It is both pompous and trite for a man of middling years, and who has achieved a degree of comfort, to sit around complaining about national decline. But local readers will back me up: national decline is ‘a thing’ here in Britain. It is palpable.
The new(ish) Labour Government has, as I have previously demonstrated, sought to make hay from the ‘lived experience’ of the population in this regard by doubling down on declinism, describing the country as having well and truly gone to the dogs – and itself as the only plausible solution. It has gone about this in a characteristically inept way; rather than providing a message of hope, it seems to be trying to position itself as the political equivalent of a dose of castor oil – foul-tasting but necessary. That might have washed if the voters had a clear idea that there was a credible plan for national renewal in the offing, but this is now true surely of only the most die-hard Labour members. The rest of the population are essentially now just walking around with their fingers collectively crossed behind their backs, clinging to hope but expecting disaster.
Keir Starmer himself seems to be aware of this – he appeared in the news today to display his spectacularly bad political communication skills, declaring that he did not want to rule out certain tax rises in the forthcoming Budget in case it “put the fear of God into people“. Let me tell you – that statement well and truly put the fear of God into me. But it does indicate that the PM has a sense that he may have made a misjudgment in cranking the pessimism to ‘11’ since taking office.
The image which the Government has conjured up to drive this basic point home is that of a “societal black hole“, as distinct from a mere economic one. The idea here would seem to be that the previous Government was so bad that it even managed to damage the very fabric of society, let alone the economy. But it is also what, I believe, poker players would call a ‘tell’. Yes, the Government appears to be saying, the economy has gone off the rails, and yes, the evil Tories played their part, but the real problem is you, the people, for being so foolish as to vote for the Conservatives in the first place (not to mention Brexit), and probably making foolish financial decisions to boot. The underlying message that is transmitted is: “Society, which is to say, the stupid and hateful proles, are the ones who’ve got us into this mess, and now we, the grown-ups, the sensibles, the experts, have to come along and fix it.”
This, let’s call it the ‘technocrat’s lament’, is entirely to be expected. The discourse that lies at the heart of technocracy is that the population are corrupt and that expert rule is necessary to save them from that inherent corruption; it would be naive to expect anything else from what is, in the end, a basically technocratic Government, which makes absolutely no claim whatsoever to be governing in such a way as to represent what voters actually want.
My own feelings, though, are complicated. It seems to me that, undoubtedly, things are deteriorating, and I have written a lot in this Substack about the roots of that deterioration and its trajectory. The country is in a bad way, and we can concede that to Starmer. But on the other hand, to describe society as being mired in a ‘black hole’ as such is to mischaracterise the matter rather. Society, by which we mean the people of a country in their collective interactions and relationships, is not really the problem; it is everything else – economics, politics, education, technology – that is really going wrong. ‘Society’ does not print money or set interest rates; society does not enforce (or fail to enforce) the criminal law; society does not run schools and hospitals; society does not police (or fail to police) the border or make decisions about immigration or asylum; society does not embark on exorbitantly expensive and corrupt megaprojects; society does not set climate change policy. It is the state that does those things. Society merely deals with the consequences and responds to the incentives. Yes, society may go wrong, but typically this will be as a result of government policy more than bad decision-making on the part of ordinary men and women guarding their own interests. For the most part, ‘society’ represents a bastion of sanity and reserve.
And it is also true, of course, that when the crash does happen – which I am certain it will – it is society that is going to have to pick up the pieces – and society, rather than the state, in which we will have to deposit our trust and faith in the aftermath as we rebuild.
I was struck by this on a recent visit to my hometown, where I took the photograph that heads this post. The scene depicted in it is the bandstand at the local park near where I grew up, where every day during the school summer holidays an afternoon of entertainment is provided to the local kids for £1 a head – and has been since 1953 (I used to go when I was knee-high-to-a-grasshopper myself). It is exceptionally good value, and genuinely enjoyable – and all basically run at the initiative of local volunteers (the founders having been a married couple who started it for fun). Watching my own children capering about with the others pretending to be one-eyed, one-horned, flying purple people-eaters, while the adults sat about on deckchairs having a moment’s respite, I was reminded that, when left alone, British people are generally pretty good at getting on with things. Problems only tend to arise when their incentives become misaligned due to over-reliance on the state – a sadly very common phenomenon – or, let’s face it, when the state interferes directly.
This is not true in all cases, and we can all think of collective action problems which genuinely need national coordination (such as the policing of the border, or, as is perhaps becoming increasingly apparent, the regulation of smartphone use for children). But by-and-large society as such is the reliable partner in the state-society relationship, and it is society which always has to provide a safety net where state interference messes everything up. Society, in other words, does not tend to fall into black holes. It gets pushed into them – by overzealous regulation – or slips into them as a result of neglect.
It is important, then, that in opposition the Conservative Party – and it is still, rightly or wrongly, the Conservative Party which has to do the work of official opposition – develops this understanding and forges a narrative to counteract Labour’s combination of low expectations and contempt when it comes to what society is capable of. What is needed is really a rhetoric not so much of societal black holes, but societal strength – and therefore of hope. Those two matters – strength and hope – are connected. And at the heart of the relationship between those two things lies the possibility not just of electoral victory for somebody but, vastly more importantly, genuine national renewal. Whether that synergy can be harnessed is another matter. But the fate of the country rests on it – and not what (as Labour believes) the state can do.
Dr. David McGrogan is an Associate Professor of Law at Northumbria Law School. You can subscribe to his Substack – News From Uncibal – here.
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The Conservative party has so far failed to realise why it got a good kicking in the recent election, and none of the candidates for leader show a real appreciation for what they need to do!
Becoming (c)onservative would be a good start, not just another Marxist/Socialist party not just paying lip service to some Capitalist ideals.
Actually listening to what people want, and not assuming to know what’s best for them! All parties always claim they will listen and learn, and then fail to do so!
I defy anyone to name ten conservative policies held by the most recent (and current) Conservative party and the roster of candidates for leader.
They wouldn’t make 3…
The greatest increase in wealth and health in all of human history happened in the last 200 or so years and has come from freely associating individuals (bottom up) allowed to question, explore and cooperate as they saw fit. The overriding societal model before this was top down empires with their centralised courts of experts, advisers and high priests and very little progress over several thousand years. It is strange that the loudest detractors of the British Empire are supporters of centralised authority such as the UN, WHO, CCP, WEF and EU, all of which can only countenance the idea of humanity being managed/controlled by an inner court of experts, advisers and high priests, in other word’s a return to the ancient Babylonian type model of governance. We are too far down the road of modernity to do that without dire consequences.
And…
“It’s among the intelligentsia that we often find the glib compulsion to explain everything and to understand nothing.”
Joos Meerloo
“Two things are outstanding in the creation of the English system of canals, and they characterise all the Industrial Revolution. One is that the men who made the revolution were practical men. …they often had little education, and in fact school education as it then was could only dull an inventive mind. The grammar schools legally could only teach the classical subjects for which they had been founded. The universities also (there were only two, at Oxford and Cambridge) took little interest in modern or scientific studies; and they were closed to those who did not conform to the Church of England.
The other outstanding feature is that the new inventions were for everyday use…”
Jacon Bronowski
“No government has the right to decide on the truth of scientific principles, nor to prescribe in any way the character of the questions investigated. Neither may a government determine the aesthetic value of artistic creations, nor limit the forms of literacy or artistic expression. Nor should it pronounce on the validity of economic, historic, religious, or philosophical doctrines. Instead it has a duty to its citizens to maintain the freedom, to let those citizens contribute to the further adventure and the development of the human race.”
Richard Feynman
“Take away the energy-distributing networks and the industrial machinery from America, Russia, and all the world’s industrialized countries, and within six months more than two billion swiftly and painfully deteriorating people will starve to death (based on the population of the late 1950s) . Take away all the world’s politicians, all the ideologies and their professional protagonists from those same countries, and send them off on a rocket trip around the sun and leave all the countries their present energy networks, industrial machinery, routine production and distribution personnel, and no more humans will starve nor be afflicted in health than at present.
Fortunately, the do-more-with-less invention initiative does not derive from political debate, bureaucratic licensing, or private economic patronage. The license comes only from the blue sky of the inventor’s intellect. No one licensed the inventors of the airplane, telephone, electric light, and radio to go to work. It took only the personally dedicated initiative of five men to invent those world transforming and world shrinking developments. Herein lies the unexpectedly swift effectiveness of the design-science revolution. Despite this historical demonstrable fact, world society as yet persists in looking exclusively to its politicians and their ideologues for world problem solving.”
Buckminster Fuller
“It was Thomas Edison who brought us electricity, not the Sierra Club. It was the Wright brothers who got us off the ground, not the Federal Aviation Administration. It was Henry Ford who ended the isolation of millions of Americans by making the automobile affordable, not Ralph Nader. Those who have helped the poor the most have not been those who have gone around loudly expressing ‘compassion’ for the poor, but those who found ways to make industry more productive and distribution more efficient, so that the poor of today can afford things that the affluent of yesterday could only dream about.”
Thomas Sowell
It was the Wright brothers who combined the work of earlier aviation pioneers like the German Otto Lilienthal with the fairly recently developed (by other Germans, original inventors Nicolaus August Otto and Eugen Langer, refined into something suitable for transport by Carl Benz) internal combustion engine in order to create a machine which was capable of directed movement through the air by its own power. And while Edison invented and developed, the lightbulb, he was trying to use it to sell his own direct current supply services which turned out to be a technological dead end as direct current transmission was limited to fairly short distances. It was George Westinghouse who brought the USA electricity based on alternating current technology.
In addition to pioneering the use of assemly lines for mass production, Ford also famously insisted on paying his workers sufficiently high salaries to enable them to buy Ford cars, something other industry captains from the time weren’t much fond of.
The picture presented by Sowell is only partially correct and incomplete.
He is correct in that none of the advancements came from the minds of regulators. The Wright brothers would have taken advantage of any previous knowledge which also would have included George Cayley, the first person to build a person carrying flying machine and who defined the ideal wing aerofoil. Benz, Lilienthal, Langer were all engineers and not government regulators.
That’s unsurprising because government regulators are tasked with managing what already exists, ie, he is using silly examples, condemnating a dog for not having wings, so to say. Technological breakthroughs have obviously done more for our present prosperity than hundreds of years of people presiding over and staffing filing cabinets could ever accomplish. But this doesn’t mean that “let’s just rely on our good luck” is a good way to run things as “good luck” might take a long while to manifest itself, it at all.
The Wright Brothers did not rely on ‘good luck’.
I’m not one of them and neither are you nor Thomas Sowell. Further, that their hobby would eventually turn into mass air transport cheap enough to be affordable to common people certainly didn’t occur to them. This needed almost a century of work of a lot of other people who aren’t remembered and there were certainly a lot of civil servants and maybe, even some politicians among them.
Perhaps, but the lion’s share of all improvements comes from the inventor, engineer, farmer etc.
The graph below is from Hans Rosling’s excellent book, FactFullness, and shows the dramatic improvements in airline safety since the 1930s. This is how Hans described it:
“Back in the 1930s, flying was really dangerous and passengers were scared away by the many accidents. Flight authorities across the world had understood the potential of commercial passenger air traffic, but they also realized flying had to become safer before most people would dare to try it. In 1944 they all met in Chicago to agree on common rules and signed a contract with a very important Annex 13: a common form for incident reports, which they agreed to share, so they could all learn from each other’s mistakes.
Since then, every crash or incident involving a commercial passenger airplane has been investigated and reported; risk factors have been systematically identified; and improved safety procedures have been adopted, worldwide. Wow! I’d say the Chicago Convention is one of humanity’s most impressive collaborations ever. It’s amazing how well people can work together when they share the same fears.”
All good, but what is interesting is the lion’s share of improvements that happened before 1944 convention. All these would have been driven by the pilots and engineers and manufacturers freely exchanging experiences. We should not ignore Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’, or similar, as it’s very evident in the same graph and with the red arrow showing when the convention was. Of course it would be unjust to ignore the all important work of the very specialised Air Accident Investigators that has developed over the years and following WW2.
That’s again entirely unsurprising: In order to justify a concerted effort to weed out the remaining problems, the technology first needed to become reliable enough that it was actually useful for anything beyond hobby for men who enjoy playing with fire, with mainly military real-world applications.
Your All these would have been driven by the pilots and engineers and manufacturers freely exchanging experiences statement is also wrong. The first world war led to a massive leap in airplane technology because of state-driven research and construction to serve military purposes better.
“hobby for men who enjoy playing with fire, with mainly military real-world applications.” This is the 2nd time you have implied that people like the Wright Brothers are hobbyists, therefore amateurs, and either require “good luck” or “play with fire”, Why is it important to you that they are caricatured in this way? The brothers were not amateurs and did not play with fire or trust to luck. That is insulting.
The first passenger airline flew in Jan 1914, a good 6 months before the beginning of WW1. The first paying passenger was Abram C. Pheil, former mayor of St. Petersburg. Their short flight across the bay to Tampa took 23 minutes. They flew in a “flying boat” designed by Thomas Benoist, an aviation entrepreneur from St. Louis. No military purposes involved. The post war 1920s saw civil passenger flying pick up and with the UK airlines using converted WW1 bombers. That was not sustainable and so there were a number of new civil airlines designed and built in the 1930s such as the beautiful De-Havilland Albatross shown below at Croydon Airport. Douglas developed the DC1, DC2 and the famous DC3, each a massive improvement on the previous, and none as a consequence of military requirements. During WW2 De-Havilland built the famous Mosquito without being asked and with a design that was contrary to what the Government was specifying. In fact all the technical achievements of both the UK and US were from various engineers largely left to their own devices, such as Tommy Flowers. Please see the Youtube below, especially around the 30:00 mark. He did work for the state run GPO but he was free to contribute to the work at Bletchley as he saw fit.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2tMcMQqSbA
Colossus – The Greatest Secret in the History of Computing
It is true that both WW1 and WW2 propelled technology and societies generally forward, but in many cases there was massive development of existing technologies.
hobby for men who enjoy playing with fire, with mainly military real-world applications.” This is the 2nd time you have implied that people like the Wright Brothers are hobbyists, therefore amateurs, and either require “good luck” or “play with fire”, Why is it important to you that they are caricatured in this way?
This is the second time you come up with this absurd misinterpretation. The Wright brothers were most certainly amateurs for most of their aviation career, which means people doing something for the love of doing it instead of “professionally”, ie, because someone paid them for this. But that’s a meaningless aside as I don’t share your prejudices against such people.
The notion that it’s possible to create some as complex as working airplane by ‘luck’ is absurd nonsense. But ‘luck’ is at the core of Sowell’s argument: Because we, the majority of people not creating technical breakthrough inventions, were lucky, some people did, which very much improved our lifes. But that’s not something which can be counted on and technical breakthroughs have been quite rare throughout the history of mankind. As argument, this basically boils down to “Let’s do nothing as we trust someone else will come up with a miracle way to make everything much better!”.
“…technical breakthroughs have been quite rare throughout the history of mankind.”
Cumulative Inventions available to humanity
1610 – 150 (accumulated over last 10,000 or more years)
1840 – 450 (300 accumulated in just over 200 years)
1900 – 1,450 (1,000 accumulated in about 60 years)
1930 – 10,000 (8,550 accumulated in about 30 years)
Elements available to humanity
1730 – 12 (accumulated over last 10,000 or more years)
1932 – All 92 elements of the Periodic Table discovered
Condemning!
Well here’s some depressing statistics that Labour’s London Mayor can surely be proud of. But he doesn’t seem to be particularly ashamed or bothered by the Met’s crime figures regarding his city, does he? As if the stabbings weren’t bad enough there’s the latest data on rapes and sex assaults. At least with the knife crimes it is a reasonable possibility to increase ‘stop and search’ but how does the Met go about tackling sex crimes in the capital? We know that they aren’t even interested in recording the migration status or ethnicity of people committing these crimes, and it’s very obvious why. Because 9/10 times these crimes will be perpetrated by ‘the usual suspects’.
”A rape offence is reported every hour in London, according to data obtained by the BBC.
More than 8,800 rape incidents were reported to the Metropolitan Police in 2023 – an average of 24 a day.
Charities have called the findings “horrifying” but say the true extent of sexual offending will be far higher.
The Met says it remains determined to tackle sexual violence, is “striving to do better” and that the number of rape charges has more than doubled since 2022.
The data – obtained via Freedom of Information requests to the Met and Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) – also shows a further 11,000 reports of other sexual crimes were reported to the force last year, with almost a quarter of all reported crimes from people aged under 18.
To put this into context, a report of sexual violence or rape was made to the Met on average every 26 and a half minutes.
London-based Rape Crisis centres, Solace and Nia have called the findings “horrifying” adding that it “clear urgent change is needed”.
Tirion Havard, professor of gender abuse and policy at London South Bank University, said the figures were “depressing” both because of the extent of the offending and also in that it was “depressing that I’m not surprised”.
Prof Havard added the actual problem was far worse than the figures released by the Met indicate.
“It’s the tip of the iceberg. This is almost best-case scenario.”
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cxr202eee0no
It amazes me that on the odd occasion an MSM outlet will actually provide the names or mugshots of suspects. Oftentimes it’s just a case of ”Brighton man”, ”Bournemouth man” etc, but in this case they’ve released pictures of ‘the usual suspects’. The only reason they’ve worded it as ”may be able to assist”, rather than ”these are the men we suspect of rape” is so that they don’t get lynched by people who recognise them before the police get to them;
”Police have issued CCTV images of three men as part of an investigation into the rape of a teenage girl and the sexual assault of a woman on Brighton beach.
Detectives from Sussex Police said the two victims – who are known to each other – were attacked at around 6am on Sunday 8 September.
The force said it happened in an area of the beach between the two piers, a distance of around half a mile.
No other details about the circumstances, nor their ages, have been released.
Officers said they are looking to identify three men who “may be able to assist” with their investigation.”
https://news.sky.com/story/police-in-brighton-seek-three-men-after-teenage-girl-raped-and-woman-assaulted-on-beach-13218090
I’m sure there are plenty of useful idiot Labour supporters but I doubt the senior leadership truly believe the state can or will solve anything- except how to keep them and their mates rich and powerful
“..undoubtedly, things are deteriorating..”
Indeed. But not for all. A millionaire PM, married to a billionaire’s daughter did rather well out of Covid (by the way, does anyone know where Sunak is and what he is doing for the country as leader of HM’s “Conservative” opposition?) And so did dozens of extremely wealthy people, when at the same time, the rest of us suffered psychologically, physically and financially. Why has the author not mentioned what we all knew at the time, that “”the rich will get richer and the poor will get poorer”.
Excellent article!
I would love to think the Conservative party will bring back the hope that Dr McGrogan wishes for but I feel certain that cannot and and will not ever happen.
Their complaisance and lassitude in doing precisely the opposite over fourteen years demonstrates perfectly how utterly useless they are, and the very fact that they, even now, fail to see this renders them inept and idiotic. It is surely they who have been responsible for the ‘Con’ in their name.
The only hope any party can provide will be that of the ‘Reformatives’!