It is an interesting dilemma as to whether, if you are going to be ruled by a Government to whom you are politically opposed, it is better for that Government to be competent or incompetent. Good governance is a virtue in itself. But a competent Government can also do lamentable things much more expediently than an incompetent one if it has the wrong aims or objectives. It may in the end be better to be governed by a buffoon than a genius if either way they are going to be motivated by dangerous ideas – although really of course it is a distinction along the lines of the difference between being stabbed or shot. All things considered, one of those options is probably slightly better than the other, but both are going to hurt and the only thing to hope for in either scenario is that the wound won’t be fatal or turn gangrenous and necrotise.
I had call to reflect on these matters recently while reading the Labour Party’s now somewhat infamous ‘A New Britain: Renewing Our Democracy and Rebuilding Our Economy‘. This document, a report of something called the Commission on the U.K.’s Future (set up by Sir Keir Starmer after becoming Labour leader) was issued in 2022, but is now being read with serious attention for more or less the first time as it became clear that a Labour Government was imminent. In brief, the idea is more or less to create a written constitution for the U.K. in all but name, through the passing of a New Britain Act (a “constitutional statute” – more on that in a future post, perhaps) that would reform the House of Lords, devolve power to regional and devolved assemblies, entrench new social and economic rights, provide a mission statement for the United Kingdom and so on.
The prospect of the report being implemented has, it seems fair to say, thoroughly spooked sections of the conservative commentariat. Peter Hitchens tells us that it is a “plan to make it impossible for Parliament to overturn [Labour’s] left-wing revolution“; David Starkey warns it will “eradicate our traditions of Parliamentary Government“; Tim Stanley thinks it means “the Left will remain in power forever“; J. Sorel labels it a programme “to reduce Parliament and Downing Street to constitutional ciphers and end majority rule“; Andrew Collingwood meanwhile settles on calling it “revolutionary“.
No doubt there is a great deal in ‘A New Britain’ that would be concerning if it were indeed put into effect (and it is important to mention that although Sir Keir Starmer endorsed the document early in 2023, very few of its recommendations appear in Labour’s manifesto). But I would like to focus here on an element of the report that has not been widely reported on – if at all – and which I think reveals something important about its authors, about the incoming Labour Government, and by extension about our political class as a whole.
And it is simply this: setting substance entirely to one side, the report is shoddy, slapdash, riddled with grammatical and syntactical errors, and in places incoherent. It is not by any means the Federalist Papers, or anything that comes close to shining the Federalist Papers’ boots with spittle and shoe polish. It is a thin tissue of notions resembling ideas, written in the breathless style of an undergraduate student project by somebody who is gamely aiming for a decent 2:1 in Political Science, and who will ask his mum to proofread it for him before he submits. It is simply not what one would expect from purportedly intelligent people who have thought deeply about the subject of constitutional reform and who treat the matter with sufficient weight.
I ought to provide some examples, and these are found on almost every page. Sometimes there are slips of the finger that can be attributed to a basic failure to pay attention to detail (“We have been in touch with the Welsh governments [sic] own commission…”; “so that people across all four nations feels [sic] represented”; “our own systems and governance cannot continue to be a barrier [sic] to our future success”; “most people see that the pound sterling as a U.K. asset [sic] and that the central state should manage the macro economy for the whole country”; “We take the view that these purposes should clearly and explicitly stated [sic]”, etc.). And throughout we find oddly spliced commas that interfere with careful reading (“This we believe, can be achieved by…”; “This will, help bring a fractured and divided country back together”; “The common desire for more local control should be reflected in a legal requirement, to require decisions to be taken…”).
There are also chunks of bizarrely inept and clumsy phrasing, which reinforce the feeling that the report was written in the fashion of a humanities student’s “all-nighter”:
Because, for too long, we have developed only some of the potential of some of the parts of our country, not of everyone, everywhere in the country. …
The individual changes that we recommend are in our view, common sense reforms that have widespread support across party and geographic lines, but taken together they add up to a radical blueprint for the significant and serious change that people the length and breadth of this country have told us that they want to see. [The places where there are accidental double spacings are real, and appear throughout the document – at least a few times on each page.] …
We recommend strengthening the powers that deliver self-government in the devolved nations of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland – based on the principles that devolved self-government should be permanent, expansive, and each elected body held in equal esteem.
At times, this slips into a sort of quasi-English, which almost parses, almost makes sense, almost convinces the reader that the author has a glimmer of an understanding of what he or she is in fact trying to say:
So while many of our immediate economic problems can be fixed by pursuing better policies, by stopping the race to the bottom in our economy, Britain, needs change that runs much deeper – giving the people of Britain more power and control over our lives and the decisions that matter to us. …
The alternative we put before the people of Scotland and Wales is better than either costly and destructive independence and a stagnating status quo: change within the United Kingdom that can entrench self-government in Scotland whilst improving shared government across Britain and we believe that our recommendations offer not just faster and safer change, but fairer change. …
For this transformative agenda to succeed, we will need to draw on the best resource Britain has: its people. In that way, we will be able to face the challenges of the coming decades with confidence, and the recommendations in this report will help it [what?] do so. …
Climate change and protecting our environment also clearly transcend national boundaries within and beyond the UK and require action at the UK level, and greater cooperation between different levels of government, as we set out later.
No, I’m not making any of this up; this is actually how the report reads – like somebody making a game attempt at coherent English expression simply by throwing together various phrases that sound as though they ought to go alongside one another. My favourite example of all comes on page 68 of the report, in the section which – given my professional interests – I focused on most closely, pertaining to constitutional reform. Bear in mind as you read the following sentence that this is billed as being the zero draft of an overarching constitutional “mission statement” for the U.K. that should be embodied in law:
The UK is a group of nations, peoples and places and which have come together in a shared Parliament at Westminster to provide together what can be better provided together than separately.
Just read that out loud to yourself and then go and compare the result with “We the People of the United States…“, if you can stomach doing so.
‘A New Britain’ is not, in other words, a serious document, and the people who wrote it (I doubt Gordon Brown, notionally the Chair of the Commission, has even read it) are patently, on this evidence, not serious people. They are playing at government. They inhabit a world of platitudes and feeble intellectual gestures. They don’t really think; they gesticulate at ideas that they believe sound nice. They can’t even be bothered to proofread a document which they suggest should be the foundation for a new constitutional settlement for a mature democracy like the U.K.; they don’t appear even to know that MS Word will do some of it for them. They are contemptuous and disrespectful of their audience and of the country which they intend to make anew, and they behave as though the most serious politico-legal matter of all, the rearranging of the constitution of a nation, is something about which it is permissible to write drivel.
This all sends two paradoxical signals. On the one hand, while it is appalling and horrifying, it is also somehow reassuring: Labour’s constitutional project, such as it is, will be drawn up and “inspired” by people of the profoundest mediocrity. I would therefore be very surprised if the new Labour Government will have anything like the wherewithal to get close to actually implementing the plan; I think it much more likely that it will end up being the constitutional equivalent of HS2 – an expensive megaproject that should never have been started, leads nowhere and achieves nothing except to demonstrate that the country’s political class as a whole is patently ill-equipped to govern.
On the other hand, the message sent by the way that the document has been prepared and presented undoubtedly is appalling and horrifying: I tremble for my country when I reflect that these frivolous, lightweight people are apparently the best that we have to offer by way of political decision-makers and that it is their ideas which will be informing the honest-to-goodness rewiring of the constitution of the British State. We all of us can tell, intuitively, that our political leaders, journalists, media commentators and civil servants are like a pack of squabbling compsognathus in comparison to the tyrannosaurs of the past, but it is another thing to be confronted with the malaise so starkly and brutally as in ‘A New Britain’.
And this of course raises a much wider set of concerns. No doubt you will have noticed, as nobody can fail to have noticed, that our culture – and this is by no means limited to Britain, though I think it is most noticeable and pronounced here – has largely abandoned the notion that excellence matters. Everybody will have their own stories for illustrating this and their own theories as to why it has happened. It is a long, sad tale that would require too much time and space to really delve too deeply into here. But it is important to observe that the rot has gone so deep that it has even seeped into matters as serious and important as constitutional reform: those who have taken upon themselves the task of remaking the relationship between the people and the state do not even think it necessary to pay sufficient attention to detail to ensure that their recommendations are intelligible, let alone that their report should have been done well.
In light of this, the problems that confront the country – the swollen pile of national debt, mass migration, the energy crisis, the housing crisis, the failure to police the borders, the failure to deter and punish crime, deteriorating public services, the looming crisis in social care and pensions provision, the breakdown in civility and the impending financial collapse of universities, to name but a few – take on an entirely different hue. It is common for conservatives to attribute these problems to malevolence or at least misguided design. But might it simply be the case that the people who are notionally in charge do not have the capacity to effectively govern? Might it just be that they do not know what they are doing – an ideology of plain nincompoopery rather than a “long march through the institutions”?
What, in any event, does one say about the future of a country like this? The image that increasingly comes to mind when I dwell on these issues is one of an attic in a dilapidated country house, dusty and mildewed, with many old spider webs strung between the rafters. Brittle and frail, these strands of gossamer still somehow cling to the physical realm and to physical existence because the still, stale air does not contain quite enough movement to dispel them into nothingness. But all it will take is one decent breath of wind, one strong draft from a suddenly opened window somewhere else in the house, for them to be swept away forever.
That is how I envisage our political class and the chattering classes which surround them. They are of such thinness and intellectual fragility that they could be knocked over by a feather, and all we are really waiting for is to find out where the coup de grâce will come from and whether it will be economic, social, military, or something else entirely. To return to a different analogy, the feeling is increasingly one of wondering not whether the future is going to hurt, but how much – whether it will be equivalent of a knife or a bullet wound. We’re coming to the end of something, and we all know it; in this respect the promise of a “new Britain” does seem somehow to be prophetic, although one strongly suspects that “renewing our democracy and rebuilding our economy” are unlikely to be on the cards for a long while yet.
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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An astonishing article!
Is the author unaware that our new government is utilising the very latest in management techniques: ‘Mission Oriented Management’.
Me neither.
Here’s a handy guide:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/brettsteenbarger/2015/07/19/mission-based-management-the-leadership-of-purpose/
They are going to end sticking plaster politics:
https://labour.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/5-Missions-for-a-Better-Britain.pdf
Great! I mean, what could possibly go wrong?
It’s easy. Look:
https://labour.org.uk/change/mission-driven-government/
‘We trained hard—but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams we were reorganized. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing, and what a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while actually producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralization.’
(Apparently some disgruntled soldier of a literary bent, whether commissioned or noncommissioned I do not know, pinned this ‘quotation” to a bulletin board in one of the camps of the armies occupying Germany sometime after 1945 (the style suggests a British occupying force). Since the sentiment is impeccable, whether applied to military, governmental, or academic administration, it has enjoyed a cachet borrowed from Petronius (60 AD) ever since.)
In different words: ‘We are comprehensively fecked!’
Also attributed to a Roman soldier. So probably one of those things that has been a truism from time immemorial
I look at this Parliament as the second innings of brown and Blair, even if they are only in the background. Starmer is a puppet and his legal background means he is only capable of taking instructions. No moral integrity.
Look at those beady eyes. Him and that cretin Miliband can hardly believe their luck that the Tories turned into Labour lite and threw away an 80 set majority. They are rubbing their hands with glee. Miliband cannot wait to rip out your gas central heating
The Tories did not throw away an 80 seat majority, they engaged in controlled destruction as they had been ordered to.
As mentioned in the book by Nadine Dorries.
Interesting theory. ——–I won’t disagree with you, but maybe I would put it differently. I have no evidence for “controlled destruction”.—– I have always been of the opinion the extraordinary claims need extraordinary evidence and I do not have any for “controlled destruction”, but ofcourse it depends how you choose to define that. ——-I certainly think the Political Class are up to no good and are selling us out to globalists.
Actually upon further consideration “controlled destruction” is probably a good term for all of the things that are going on.
Nails it.
You couldn’t make it up, but they did.
GB News is showing all the new parasites moving into 10 Downing Street. Parris 1940 comes to mind.
Yep, the front bench is looking very, what’s the word…? ‘Diverse’. And here’s the new Justice Secretary;
https://x.com/DaveAtherton20/status/1809517291656101951
Sweet Jesus!
That’s a cracking start. Well at least the nations of the world know which side we are on. That’s what I would call nailing your colours to the mast.
Excellent article. Could not agree more about the competence and excellence crisis we are in. Mediocrity abounds, and many young people seem to think that trying hard is good enough. They are Minnows compared to the generations of the 1900s to 1960s.
A good theory that the left are mostly incompetent, university mis-educated, 2:1 achieving, fools, who have a high regard for their rather poor intellect.
Shades of Kamala Harris in that Mission Statement.
I would rather have the Raving Monster Loonies than this rabble of squirming eco fundamentalist mass immigration parasites.
Is it not also that English is being replaced by a sort of pidgin language, enshittified English?
Good point.
I have always regarded the deplorable use of written English as the fault of a failing education system. I think I am only partly correct. If this country is to be dismantled, and it is, then it makes sense that our beautiful language must also be dismantled.
English as a language that we love is to be bastardised and turned into some crude, lowest common denominator amalgamation of ghetto gutturals. How often on here do we remind ourselves of the need to protect the language?
Innit?
True dat, Blud!
Fanks for that Bruvva.
And yet another incompetent. Valance apponted Science Minister! I am just waiting for Neil Fergusson to be put in charge of implementing IT in the NHS.
Our computer models predict that half a million people will die in the UK over the next 12 months.
Panic!
On a serious note I do believe excess deaths will rage ever upwards under this Government and not just as a result of the injections. If misery and despair take hold as I fear they will our mortality rate must increase. Increasing living costs, loss of freedoms, hunger and cold will inevitably take a toll.
“people of the profoundest mediocrity.”
To describe any Labour people as “people of the profoundest mediocrity” is decidedly a gross exaggeration of their abilities.
Delusions of adequacy.
Aspiring to mediocrity?
I am amused that today the BBC weather presenter said that “temperatures this week will be lower than average”. This is an ideal example of the above, in that temperatures above average are “climate change” and ones lower are below “average”. The lack of mathematical understanding of the word average is astounding, instant knowledge-less mediocracy!
If we want a new Britain we need to end the welfare state and redistribution of wealth (Ha!) via the tax system as we are become a Nation of parasites each demanding to live off the other.
Back to property rights, autonomy, self-reliance, self-responsibility, self-sufficiency.
… while each western government is expecting to import Energy from its neighbour when the Wind doesn’t blow and the Sun doesn’t shine?
Good article. Although I disagree with the premise that malevolence and stupidity are mutually exclusive. I think what we’re observing culturally is because the exact opposite is true – they are joined at the hip.
New Britain is an island in Papua New Guinea. Perhaps this document indicates that the UK is to be refashioned into its lookalike.
Papua has over 800 known languages. Which must make the London Borough of Tower Hamlets look very non-vibrant. The regions of the UK are perhaps to become like the viable units of Papuan communities. The palm trees are already there in Torquay and Eastbourne.
Well those PCR tests are a bit like the initiation rites carried out there.
Is the country house like Miss Haversham’s? A coal from the fire slips out of the grate.
Unfortunately, though large sections of HS2 were cancelled, it left people without their property that had been compulsorily purchased, and others with the possibility that the scheme could be revived, rendering their property unsaleable.
The ancient woodland that had been destroyed and replaced with new ancient woodland (as if the flora and fauna of the old knew where to relocate to the new) obviously could not be regained. Quite accidentally the whole project became a giant archaeological dig.
I read an article in The Telegraph about this and,apparently, it is included in the Manifesto which means The Lords cannot prevent it. I couldn’t spot it, according to the article it is a vague reference to “implement S…”. As one expects with Labourious, there is no detail whatsoever. They did not want anyone to know what they intended, did they?
I’ve mentioned it to a few people and what it means but just get a sort of vague, shutters down, reaction. It’s as though taking away democracy is far too much like Astrophysics for them. The Sheeples who voted Labour are now horribly akin to the Jews who thought getting on a train was a good idea when they listened to the last lot of Antisemites to rule completely.
McGrogan for PM! The effect of socialism and communism has always been levelling down, not up. Excellence is unrewarded, conformity is a virtue. We needs goats,not sheep. As for the appointment of Patrick Vallance to direct science from the House of Lords… one can only hope that another old saw comes to pass – those whom the Gods wish to destroy they first drive mad.
Unlike the author, I believe this crackpot bunch of lefty loons will implement this. Look at their manifesto and, more importantly, listen to them attempt to speak. When asked to define “a working person”, Kiernocchio and his laughable Chancellor (who looks uncannily like Matt Lucas) could not agree. Yet their “Manifesto” states those unidentifiable Persons will not face NI, Income Tax and VAT rises.
They believe there is little point in details, it’s the soundbite that matters. Judean Peoples Front writ large, or is it The Peoples Front of Judea? Who cares, implement it! I’m wondering which one of the non-entities is Wolfy “Foxy” Smith?
I am wondering which of them is more of a comedian than John Cleese! There is enormous competition.
Starmer’s father was a toolmaker, in case you hadn’t heard.
Do you think he may have made one?
Here is something to think about. The travellers arrived here (like they do like clockwork, every summer) on Friday and parked their motor homes in the council car park, on the seafront, Exmouth, Devon. The council have to take out some sort of order to get them moved, but cannot do this over a weekend as the travellers know.
The police are actually scared of them, and won’t go near them. So far they have parked illegally, taking up 12 parking spaces, did not pay to park, tossed all their rubbish out in the car park and use the area behind their motor homes as a toilet. One of the men harrassed two of our lady bowlers, following them into our bowls club. The traveller children wondered into our club on a fact finding mission. They were shown the door. I dare anyone else to come park in this car park for three days without paying for your parking. You will be ticketed multiple times by the traffic warden.
So you see, the police are scared of a few travellers and refuse to protect our rights to a safe environment. When a young aggressive man harasses old ladies, things have gone too far. If and when the general public have had enough of the incompetence of government, can you imagine how scared the police will be. Public disorder is not something any country wants.
I suspect that public disorder is not very far away. There comes a time when even Britains may follow the French example of retaliation. Labour have no proper mandate, and Reform have a huge mandate but only 5 seats. Starmer should consider that very carefully.
“ French example of retaliation”. There remains 121 Conservative MPs (mostly Wets) which may demonstrate that there are still an awful lot of people of a Right wing outlook still look to that party rather than Reform to turn the rotten ship of state around. In our solid blue constituency with a Remainer MP we formed a Reform group and could hardly muster sufficient activists to leaflet the constituency. Most of our Reform members were just too timid to become activists. Not an ounce of rebellion in 95% of them. The Remainer MP just scraped in with Labour second and Reform third. When the Right start to match the activism of the Left then things will change but sadly most on the Right are presently just too timid.
What, in any event, does one say about the future of a country like this? The image that increasingly comes to mind when I dwell on these issues is one of an attic in a dilapidated country house, dusty and mildewed, with many old spider webs strung between the rafters. Brittle and frail, these strands of gossamer still somehow cling to the physical realm and to physical existence because the still, stale air does not contain quite enough movement to dispel them into nothingness. But all it will take is one decent breath of wind, one strong draft from a suddenly opened window somewhere else in the house, for them to be swept away forever.
Best paragraph I’ve read for a long time. Worth memorizing.
Hi David
I think you have gone off track a bit here and it sounds more than a bit snobby. Yes excellence matters, but the truth and coherence matters more.
A well written plan on how to spin and lie and manipulate is not better than a poorly written and misspelt attempt at the truth.
The problem is not that the political class can’t write a manifesto well, its that they do not believe in anything more than trying to justify themselves in power; which you were finally able to succinctly summarise well and usefully for us in your references to Machiavelli and the Prince and the Republic.
I don’t however think that such a lack of belief necessarily leads to a lack of penmanship, and it does not help to try to make the link. Although I would not dispute that all virtues in the end must enhance each other.
The problem is a lack of belief in that man is made in the image of God, and that this necessarily must entail the gift of freedom and responsibility. Such freedom and responsibility is only enabled in a republic type format of government whether you can spell or not. Of course you can leave the God bit out and instead say that human flourishing properly understood entails freedom and responsibility, not dependency and nannying, and therefore requires a republic form of governing.
The reason why the conservatives lost is that they only believe in power and not individual people and we have now had enough of their 14 years of growing incoherence for the individual man in the street. Unfortunately the population as a whole has now given Labour a chance to play the same (what change?) game whether they can spell it right or not. The next 5 years will therefore be even more incoherence for the individual, but this time on steroids.
Did Kamala Harris write this?
Were the authors inspired by Kamala Harris’s gnomic style, I wonder? There is an uncanny resemblance between the particularly awful sentence McGrogan invites us to read out loud and the following remarks by the Vice President at the 2022 U.S.-ASEAN Special Summit:
In the best collectivizing spirit, Kamala squeezes in not three but four ‘togethers’!