wings, although with growing distaste from both – from the Left which hated such an increased role for wider capitalism and private enterprise, and for the Right which hated accepting an enlarged state role to make it all work.
In the UK, the mother country of this thinking, greed on the private side, and bureaucracy on the public, began to strangle the whole PFI dream, This has been so, even though several other advanced economies have picked it up and right now are re-shaping the central idea under various labels, to chime with their specific conditions. The embedded ideology of state-versus-individual poisoned cooperative thinking and the search for common ground.
As a result, so as far as the UK is concerned, we are here at what the FT called the “ideas-free hole in British politics”, the plughole through which initiative and growth continue to get sucked down – and drained away. Instead, the heart of the British problem is now self-feeding pessimism, spread primarily by the daily printed press, and by the various radio platforms, who bombard us with half-informed “expertise” (defined with refreshing frankness as “bullshit” by the Princeton philosopher Harry Frankfurt as where someone talks without knowing what he or she is talking about).
Much of the “broken Britain” chatter comes from this origin, but it ignores the fact that at least half Britain’s alleged brokenness lies in issues being experienced by numerous other advanced “middle powers”. The solutions, if any, lie in reordering the overarching structures of world governance, regulation and rule-keeping — especially of trade and finance, over which national governments separately have no control whatever, and only limited control in rebuilding failed institutions (as in 1945).
The fact that these institutions – and their repair-needs — get virtually no intelligent discussion in public prints inside the UK creates of course a distorted blame game in which every ill is immediately blamed locally on “the politicians” — as though they were a separate breed — and on their advisers, as the easiest (and most visible) targets. The fact that most of the loud-mouthed critics are themselves citizens, with as much influence as legislators and therefore with as much responsibility, only seems to occur to a few.
In the British case this produces a sort of feverish destruction of whoever happens to be prime minister at the head of whatever party or coalition happens to have a majority for a time in Parliament. This used to be the acute Japanese problem too, with changes of PM every six months. Now Japan has recovered (have we studied how?) but it has become the British problem. This has been conceived and elaborated entirely within the Westminster bubble and is of little interest to — in fact actively disliked by — the vast majority outside London, who merely want to tolerate the political class, elect a party and leaders to do the least harm, and have their say every four or five years. The constant hysteria of Westminster press coverage leaves most of us stone cold.
If the feeling of good citizens (most people) is that they just have to tolerate politicians and their games, inadequacies and outdated theories most of the time, the same is not true about attitudes to broader conditions. For example few people except obsessed ideologues now have time for full-blooded egalitarianism, which is anyway impossible and a direct cause of increased suffering, poverty and injustice.
But what should not, must not and cannot be any longer tolerated, at least in countries which call themselves civilised societies, are conditions which deny for millions of families good basic services: a roof over their heads, uncrowded hospitals, good schools that really work, warm homes, a pension you can live off, good training for all who want it, enough food for their offspring, relief from constant harassment and shortage and freedom from the agony of daily worry about how on earth to make ends meet.
This is modern nationhood and the bedrock for unity and stability, without which societies no longer work. Neither parties nor politicians in the UK who want to stay in the game should accept any half-dead political or narrow economic theory telling us that these things prevent remedial action because they disrupt the inherited taboos of fiscal restraints and must not be breached. This is a harder-than-ever message to get over, especially when the statistics themselves are distrusted and aeons away from the safe aggregates of Keynes and Kuznets which dominated pre-digital world economics in the 20th century.
To be told that, while the world is full of riches, they are in the wrong place and not available through the state as presently organised is not tolerable and not in line with any priorities of a moderately populist world in the all-information age. Ways forward do exist, but they lie in a new marriage between public needs and private resources – a marriage which has not yet been consummated. Along with state efficiency, well-administered law and order and administrative honesty, these now have to be the new — and actually deliverable — standards. They stand in marked contrast to, and are far more meaningful than, generalities about new “resets” and the need for “fundamental reform” which we hear daily from wafflers on air or online, or pieties about protecting human rights. Rights are two-a-penny in political circles but cannot be eaten for breakfast or supper – or indeed delivered in practice.
To understand why these latter generalities fail so utterly to create a sense of fairness in society – anywhere — we have to return to that basic public/private relationship (a line now increasingly blurred) between state and citizen. This is the root source of the poison of political instability and distrust at almost every level of human governance and on which so many negative and obsolete barriers are based. In at least a dozen advanced nations, local versions of expanded types of PFI, now labelled PPP, are being tried out and developed. These include Korea, Japan, Sweden, Australia, Finland, Canada, Norway, Germany, France, Belgium, the Czech Republic and The Netherlands.
The good news is that bright minds here in the UK are turning again to whether and how the old PFI thinking can be resuscitated and improved. A device called Regular Asset Base has been used to produce almost all funds for the Thames Tideway, a giant sewer and drainage system under the Thames, delivered to budget (£5bn approx.) and bang on time. Whether it works for something much larger and riskier, like the proposed Sizewell C “replica” nuclear station in Suffolk remains to be seen. The intended replication is of a similar model still under construction in Somerset: Hinkley C, currently £14bn over budget and at least 14 years late for delivery. A much cleverer design using fleets of Smaller Reactors, ready far earlier and attracting far more private capital than the proposed EPA at Hinkley, would have been a far better bet, but a sort of White Elephant madness prevails in this area, It seems highly likely to end in tears.
All this sounds far away from geopolitics and world troubles. But what we have here is a perfect example of ideology trumping technology and common sense. There is no Left or Right about it. It may sound like the old familiar struggle – entrenched politicians backing state versus market.
But the axis is the wrong one and the search along it of the fabled middle ground between parties is an invitation to a quagmire and nowhere. It is a confusion between middle-way compromise and the more fertile common ground that lies not between but ahead. For the kind of enormous public/private infrastructure required for energy transition, lying just ahead for the UK, if we are to prosper, an entirely new battleground and plan is necessary. It is the common ground of the future, not the bogged down Left-Right middle ground of today’s party political bickering, where genuine progress resumes.
Along with much wider sources of capital, including easier and more popular share investment, the mobilising of wider employee ownership in a vastly greater scale in the UK, there are the makings of an extremely dynamic exemplar, playing a important steadying role in a very dangerous world. Not a bad future, not bad at all if we follow the right path to the future and switch from the old one of the past.
So what are the policies that might lift governments back into the position of authority and respect they once enjoyed, and enable people to trust their leaders? Such conclusions are invariably followed by a challenge: “Well, what would you do?” A cascade of favourite ideas follow, rattled out from the policy wonks of the world
The answer is that the question itself is wrong. It is not policies, however copious or detailed, but ideas that inspire today’s electorates. The winning ideas will be those that are drawn from a profound understanding of the way the world now works, which pierce through the fog of information overload (much of it fake) and are interpreted and promoted with honesty, frankness, wisdom and conviction. No use for leaders to rely on clever public relations experts who miss the real mood, or fashion-obsessed focus groups. And no use drowning a nation’s citizens in endless promises of detailed policy goals that an increasingly skeptical public doubts will ever be achieved, and certainly not by overloaded central governments.
And no use, again, relying on the old ideological rallying calls of the past, when neither the collectivist state nor the marketplace any longer have all the answers, and common sense shows clearly that a skilled and innovative mix of the two is needed.
With all the detail in the world available online in continuous flood, the message people really want to hear from their leaders is how this bewildering flow makes sense, what the real underlying truths are and where it all is leading. They seek deep reassurance and guidance as to where they belong, what the nation they inhabit stands for and what position it aspires to in the new global landscape.
Well above all the usual bread-and-butter wants — about which they have heard so may unfulfilled pledges — people are ready to have their minds open to new possibilities, for themselves and for their children, and to have their imaginations fired about the future.
To some degree Margaret Thatcher, after a slow start, succeeded almost 30 years ago in reinvigorating the UK, which was a deeply dispirited and demoralised nation when she first took over. But that sense of pride and purpose has long since melted away and now a new uplifting lead is once again crying out to be articulated. Everyone needs a country to love, and the moment for a profound renewal of the nation state, as the wise former U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros Ghali once described it, has truly arrived.
Where should the British now look for that sense of renewal — or at least the best hope of escape from the rumbling anger and distant but approaching thunder of the loop of doom? Some British voices have been arguing for a generation or more that the answer is primarily within the European Union. That, they claim, is where Britain’s destiny lies. These voices are not as strong as they were, but they are still influential. Others put the trans-Atlantic relationship with America as the top priority — in spite of the present falling out over Iran. Others urge still closer links with Japan.
But in reality the first step to restoring national confidence and unity is to show that while the British are, and will remain, good Europeans (it is after all their immediate close neighbourhood), and while relations with America should always remain strong (although getting more difficult daily), a modern nation like Britain need not see itself as bound to either entity when it comes to its new global positioning. British interests and potential go far wider and are changing far faster than prevailing opinion allows or understands.
The world is now a network in which confident and agile nations of all sizes can play their part with a mixture of alliances and bilateral links all round — and especially links with the rising powers of Asia, the Middle East and Latin America.
Now that really is a big idea for a nation that has lost its way and has long felt somehow torn, even squeezed, between the two Atlantic blocs of America and Europe — perhaps not quite such blocs as feared after all. It will surprise many to know that the one voice of true authority to have spoken out in recent decades in support of this vision of renewal for Britain, and for all its citizens in entirely new world network conditions has been a royal one. It is that of the late Queen Elizabeth II, who clearly set out where the best future for Britain may lie. In lots of ways, she told the nation in a Christmas Day broadcast, it is the Commonwealth that is “the face of the future”.
What she said is probably what most British people feel, although it may not show up on the surface of opinion polls and tests. The British are not anti-European, despite Brexit, and certainly not anti-American, in spite of Trump. And nor are they nationalist in the narrow, obsessive sense. But they do long to make their own special contribution on the international stage. The Commonwealth of 56 nations offers an amazing soft-power network, or stage, on and through which that can be done.
The political leaders who follow this royal guidance, reinforced by King Charles III, will strike a deeper chord of sympathy and assent than anything that can be achieved with promises of good times round the corner. In doing so they will be offering a truly big idea around which a divided and disoriented nation can loyally unite. Our leaders could thereby regain for government and constitution the trust, credibility, authority, respect and capacity to meet great challenges that, for the moment, we seem to have lost.
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