What’s Wrong with Britain?

In the early 1960s, Penguin had a series of books under the general title “What’s wrong with Britain” which focused on its institutional failures. Some 50-60 years later the focus seems to have shifted to its failures in its political culture. This post discusses Rory Stewart’s Politics on the Edge – a memoir from within (2023)

We are trapped by the rigidity and shallowness of our political parties, the many weaknesses in our Civil Service, and the lack of seriousness in our political culture. We are trapeze artists, stretching for holds, on rusty equipment over fatal depths. A slip is easy. But I don’t consider my brain, or that of any of the others, adequate for our historical moment. In our case, the profession has developed not an expanded memory centre, but a capacity for shortcuts and sinuous evasions. Our brains have become like the phones in our pockets: flashing, titillating, obsequious, insinuating machines, allergic to depth and seriousness, that tempt us every moment of the day from duty, friends, family and sleep.

I had entered Iraq supporting the war on the grounds that we could at least produce a better society than Saddam Hussein’s. It was one of the greatest mistakes in my life. We attempted to impose programmes made up by Washington think tanks, and reheated in air-conditioned palaces in Baghdad – a new taxation system modelled on Hong Kong; a system of ministers borrowed from Singapore; and free ports, modelled on Dubai. But we did it ultimately at the point of a gun, and our resources, our abstract jargon and optimistic platitudes could not conceal how much Iraqis resented us, how much we were failing, and how humiliating and degrading our work had become. Our mission was a grotesque satire of every liberal aspiration for peace, growth and democracy. Most striking was not the failure, but the failure to acknowledge our failure.

Professional managers in Manchester or London saw almost all these small local institutions as examples of inefficiency. Health specialists explained that closing our community hospitals and forcing patients to take long journeys to larger hospitals would ‘improve patient outcomes’. Education specialists told us that our students would benefit from the closure of our small rural schools. Our local police stations, banks, auction marts and post offices were to be closed; so too were the volunteer fire engines in Penrith and Lazonby, the community ambulance in Alston, the community hospitals in Wigton and Brampton, and the magistrates’ courts, which had operated in Appleby since the Norman Conquest. The people making these decisions were generally based hundreds of miles from the constituency, and had little idea, I felt, of what it was like to be trapped behind a 3,000-foot snow-covered pass in Alston waiting for an ambulance from Lancaster. If they had been elderly – or going into labour –they too might have preferred a hospital which was not an hour’s drive from their family.

I joined, and sometimes organised, campaigns to save assets such as the community hospitals. We failed with police stations, magistrates’ courts, the peat works and post offices. But I was also part of the successful drives to save the volunteer fire stations in Penrith and Lazonby, the community ambulance, the Penrith cinema, the school in Alston, the community hospitals in Wigton and Brampton and the Longtown munitions depot. In every case, I made impassioned pleas to ministers, and in many cases led a crowd through a town with a megaphone. The real secret to these campaigns was not me, but people like Dawn Coates, a volunteer firefighter who had divided us into seventy different task groups for the campaign to save the Penrith cinema, writing letters, organising petitions, placing press stories, soliciting expert legal and professional opinions, and lobbying councillors of every political party.

The book then goes on to cover Stewart’s time in the Ministry of Environment 

with Liz Truss; his experience with flooding; the referendum on Brexit; his promotion 

to DfiD where he felt the tension with old colleagues who found it difficult to adjust 

to the divide between Civil Servants and Ministers; with Jihad controlled councils 

in NE Syria. He then became Minister for Africa – joint with DfiD – under Boris 

Johnson. After that he had a spell as the Prisons Minister in the Ministry of Justice 

(5 appts in 2 and a half years). The final chapters are on the campaign to become 

the Prime Minister.

Suggested Books

How they Broke Britain – James O’Brien (2023)

How Did Britain Come to This – a century of systemic failures of governance? Gwyn Bevan 

(2023) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGRvpppzA8E&t=496s 

Late Soviet Britain – why materialist utopias fail Abby Innes (2023) which argues that the 

Russian State and neo-liberal Britain share a common approach to the state.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zb07GSYG_sY 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1EJWW6p3yY 

How Westminster Works – and why it doesn’t  Ian Dunt (2023)
https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/ian-dunt-on-how-westminster-works-and-why-it-

doesnt/id1579722735?i=1000609622457 

Why Don’t We Revolt More Often?

I posted on this a couple of months ago but let me return to the question – with a rather fuller set of suggested reading. It is, of course, a variant of the question I confronted at University – namely why we obey. This, I learned, was answered by Max Weber in his talk about government “legitimacy” gained from one of three traditions, ”charismatic”, “traditional” and “rational-legal”. We obey because we consider the government is legitimate. When questions begin about its legitimacy, that’s the beginning of the end. That’s what happened in the countries of the eastern bloc in autumn and winter 1989. And that’s the situation currently in the US. 

If it was communism that people in the East were rebelling against in the 1980s. 

In America these days it’s Fascism.

Recommended Reading.

• Discussion Guide for Practical Radicals Deepak Bagharva and Stephanie Luce (2023) 

A highly recommended, short (just over 100 pages) guide – with lots of bullet points

• Revolution, rebellion, resistance – the power of story Eric Selbin (2021) 
  

  • In particular,  by using the concepts of myth, memory, and mimesis, it is possible 

  • to identify and illuminate four basic stories of revolution which show up in a 

  • surprising number of places and cultures across impressive stretches of time. 

  • These four stories are the Civilizing and Democratizing story of revolution, the 

  • Social Revolution story, the Freedom and Liberation story, and the Lost and 

  • Forgotten story.

  People without Power – the war on populism and the fight for democracy  Thomas Frank

  • One name scholars have applied to this tradition is the “elitist theory of democracy.” 

  •  It holds that public policy should be made by a “consensus of elites” rather than by 

  • the emotional and deluded people. It regards mass protest movements as outbreaks 

  • of irrationality. Marginalized people, it assumes, are marginalized for a reason. 

  • The critical thing in a system like ours, it maintains, is to allow members of  the 

  • professional political class to find consensus quietly, harmoniously, and without too 

  • much interference from subaltern groups. The obvious, objective fact that the 

  • professional political class fails quite frequently is regarded in this philosophy as 

  • uninteresting if not impossible. When anti-populists have occasion to mention the 

  • elite failures of recent years—deindustrialization, financial crisis, opioid epidemic, 

  • everything related to the 2016 election—they almost always dismiss them as inevitable. 

  • If only it were possible, they sigh, to dissolve the people and elect another.

  Revolutions – how they changed history and what they mean today ed Furtado (2020) 

  • The aim of this book is to look at revolutions around the world and through history: 

  • not only at their causes, crises and outcomes, but also, for the more distant events, 

  • at their long-term legacies and their changing, sometimes contested meanings today. 

  • Historians, mostly native of or active within those societies, have been asked to reflect 

  • on the following questions: What were the essential causes of the revolution? 

  • What narrative of events, protagonists and ideologies is most commonly accepted? 

  • What impact is it believed to have had? What legacy does it have today in national 

  • self-perception and values? Has this changed significantly over past decades?

• Democratic Capitalism at the Crossroads – technological change and the future of politics 

• Carles Boix (2019)

Technological pessimists foresee a brave new world where, once artificial intelligence makes its final breakthrough into the so- called “singularity moment,” workers will become completely redundant or will draw, at most, a meager salary. Sitting at the top of a mass of unemployed and underemployed individuals, there will be a small creative class— a thin layer of inventors, top managers, and highly educated professionals— enjoying the benefits of automation and globalization. The system of democratic capitalism that has so far prevailed in the advanced world will crumble under the weight of so much economic inequality. Policy makers will not be able to reconcile free markets with representative elections and deliver both economic growth and a generous welfare state in the way they did during the better part of the twentieth century. The new technologies of information and communication invented in Silicon Valley will take us back to the contentious politics of nineteenth- century capitalism, finally vindicating Karl Marx, who, more than 150 years ago, predicted the eventual substitution of machines for workers, the immiserization of the masses, and the collapse of capitalism at the hands of a horde of angry men, armed with pitchforks and torches, marching down on the wealthy few— now huddled in their Manhattan and Bay Area mansions.

On the other side of the aisle, technological optimists concede that automation will disrupt the labor market and hurt the wages of the least educated, alienating them from politics and elections. That “process of industrial mutation”, to employ Schumpeter’s renowned words, “incessantly revolutionize[d] the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one”— modifying the relationship between capital and labor, the patterns of employment, and the distribution of income over time (Schumpeter 1950, 83). In doing so, it periodically generated a (changing) number of critical political challenges that were then met with a particular set of policy responses.

The same logic applies to today’s technological innovations. Because they have already heightened economic inequality and may result in an even more extensive robotization of substantial numbers of (low- and semiskilled) jobs, they could put an end to the broad social consensus around democracy and capitalism that prevailed during most of the twentieth century— particularly in the advanced world. That does not necessarily mean, however, that they will— and that they will make us travel back in time to the nineteenth century, when the industrial capitalism invented in

Manchester and its cotton factories turned out to be incompatible with the construction of fully democratic institutions. The reason is simple. The growing economic and political tensions we are witnessing today are happening in very affluent societies: their average per capita incomes are more than ten times higher than at the beginning of the first Industrial Revolution. So much wealth, jointly with the presence of stable democratic institutions and relatively well structured bureaucracies, should give us much more maneuvering room than any generations before us ever had to respond to the technological and economic challenges of today. Therefore, the task ahead of us is to think about how to harness those economic and institutional assets to the advantage of the many.

Rules for Revolutionaries – how big organizing can change everything B Bond and Z Exley 

(2016) Basically the tools used on the Bernie Sanders campaigns

• Beautiful Trouble – a toolbox for revolution ed Andrew Boyd (2012) Highly recommended

•  – with bullet points for all the key tactics

Transnational Protest and Global Activism ed Della Porta and S Tarrow (2005)

Organising for Social Change – manual for activists S Max et al (3rd ed 2001)

The 8 stages of successful movements Bill Moyer (1987) an article by a social activist which 

in some 40 pages gives the essence

• From Mobilisation to Revolution  Charles Tilly (1978) one of 2 great US writers on revolution, 
  the other being Sidney Tarrow  

Rules for Radicals Saul Alinsky (1972) The basic guidebook for change agents everywhere 

by the radical Chicago community organiser

Why Men Rebel Ted Gurr (1970) a rather academic study of the phenomenon

UPDATE
Why Reform isn’t enough (The Peaceful Revolutionary 2025)

immigration 
Peter McCormack https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2C4h0pYzY7M 
David Starkey on UK doom https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5emeJ_XyM4 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=McZOj3j7gPI UK commander 
David Betz https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgwO9G1hmDQ

Memoirs et al

I continue to add memoirs (and correspondence) to the collection I’m developing. The latest to catch my attention is Robert Reich’s Coming Up Short – a memoir of America (2025) which starts by noting that -

The New Left had relegated the depredations and indignities of class—and the need for strong labor unions to lift workers’ wages, protect jobs, provide pensions, and give workers more job security—to the backwater of activism. By the late 1960s, it felt as if all Americans, apart from the very poor and the very rich, were on the way to enjoying middle-class life. To me, the central problem wasn’t inequality but drab conformity, crass materialism, and the hypocrisy of American ideals—as illustrated in the classic 1967 film The Graduate, in which Dustin Hoffman, playing Benjamin Braddock, a newly minted college graduate, is told that the future is in “plastics” and is seduced by the mother of the girl he loves. The trail-blazing progressive authors of the late 1950s and 1960s whose books I devoured barely mentioned the working class. As John Kenneth Galbraith wrote in The Affluent Society, published in 1958, America had become a society of abundance.

The Feminine Mystique grew out of a fifteenth anniversary reunion survey at Smith College; its message that women should join the workforce was of little relevance to the workingclass women already in it. Silent Spring spurred the environmental movement. Ralph Nader’s 1965 bestseller, Unsafe at Any Speed, gave birth to the consumer movement. Michael Harrington’s 1962 eye-opener, The Other America, exposed American poverty and inspired Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. But the working class and the labor movement were all but forgotten.

Not even President Johnson’s Great Society aimed to strengthen and expand the rights of workers. Initially, he intended to repeal the part of the Taft-Hartley Act that allowed so-called open shops, but he backed off when corporate lobbyists attacked. America had a civil rights movement, a women’s rights movement, a gay rights movement, a consumer movement, an environmental movement, a poor people’s campaign, and an anti–Vietnam War movement, but no movement to lift the living standards of the working class.

Reich superbly captures here the mood in not only in the US but in the UK – where I well remember my own shameful neglect of the power of the trade unions. He continues -

Democratic presidents took organized labor for granted if they thought about unions at all. When Jimmy Carter as president had to choose between spending his political capital on a bill to strengthen labor unions or a treaty to hand over control of the Panama Canal to Panama, he chose the treaty and the labor bill died. Bill Clinton didn’t push for labor law reform in his first two years as president when Democrats held a majority in both houses of Congress, nor did Barack Obama in his first two years, when Democrats also had a congressional majority. In 2021 and 2022, when Democrats again narrowly controlled Congress, President Joe Biden did not fight to make it easier for workers to form unions, although, to his credit, he did appoint a pro-union National Labor Relations Board and he walked a union picket line.

In the twenty-first century, millions of American workers—most of them with no college education and no union to support them—lacked a political home.

Without the alternative of economic populism, Americans were more susceptible to right-wing cultural populism. Yet in a world populated by people like Trump, we could not trust anyone to be truthful if they could do better for themselves by lying. (Here again, much of the public believes America is already at this point.) We couldn’t count on any claim by sellers of any product or service.

Journalists would shade their reports for their own selfish advantage, taking bribes from advertisers or currying favor with politicians. Teachers would offer lessons to satisfy wealthy or powerful patrons. Historians would alter history if by doing so they gained wealth or power. Scientists would doctor evidence for similar selfish motives. The truth would degenerate into a cacophony of competing factual claims, as, in part, it has. We couldn’t trust doctors or pharmacists to give us the right medications.

We couldn’t trust bankers and accountants not to fleece us, restaurants not feed us tainted food, lawyers not to hoodwink us. Professional ethics would be meaningless.

Diaries, Letters and Memoirs contains the up-to-date listings – all 64 pages

Other selected additions

A Little Yes and a Big No George Grosz (1946) The German/US artist famous for his satirical 

paintings of Germany in the 1920s and 1930s
Persons and Places – fragments of autobiography George Santayana (1953)
Open Secret – the autobiography of the former head of MI5 Sheila Rimington (2001)
A Lie about my Father John Burnside (2006) the Scottish poet
Back from the Brink – 1000 days at number 11 Alistair Darling (2011) ex-Chancellor for the 

Exchequer in Gordon Brown’s government 
Kurt Vonnegut – Letters ed Wakefield (2012) The US writer who survived Dresden
Building – letters 1960-75 Isaiah Berlin (2016) Berlin was the famous UK philosopher
More Affirming 1975-79 - letters Isaiah Berlin (2016)
More Explaining 1982-96 - letters Isaiah Berlin (2019)
The Room where it Happened – a white house memoir John Bolton (2020) Trump’s Sec 

of State who has become his greatest critic

Because, however, the axis of adults had served Trump so poorly, he second-guessed people’s motives, saw conspiracies behind rocks, and remained stunningly uninformed on how to run the White House, let alone the huge federal government. The axis of adults is not entirely responsible for this mind-set. Trump is Trump. I came to understand that he believed he could run the Executive Branch and establish national-security policies on instinct, relying on personal relationships with foreign leaders, and with made-for-television showmanship always top of mind. Now, instinct, personal relations, and showmanship are elements of any President’s repertoire. But they are not all of it, by a long stretch. Analysis, planning, intellectual discipline and rigor, evaluation of results, course corrections, and the like are the blocking and tackling of presidential decision-making, the unglamorous side of the job. Appearance takes you only so far.

More Enlightening 1946-60 letters Isaiah Berlin (2024)
More Flourishing 1928-46 letters Isaiah Berlin (2025)  

A Resource on AI

I’m not a great fan of articles on Artificial Intelligence (AI) – although I’ve dipped into Nexus – a brief history of networks from the stone age to AI by Yuval Harari (2024), The Coming Wave – technology, power and the 21^st Century’s greatest dilemma by Mustafa Suleyman (2023) and The Machine Age by Robert Skidelsky (2023) 

All of these books are clearly written and give a good assessment of the pros and

 cons of AI. A much more difficult book to assess is The Great Transformation – 

history for a techno-human future by Judith Bessant (2018) whose conclusion 

includes this excerpt -

Co-evolutionary theorists like Merlin Donald and Michael Corballis developed a sophisticated theory of the mind, consciousness and evolution that pays attention to historical and evolutionary change over very long periods of time and offers a relational or ecological approach to understanding the mind, body, consciousness, and culture which includes technology.

As Karl Jaspers (1953) observed, the Axial Age (800–200 bce) was a period of dramatic intellectual, mathematical, religious, and philosophical development that occurred simultaneously in China, India, the Middle East, and Greece. Its protagonists included Confucius, Buddha, Pythagoras, Socrates, and Aristotle. It was a pivotal time in human cognitive and intellectual development signified by the birth of comprehensive systems of philosophy, theology, and science. It was also a time marked by an exploration of ethical ideas (e.g. justice, kindness, compassion, and piety), which for many became central to the idea of a good life and spirituality.

For Donald, the Axial Age was also a key period in a larger evolutionary history of human cognitive and cultural development - it signalled the advent of a new human consciousness, a ‘theoretical stage’ of human thinking. This account of the Axial Age provides a base for a key argument in this book, namely, that we are now experiencing distinct changes in human consciousness and ways of representing reality that are as significant as the changes in consciousness that defined the original Axial Age. The new techno-Axial Age we are now entering is revising long-established relations between human consciousness, that is, the ways we represent reality, human action, and work.

The changes documented in this book will have major implications for every human now alive, because they will affect all aspects of our experience and existence. They raise ethico-political questions in which we all have a direct interest in answering. Doing so requires open debate in the public sphere and is too important to be left to experts and elites.

All this indicates the importance of thinking about the arrangements, policies, education, and ethical frames we want and need to develop if we are all to enjoy the benefits of new and emerging technology. The governing ideas and representations of the late-modern capitalist order, like those of pre-Axial societies, are failing to provide what is needed to give meaning and to secure our political cultures as they seemingly did once.

The previous chapter identified a number of design principles that might help guide our thinking and deliberating about a new social imaginary. The aim of that exercise was not to prescribe a doctrine or plan, but to identify particular ideas that will help in deliberations about possible paths and the preliminary steps we might take along them. To do this I drew on a number of writers to argue that priority be given to promoting deep freedom and diversity (plurality), while recognizing that the conditions in which we now live require a new social imaginary. I concluded with an argument about the role educational practices can play in enabling this to happen.

We need now as never before intelligent, ethically sensitive governance. It is something that can be achieved by recognizing everyone’s capacity to imagine and create change.

READING LIST ON TECHNOLOGY – starting with the most recent
Nexus – a brief history of networks from the stone age to AI Yuval Harari (2024)
The Coming Wave – technology, power and the 21st Century’s greatest dilemma Mustafa Suleyman (2023)  
The Machine Age Robert Skidelsky (2023)

The Next New – navigating the 5th industrial revolution Pranjal Sharma (2023)

Impromptu – amplifying our humanity through AI by AI and Reid Hoffman (2023) 
The Age of AI; and our human future H Kissinger, E Scmidt and D Huttenlocher (2021)

Democratic Capitalism at the Crossroads – technological change and the future of politics 
 Carles Boix (2019)
“Humanity is at a Precipice” (Pew Institute 2019)
Future Politics – living together in a world transformed by Tech  by Jamie Susskind (2018)
The Great Transformation – history for a techno-human future Judith Bessant (2018) 
“Artificial Intelligence and the future of Humans” (Pew Institute 2018) 
Utopia is Creepy ; Nicholas Carr (2016)
The Internet is not the Answer ; Andrew Keen (2015)
The Second Machine Age – work, progress and prosperity in a time of brilliant technologies ; Brynjolfsson and McAfee 2014  
From Guttenberg to Zuckenberg – what you really need to know about the Internet ; John 
Naughton (2013)
To Save everything click here – the folly of technological solutionism; Efgeni Morozov (2013)
The Shallows - what the internet is doing to our brain Nicholas Carr (2010)
Technology Matters – questions to live with  David Nye (2010) Looks exactly what I've been
looking for
The End of Ethics in a Technological Society LE Schmidt ((2006)
Technopoly - the surrender of culture to technology ' Neil Postman (1992)
The Technological Bluff Jacques Ellul (1989)
The whale and the reactor –a search for limits in the age of high technology Langdon Winner (1986)
The Impact of Science  james burke, isaac asimov (nasa 1985)
The Technological System Jacques Ellul (1980)
Between two ages – america's role in the technetronic era Zbigniew Brzezinski (1980)
The Republic of Technology  Daniel Boorstin (1978)
The Revolution of Hope - toward a humanized technology  by Eric Fromm (1968)
The Technological Society  Jacques Ellul (1964)

Previous posts on the issue
https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2024/09/can-we-ever-keep-up-with-technological.html 
https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2023/08/perhaps-we-need-to-be-more-cautious-in.html 
https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2023/07/have-we-lost-our-collective-intelligence.html