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