Governing for the Future. Not the Next 20 Minutes

I've been watching what’s going on in UK politics with interest recently, not because I’m interested in the UK itself particularly, but it is a great allegory for something I am hyper interested in, the changing landscape in how successful societies in the Global South are organising themselves in the modern world.

I've written twice before about what’s happening in the UK. In Closer to Home I discussed that Britain's present malaise isn't thirty years in the making as identity politics would like to have people think, but closer to a thousand — that the country wasn’t held together for centuries by the lack of an all-centralised State, but through a dense cultural middle layer of parish, chapel, union, club, county and more; and that as those things eroded post WWII, cohesion was outsourced upward - to Whitehall until the unspoken thing that people think of as ‘Britishness’ stopped being a shared experience and the country finds itself culturally unanchored and blaming external forces for what is essentially an internal issue.

Then in Taxing the Past I discussed that the machinery that is used to fund this (think tax) is calibrated for an economy that no longer exists. The UK is an economy in which value creation long ago migrated from labour to capital while the tax logic still behaves as though the economy is driven by vast swathes of pit and plant workers.

So, the country is in a trap - one of asking an ever decreasing number of workers to hold together what the national culture no longer can - or does. The two layers have radically shifted - the social fabric has frayed, and the financial engine is running on the wrong juice.

So, this piece is about the third layer - sitting on top of both - that has the ability to solve the other two but in the current state of things is simply making it worse! Even if we accept the fact that the social fabric has thinned (think assimilation of immigrant populations being a hot topic) and the engine is wrong (salaried employees carrying the national tax burden) — you're still left with the obvious question that if the problems are so clear, why are things continually getting worse? Why do successive governments turn up promising to be serious and leave having shuffled the same furniture round the same sinking ship?

In large part, and this is not a revelatory insight, it is the fact that the politics itself has become the problem. Society has fallen into a trap of thinking it’s this party or that party when it is actually much more that – as in much of the developed world - the last 30 or 40 years has seen politics become a subset of the entertainment industry and not an actual societal function for serious people to drive ahead with long term visions.

All the countries in the world today in the ascendent have long ranging plans set out, Vision Statements for 2030, 2050 even 2071 in one country. Long range visions that give the nation a north star, it’s leadership something to aim at, it’s citizens something to contribute to and its private sector a road map of opportunity to benefit from. A cohesive system where people know where they are - and what the future looks like.

It used to be that government worked in the background and politics got on with itself. Over the course of a parliament or a congress it was background noise to broader society, a hum that people could, and mostly did ,ignore for years at a time and only when an election came into view that it swelled into anything like a national conversation.

Now it's in large part the main conversation, all of the time. Young people today don’t go to Woodstock, they go to a political rally. It's the talk at a dinner party, on a train, in the group chat - and always in the same key of grievance and tribalism and not a collective chatter about the future and what can be done.

I don’t take aim at people sharing their views. My issue is with the fact that it is almost exclusively about politics and almost nothing at all about policy. If everyone was engaged in the future of their country and the planet that would be a wonderful thing, but it isn’t that it’s  this figure versus that figure, this religion versus that, whose side are you on, who are we attacking this week. The whole discourse has floated off from the thing it's supposed to be, which is the boring - but rather important - question of what is the actual plan and what are we going to do about it!

What sent me down this train of thought is watching the current Labour internal fighting that the whole country is talking about. Labour is this, Starmer is that, Streeting is the other. Now these all may be entirely accurate observations, but the wild thing is that the fury is almost identical to that aimed at the Conservatives just three or so years ago - and it'll be aimed at whoever comes next.

The problems remain but the targets keep rotating. I made the point in Taxing the Past that the Reeves budget was barely distinguishable from the Conservative budgets before it, or from most of what's happening across Europe — competent enough on its own terms, but at the same time almost entirely irrelevant and useless. But the discourse is that it was the person that was wrong – which they were but so were the others.

This same disappointment turns up during every government no matter from which side, so the disappointment isn't really about the party but about the system. It's structural but nobody is having that conversation. Ultimately this is because nobody is prepared to zoom out and have an actual plan and then work toward it. The system has become very good at staging the drama of change and not very good at delivering it.

In my work with Tintra I talk a lot about trying to move away in the Global South from solving problems at the App Layer — the surface where you build the visible thing, the interface, the feature, the bit everyone can see and click on – and move toward the infrastructure layer that sits underneath. Without which you can build all the apps you like but they only make incremental change – when what is required in both the global south and the UK is Infrastructure Layer change – admittedly for very different reasons but the solve is the same.

Almost all of what passes for political debate in Britain now exists at the app layer. An extra few pounds here for a social program, a tax discount there, one percent added over five years to something else, and with each of these nonsensical corner nibblers announced like they’re the turning point in the national story. None of these are strategies. They're really just symptom management. At best they take the edge off the discomfort of the moment – at worst they are nothing more than a press release - without going anywhere near the architecture that's producing the discomfort in the first place. And because they're visible and immediate and easy to argue about, they make perfect fodder for the theatre.

The real trouble is what the theatre is built to reward immediacy measured in news bulletins but hopeless at the thing that matters most, which is slow, unglamorous, generational planning. Nobody wins a week by setting out a coherent view of where the country should be in 2050. There's no applause for pouring a foundation whose value won't show up until long after you've left office. So, the foundations don't get poured. We've ended up with a politics that governs for the next twenty minutes, because the next twenty minutes is the only thing the machine pays out on – to mix metaphors.

It is a systemic issue caused over generations and compounded by technological and social change – I don't think the current government are uniquely foolish or venal, and I wrote something similar in an earlier piece on what Sallust said on the Roman decline — his argument was that Rome started to rot not when it became rich but when ambition came loose from purpose beyond itself. The British political class is stuck inside a set of incentives that make being serious more or less electoral suicide and nobody has either the skill or the vision to change that. This is why Trump has been so successful in the US, like it or hate it, he has a vision that if one is so included people can get behind. The same is true of Brexit – it was a story well told. We need the same narrative and vision but with a more cohesive and frankly positive and optimistic vision.

If you stand back far enough you start to see a pattern, I touch on it lately in nearly everything I write. Namely that societies in the ascendent over the arc of history spend their energy and capital building forward — infrastructure, capacity, institutions of a future they've bet on and societies that are contracting (socially as much as economically) spend theirs holding positions — servicing debt, defending entitlements, propping up systems built for yesterday’s word.

Offence and defence. Building tomorrow or propping up yesterday. Europe has circa 10% of the world's people, creates around a quarter of its output and close to 50% of all social spending. Which pretty much amounts to a whole continent’s society optimised for paying for yesterday rather than investing in its future.

Set a country such as a Rwanda next to that, growing at 9% with capital investment north of 25% of GDP or any number of other countries in the world. Looking and feeling like the US in the 50’s or late Victorian Britain and contrast is clear.

Let me be clear looking after the old, the sick and the unlucky is an essential part of the social contract in any decent country. The failure is that the entire discourse is focused on these things, where care as a subset of a broader mission is great, care at the expense of that mission is nihilistic.

What's missing isn't really a committee or a strategy document. It's a story. A north star. A simple, plain answer to the question of what Britain is for over the next fifty years, told in language a person can actually feel. A 2050, a 2071. Imagining what the future of Britain actually looks like and bringing the country along.

The industrial revolution built the country, the UK de-industrialised first which has bought to an end that 250-year period in British history that created the country today. This was inevitable and nothing lasts forever - the issue is that nobody has bothered to figure out and communicate what comes next. Where is Chapter 2. There is just a chancellor at a dispatch box talking about debt like the country is a first-time buyer at a mortgage meeting, citing numbers a thousand Americans could put on their credit cards, while the country is supposed to nod gravely and feel responsible.

The country that gave the world modern western culture writing policy about amounts of money that are trivial to individuals is a breathtaking situation to be in.

Someone needs to set a mission. Narrate that mission to the public. What does the next hundred years look like? Rebuilding the Northwest as an AI hub, the Northeast as something, Wales as something else. A mission everyone can get behind a picture of the country in 2050 or 2070 that a child in Sunderland or Swansea can actually recognise themselves in. this then creates something to aim for. Gives hope, brings the country together behind something. Then immigration can be measured against need rather than xenophobic abstractions, social care can be reduced because there’s another (better) alternative than 50% of under 25’s being on social benefit. Once we solve at the infrastructure layer rather than the application layer all of these lesser issues if not solve at least start to right size.

To do that and figure out a plan not by interparty bickering when nobody knows what to do, scoring silly points about some totally inconsequential matter when the country is at a one in a century crossroads – we need big thinking by grownups. And the public discourse should be as alive as it is, but with conversations and engagement about what the country looks like. A century from now, not how much some faceless minister claimed for housing allowance last week or the latest baseless claim that Reform is making about immigrants being the problem instead of multigenerational societal change that needs grown up strategy. Bring in cross party discussions, do town halls, maybe even a referendum. Let's listen to experts. Let's listen to citizens. This should be thought of almost through the lens of wartime. It isn't that in any way whatsoever, but that camp spirit, all pulling together.

Fundamentally it’s about finding the why. This is what will generate change, then that will in turn make politics again about the why and the how, not the what. Why are we doing this. "Not because it's easy but because it's hard." "Fighting on the beaches." These are the rally cries that spur countries on. And every country in the world that is ascending has these plans, where in the UK nobody can get past the latest gossip. In 100 years from now it is the big decisions that will be remembered, not Angela Rayner’s housing arrangements. The country needs to elevate the discourse.

Have a plan, set a goal. Then yes, the country might borrow lots more money but do it to achieve a mission, borrow a dollar to create two dollars. Borrow £250 billion and retool the entire country – instead of 10’s and 20’s here to support a triple lock pension and NHS support for 20 minutes. Create jobs for people that are interesting and rewarding. Yes, be stricter on benefits — but only if there's a counter of meaningful work with a purpose on the other side of the conversation. The whole discourse is to the negative, all defensive, lending is bad, social care is a burden, industry has gone – all in a way true, but such is life – let’s hyper index on the solution and stop this navel gazing worrying about the problem and making the politics a psycho drama of negativity.

I don’t pretend to have all the answers to this huge problem and i'm not focusing on the UK as I think it's worse than anywhere else - it just provides a good example of a much broader global issue. But one thing is for sure, bickering about trivialities doesn’t save a friendship or a marriage it certainly doesn’t save a country. Developed economy politics needs to lead broader economies to look up from the current negative discourse and reach for the horizon, think about what is possible, set a mission to get there and bring their countries along.

This is exactly what is happening today around the world outside of Europe and the US and is what has worked historically for these countries at times they've achieved their best. This might not be a certain win, but i'm pretty sure continuing on their current trajectory is a certain loss. It's been done before and can be done again and i'm optimistic it can happen. Time will tell.